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   Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 16:36:20 JST Adrianna Tan

   I’ve not really lived in a small city or town before. Basically I’ve rarely lived in a place without direct flights to say, Hong Kong and London. Just a fact of life and where I grew up.

   So today someone said ‘hey there’s a Daiso that’s opened near here’ and it’s 40 miles away, I did a double take.

   In San Francisco, I can walk to a Daiso in 15 min. In Singapore I can walk to one in.. 3 minutes.

   I am enjoying aspects of small town living, but it is very very new to me. I basically have the opposite of whatever people from smaller places feel about big cities: whatever the opposite of agoraphobia is. There’s too much space. It’s too quiet.

   (SF was the smallest city I’d ever lived in. Until now.)

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     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 16:38:00 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     Someone at work told me she grew up in a town with a hundred people and my brain just could not fathom it.

     There’s probably a hundred people in the 1 level of building I live in in Asia, and there are 40 levels.

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     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 16:43:37 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     I used to think I can’t live in places that aren’t dense, but I realize now my objection is basically I don’t want to live in cities that are basically car parks.

     I like mega, mega cities, and I like nice scenic towns.

     I’m only now learning how to exist in a space that is not a mega city. It feels like rewiring my brain on how space and cities work.

     Whenever I’m back in Bangkok or Bombay I am still most at peace. I like the buzz of mega cities a lot. I understand space in that context intuitively and how to orient myself in those worlds. Increasingly my life is moving in a different direction.

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     Bec (teadrinker@aus.social)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 16:55:41 JST Bec

     in reply to

     @skinnylatte I lived on a farm as a child, closest 'town' (20km away) had about a dozen buildings, including the hall, the school, and a tiny general store/post office. My school had 26 kids in the whole school (aged 5–12 years)... moving to a city of over 1mill was a bit of a culture shock. I'm now in a place with fewer than 50k and it suits me down to the ground. Still miss the farm, though. That quiet, the huge sky

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     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 16:55:41 JST Adrianna Tan

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     • Bec

     @teadrinker I split my time between a 28K city and a 800K city, and the latter still feels extremely small and tiny to me!

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     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 16:58:54 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     My fave thing is when I take new expat Singaporeans to look at apartments in some neighborhoods that San Franciscans would genuinely consider ‘dense’, and they’re like oh my god I can’t live somewhere so suburban

     Basically anything that’s like, not full of 20 floor apartment buildings is suburban to us

     They don’t mean it in a mean way, they just mean, they’ve never seen short buildings before (like me when I first got here)

     One time I was in rural Australia on a quiet country road and I wanted to pull over to take a picture. My friend was like, of what?

     I said ‘of how there are no street lights! I’ve never seen that before!’

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     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 17:05:12 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     I was telling my friend from Singapore on a video call that I’m enjoying my quiet life in Monterey and he said ‘same, I moved to marine parade, it’s SO QUIET’

     Marine Parade is a neighborhood in Singapore that has 2x the no of people of Monterey city

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     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 17:08:35 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     I almost typed ‘maga cities’ so that’s a sign I should sleep!