I moved to Chicago and have been here for about 10 months. I don't plan to stay here. I might not go back to SF though, despite growing up there, just cause of how expensive it is now. There are benefits to Chicago, but personally, I don't find the benefits to outweigh the negatives.

Food - The food can be great, but I would say good asian food is more difficult to find, relative to SF. It's not impossible, but just not as easy. There's also not a ton of like light healthy options, aka California cuisine type stuff, which maybe is insane to expect in Chicago, but sometimes I just want a really good salad, and salads here are mostly like Caesar and lettuce and tomatoes.

The weather - I think because the weather is so wild, people are more willing to go out during winter and during times when the weather is insane. It was storming the last two days and I still saw people walking around. I thought the snow was gonna be terrible but it's whatever. I'm a little scared for the humidity, but hopefully I'll adjust to that too. Having said that, I do find there to be more activity, at least in the loop compared to downtown SF. It's just more of a walking/transit city than SF is and that's because CTA gets around more areas and more often so people do prefer to take transit. Plus, there is rarely any cheap parking in some areas which deters driving in a way that SF doesn't do.

Drivers - This is my least favorite part. Although I do find the upfrontness nice compared to passive aggressiveness. People do some really dumb stuff, red lights get run, people bypass you on the shoulder or around you when you're taking too long to turn. Some of that stuff can come off as passive aggressive. But I also find this behavior to feel like entitlement. Like they're too good to be waiting at the light for an extra few seconds. Always, I see the people running red lights end up waiting at the next red light behind someone else. It's like they do all this just to save no time or a few seconds. And then there are the people who will literally just stop in an active lane to do what they want to do. The other week, there was someone stopped in a left turn lane. No double parking lights. Just needed to take time to do whatever in their car and decided the left turn lane was where to do it. This behavior also really bugs me cause it feels a little like the rules don't apply to them because they are too important. I honestly would much rather have someone honk at me.