ladyislingering

I live in a suburb of Seattle.

Cool:

- transit to pretty much anywhere during normal hours of the day.
- hella trees and nature and shit.
- you can get coffee pretty much anywhere anytime.
- I don't know, it's just the best place I've ever called "home"

not cool:

- the ocean isn't close enough.
- there aren't any record stores.
- creeps galore, and the homeless population is ridiculous.

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Pet_Sounds

Convenience stores in Ontario sell some godawful just-add-water sludge they call "Seattle's Best Coffee". I hope that's not true.

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Everybody's dying just to get the disease

John Wilkes Booth

clearly starbucks is seattles best coffee

Key

Seattle's Best Coffee is known as the superior even though it's owned by Starbucks, which is odd.

Pet_Sounds

The stuff you can get here is instant and really watery, so it's probably not up to Seattle's standard. Wouldn't know; I was too young to drink coffee when I visited.

Of course we're spoiled, having Tim Hortons and all.

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Everybody's dying just to get the disease

downwardspiral

Sorry man, I don't come on here often, so only just seen this.

Yeah Liverpool is genuinely a beautiful city and in terms of niceness, absolutely knocks Manchester out of the park. The only thing Manchester really has over us is the gig scene there, but that's just down to logistics cos it's bigger and therefore it has more people, more venues, more promoters. Nothing else.

I suppose you're in a similar boat with being from Birmingham, hardly a city with a good rep but it's such a beautiful place and has some of the most imposing, wonderful architecture I've seen. Before a couple of years ago, I'd only ever been to Birmingham to change at New Street on my way further down south or through on the coach and I thought the place was a dump, cos the coach station is in Digbeth (iirc?) and it's just not a nice area at all, but every city has that and once you get past that (and the absolute eyesore that is the Bullring, let's be honest) it's SO lovely. Went to the Institute to see Melvins a few years ago and my friend who's from Stoke and knows Birmingham fairly well took me around parts of the city centre I had never seen before and I was genuinely dumbfounded at how lovely it was.

I'm generally not a fan of huge city centres like London and Manchester and to some degree, Leeds, but Birmingham does it well. I'm just used to Liverpool being small and compact and having such a well thought out layout that other city centres just do my head in.

Birmingham is probably the only city further south to Liverpool that I actually like, though. Well Sheffield too, which I discovered recently is EVER SO SLIGHTLY further south to Liverpool and that blew my head off.


EDIT - with regards to the North East, I've been to Newcastle, Sunderland, Hartlepool and Middlesbrough. All of them are pretty awful bar Newcastle, I've been to NCL a few times for nights out but never really seen the city. Went for a day out there last year and scaled the whole city centre and drove around some of the suburbs as a friend and I were actually considering moving there for a bit of a change as we'd both enjoyed it on previous visits. It's very very similar to Liverpool in lots of ways, we kept noticing similarities and then we'd follow it up with "..but it's just not as good as *whatever we were comparing it to in Liverpool*" - like their Quayside is such a poor man's version of The Albert Dock, their Chinese arch on Chinatown is tiny compared to ours (ours was crafted by 20 craftsmen who were flown over from Shanghai just to build it and is the biggest outside of China, second only to one in Washington) and the Tyne river looks pathetic compared to the Mersey. Even down to stuff like one of their main shopping streets, Northumberland Street, is very similar to Church Street in Liverpool but it's just nowhere near as nice, aesthetically.

One thing I will say though, is Grey Street in Newcastle is genuinely one of the most beautiful streets I've ever seen, even if the buildings along there are a bit repetitive and there is no diversity, it's still gorgeous.

Must say, though, very few streets can rival Castle Street here in Liverpool.

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Jonts

This has been really interesting to read, I definitely appreciate and identify with both your descriptions.

I'm currently situated in Blackpool (which for the benefit of our US buddies is on the northwest coast), but I lived in Liverpool very briefly after I was born and was too young to remember it, but grew up in Birmingham then spent about a decade living in Manchester for uni and afterward. In the process spent a bit of time visiting Liverpool as I met my fiancé while she was temporarily living there.

Interestingly I've lived in both the city centres and suburbs of Birmingham and Manchester so feels like I saw both sides of what each city was like.

I have to say I admire your positive spin on Birmingham - personally I hated everything about it except the only rock clubs at the time which were Snobs and Exells (can't remember how to spell, maybe that's right) but we're talking the early 2000s here. I left pretty much at my first realistic opportunity.

Totally agree with everything said about Liverpool based on my experience, although I'm a bit too biased towards Manchester to say Liverpool is "better."

I'll do a review of Blackpool if I find time later. Oh and for reference I've also lived in Bolton, Salford and Stockport. Let's literally not go there.

The Batlord

My take away from this is that everybody in England hates every English city.

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Jonts

Not at all, I love Manchester as much as I love Thrice. Y'know, the radiohead of the hard rock/metal world.

The Batlord

I'll see you dead.

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