Location is everything

Prior to living in LA, we had lived in a couple different San Francisco neighborhoods. Location was an important factor for us while living in SF, especially since parking was either extremely difficult to find or very expensive.  Even now, I still get shocked when a parking meter charges less than $10/hour, and that’s not even a parking garage!  Who has that kind of change handy anyway?!  When we moved to LA, I found myself having to reacclimate to the new location standards. In SF, its vital to be able to walk to places or have easy access to public transportation. In LA, everyone has a car, parking is usually readily available, and when planning travel time, you need to allocate at least an hour of “wiggle room” in case of traffic.  I’m glad that I don’t have to ride on packed fowl-smelling buses anymore, but that has now been replaced with the dread of either fighting insane traffic or being run off the road by speedster locals.  We move into our new apartment in a couple weeks, and I’m hoping that my location standards will have adjusted to our new latitudinal coordinates by then.