the tinyblog

People in Seattle often comment on how the social network seems so small since you always seem to meet the same people randomly, or find out that people you've known for awhile know each other. Plus, when you are in one hood in Seattle, you only need look up to see some other neighborhood - but a hilltop away. In Chicago, though, in each of the four directions you see only the street you're on going off infinately into the horizon.

It is a serious city. It's a city that swollows me up whole and makes me instantly anonymous. Always the brand new structures are towering among the crumbling monuments of history. Its people tend to be a bit grim. No one thanks the bus driver. There's no Fremont.

There's no network of smaller lakes, just one big lake, Lake Michigan. It's a huge wall bordering the whole eastern border of the city. It's one of the great lakes. It's almost like an ocean, a body of water that you can't see land on the other side, but the water is freshwater.

Seattle has only one token ethnic neighborhood, but in Chicago, huge stretches of road throughout the city are devoted to Thai or Vietnamese or Korean owned shops. Whole stretches where I can't read a single sign. Tough Korean old men who stay in their own community...living forever in the wilds of the freshwater city. And I just a white Seattle boy among them.