Toronto.
I love Toronto. I love Toronto especially because it's home. I'm from Toronto, I grew up in Toronto, I've lived in Toronto longer than I've lived anywhere else, my parents live in Toronto, and 3/4 of my sisters live in Toronto. I also love Toronto's vibe: the big city, something always going on, the best restaurants, arts & culture, creatives and business people working alongside one another... Neighbourhoods! Gentrification! "The hottest new cafe!" I live for that stuff. I pour over my monthly edition of Toronto Life magazine and drool over the latest trends and where to see and be seen. I really do love that stuff!
But I also struggle with that stuff. I mean, who cares?! Does eating at the "hot new place" make any difference? Does anyone care? Does my indulgence in that kind of nonsense result in stress to "keep up with the Joneses" and then constantly feeling like I can't keep up?
Trust me... I don't devote too much energy to any of this, but I do experience that swelling of the ego when I participate in that kind of culture while simultaneously poo-pooing people who get too wrapped up in it. I both want to be the yuppie and make fun of the yuppie. It's like "Portlandia"; you embrace the culture and mock the culture all at once, but you do love the culture.
Anyway, all of this is to say that there's something liberating about caring and then letting a lot of that go. How? By moving! Yes, I'm from Toronto and yes, I'll still be in Toronto a lot, but I don't live in Toronto right now and I want to embrace that. I want to pat myself on the back for not being so Toronto-centric to have to stay there forever and consider every other place lesser than. In fact, I am having the wonderful - yet not totally unexpected - experience of loving and having my life enhanced by a new city.
Waterloo.
I lived in Waterloo from 2005-2010 and I really enjoyed the city. However, living anywhere as a university student is a different experience, so when I made the decision to accept a new job and move as a young professional to Waterloo, I wondered what that would be like. What would it be like to have a car in Waterloo? Have some disposable income? Not be taking classes? What would it mean to live in Waterloo when I don't have classes to take and schoolwork to do, and therefore more of a life? Could I have the life I wanted in Waterloo? The answer, delightfully, is yes.
Waterloo is a change of pace. Truly. The pace is slower than Toronto's enough to feel it, but not so slow as to make it - for lack of a better word - lame. There is an ease of life in Waterloo! Nowhere takes as long to get to. I get to work in 5 minutes! I get from work to the gym in 5 minutes! There's parking everywhere! There's decent public transit, lots of taxis, and if you find the right place to live, it's totally walkable, too. You can find a restaurant with tapas, a microbrewery with craft beers, and a cute cafe with a crazy collection of scotches.
You can find friends! Some of my best friends were living in Waterloo still, and seeing them is so much easier than it is to see friends in Toronto. In Toronto you have to make plans with a friend and account for maybe an hour of total travel time. In Waterloo I can be having an alone night in my apartment and then realize at 8:00 that I want to hang out with someone, get to their place in 5 minutes, hang out for an hour, and be home in time for an early bedtime.
Toronto will always be where I'm from, and it'll always feel like home, and I will very likely settle down in Toronto one day for good. But right now, at the moment in time, Waterloo feels like exactly where I should be, and it feels so good.
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