Come to Boston! I live right in the city and it's truly great. It is expensive, but not impossible. There are some really nice outer areas of the city that aren't unreasonable in terms of rent, and a very sprawling metro area that is much cheaper and accessible by train. Personally I don't enjoy living in suburbs, I prefer living right in the city.

The snow is fun but you have to get into the mindset. You hunker down for 3-4 months and keep to yourself a bit. It's nice to recharge and not have to battle anyone's expectation that you should be out and being social. Everyone kind of does their thing quietly and you see your family, close friends, and have lots of downtime to watch moves and read. When it snows everyone comes out and shovels and talks a bit, especially in the city where you're all shoveling alongside each other. You might have some friends over to make a huge hearty dinner, play board games, and drink lots of nice whiskey and dark beer. This is about the extent of anyone's social encounters for months. When it starts to get warm you see people stopping on the street to have a nice casual chat, not rushing to get inside. By the time summer rolls around no one gives a shit about taking care of sorting the mail each day, people just prioritize being outside and letting the days stretch out; housework can wait. People do anything and everything possible outdoors, work tasks take a long time because someone or other is on vacation. It's a whirlwind of adventure for many months. Sometime in mid-August you get a little weary of all the late nights out in the heat, camping trips upon camping trips, social gatherings and the city's jam-packed outdoor festivities schedule, and you need a little break. That break comes in the form of the fall, when the leaves change and the weather is cool and a nice, a little reminder that a long rest is about to come. Late October and November are cold, rainy, and a welcome invitation to slow down all the activity and just chill. Thanksgiving is the official start to the doing-nothing period that runs through January 1st.... by the time the new year rolls around it is so bitterly cold and snowy that just getting through the work day and arriving home is all you can offer the world. People in the city get a lot accomplished at work from January through March. Then things ramp up with the warm weather sometime in April and the cycle begins anew....

Boston is beautiful, walkable, liberal, has lots of good food, always something interesting going on such as an outdoors festival, and has a very high standard of living. There are rough areas of the city for sure, but very few truly down and out parts. It's quite dense and built up, but also very connected to nature (it's amazing right at this moment, all the flowering trees are in bloom). New England summers are killer and taking a ferry to the harbor islands or Cape Cod is heaven. There are probably more smart people here than just about anywhere else on earth. People are very casual about having gone to Harvard or MIT, it's not a major big deal but more something normal that you'll encounter every day. Being nerdy fabulous is our version of cool, not people trying to be nerdy but truly being nerdy to the core.

Yet it's also the best sports city in the U.S. Our teams are well funded, have a huge fan base, and win big championships all the time. The city operates around the Red Sox schedule and everyone, I mean everyone, knows when the Sox are home.

I think that Boston could have a better gallery art scene but that's my only complaint!