I moved from a Dallas, TX suburb to a pretty "nice" place in Brooklyn, NY last June.
Holy shit, the things that people think of as normal and okay here are totally nuts.
I never heard a damn sound from anything in Dallas. Nothing. I could play my classical music pretty much as loud as I wanted whenever I wanted, and neighbors would never hear it.
Here in Brooklyn, I swear to god we live like animals, and people are okay with it.
I got a noise complaint with cops and everything the other day just having reasonably quiet sex with my girlfriend. Neither of us is noisy.
I can hear everything above and below and next to me. It's stupid. There's no central heat/ac. The building just turns on the heat when they feel like it, which is nuts. It's more than 80 degrees in my apt right now. I don't even like that temp ever. I have to open windows to let it cold air to bring the temp down to something reasonable.
There are no reasonable grocery store. If you want to cook a reasonable meal at home with your own cooking skills, you have to go to at least 5 different places, and there's nothing about a store that tells you what you can and can't get there. It's insane. And they don't tell you with a sign on the the door if they are or are not cash only.
I love the opportunities I've found in NYC, and am truly loving my job, but the tradeoffs are fucking terrible. Aside from public transportation, this is the worst, most idiotic city in the world.
Seriously, it's like living as an animal here.
And I live in one of the best parts of Brooklyn. This is just stupid, and I kind of hate it.