TBH, reading pretty much your entire post reminds me why I love living in Dallas and am dead set against ever moving to SF or SV (and if I ever had to move, it would be to Vegas).
> SF is cold! (yes, this coming from a canadian)
It's kind of interesting that as much as I love cold weather, I wouldn't want to live any place where it's actually cold as a matter of course. Why? Air conditioning. In warm places like Dallas and Vegas, air con is everywhere. Central A/C is in all the houses, and every business is air conditioned. In cooler places, that doesn't exist. I've heard horror stories from friends who moved to SF/SV and can't find a place to live with air conditioning. And people will say you don't need it, but a) heatwaves still exist, and one heatwave will fuck up your entire week, and b) they underestimate my lack of tolerance for heat. I blast my air con at 60°F even in the winter :)
> It's very common to see people lining up for unique eye-catching things like asian+mexican fusion, dashi-broth ramen and taiyaki ice cream, but finding good traditional chinese or greek or korean food or even a half-decent shawarma is tough
Honestly, I've been put off of SF a very long time ago, but if I hadn't already, this would do it.
The older I get, the more I find white people's spins on ethnic food to be just plain annoying. It's both more expensive and not as tasty as the real thing.
Here's a pretty recent example for me: in a suburb of Dallas, they recently opened an upscale food hall called Legacy Hall. I was really excited about it when it first opened, and I tried it a few times. Every time I ate there, I ended up leaving unsatisfied for the most part. Why? Because so much of their food was some kind of ethnic or regional food all gussied up by and for white yuppies. Case in point, they had one Asian-style noodle joint there called the Monkey King Noodle Company. I ordered the dan dan noodles, because I love dan dan noodles, and I've ordered it several times at hole-in-the-wall Sichuan restaurants. What I got was some white guy's idea of what dan dan noodles are. It was awful. And it was way more expensive than it should have been. And that's not the only kind of this thing I've encountered at Legacy Hall... I've had a few similar experiences there, but this is just the one I picked as an example.
But of course Dallas is a wonderful city, and there are hole-in-the-wall restaurants of every ethnicity here. I have one coworker, of Filipina descent, who I go out to lunch with once a week or so, and we mostly go to all different kinds of hole-in-the-wall Asian places of pretty much every ethnicity we can find. And while we're in the car, we talk so much smack about overpriced "Asian" restaurants that cater to white yuppies... it's so cathartic to have someone to talk to about how frustrating this is (TBH, I'm a Jew who grew up on Chinese food, understands Japanese well enough to translate as a hobby, and has never identified with white people).
> LGBT community: Toronto has a large LGBT community and one of the largest parades in North America, but people generally don't try to be too outrageous. In the one year I've been to SF, I've ran into butt-naked people numerous times (in contexts ranging from them just walking down the street to them running the Bay-to-Breakers marathon). Also ran into a leather fetish gear festival around costco a while back. Nothing really against that sort of stuff, but can be awkward to inadvertently run into it when you're just out and about with the kids on a random weekend.
I'm a transgender lesbian, and my main goal in life is to assimilate into ordinary life as a girl and maybe play around with a few chicks here and there. I've felt out of place in a lot of online LGBT communities because so many of them are dominated by those who... well, who aren't like me. People with radical political beliefs, very distinct "alternative" looks, who are thoroughly immersed in queer culture, etc. Now, I don't have a problem with those people existing (and in fact one good way to get on my bad side is to tell me they make the community "look bad"), but I do feel alone because so few people in the community are like me. And then I started getting involved in my local LGBT community and became a regular at a trans support group. And most of the people I met there are a lot like me, and it felt great to finally be part of a community I identify with. Going to that group felt like coming home, and I've since pulled out of most online trans communities in favor of becoming more involved with my local community.
Again, I don't have a problem with the queerer or more alternative parts of the community, and I'd never say they make the community look bad, and I certainly won't invalidate their identities, but I don't identify with them, and I just feel isolated when I'm surrounded by them, which is what's happened in most online communities, and I'm more comfortable when I'm with people who share my sensibilities and life goals.
From what I understand, SF is filled with the segments of the community that I don't identify with, and so I probably wouldn't get involved with the LGBT community there.