Ask HN: Living in two cities? Please share your experience? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Living in two cities? Please share your experience?

6 pointseswat4 comments

I’m a designer & developer that recently left my previous job so I can focus on doing more open source projects and figuring out my own way of earning a living. By coincidence the lease on my apartment in Ottawa is now month-to-month and I now want to move to a new place. But since I end up traveling to Toronto at least once a month – I like vibrancy of the culture and have family there – I was considering moving to Toronto.

But another solution is to live in both since I like their differing qualities: Toronto is great for the loudness, variety and family, while Ottawa is quiet, good for taking a break and I don’t want to drop everything that I built here (friends, network, relationships with my favourite vendors). FYI it only takes about 4-5 hours to drive or bus between the two.

I want to take a stab at living in both, given I have a decent amount of savings and no commitments. I was hoping to hear from those that are doing the same. Perhaps I can learn a thing or two to help me settle into this plan (which is to get s smaller apartment in Ottawa and couchsurf between my relatives’ places in Toronto until I figure out a proper living arrangement there).

I kind of tried to arrange this but never pulled it off. I was married to an introvert who was a bit of a workaholic and his career generally put us in places where I could not readily go to college. I suggested that I move to a college an hour or two away, take the kids with me and see him on weekends (in part because he really didn't want much to do with us after working all day with other people -- he needed alone time after work during the week). It never happened.

I suspect few people have really done this. You might look for experiences of college students who go away to college in another city but technically still live with parents the rest of the year in their hometown. I did for a time split my time between Kansas and Georgia when I was a homemaker and military wife. There are some remarks here about those experiences:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/02/ramblin-mom....

HTH.

I spent a semester doing this in college, living in the city where my school was located during the weekends and living in a student city a few hours away to work an internship during the work week. I would bus between the two every week. It definitely spread me thin (working full time, classes and papers at night, research on the weekends, plus somehow still trying to have a social life) but it was an incredible experience to live in an awesome new city. If you have a reason to go for it and don't mind spending the time on the road, why not give it a shot? You can always decide on one place to settle down, and you'll know what it's like to actually live in each of them

I am doing San Francisco <---> Portland, Oregon right now. In theory it sounds great. I get access to a huge tech/startup city while also having a more relaxed, quirky Portland. My girlfriend is in Portland, and my sister is in San Francisco, so I have a vested interested in spending equal time in both cities.

But after 5-6 months, I just got tired of the back and forth traveling. I felt like I couldn't invest socially in one city. Planning meetings, events, etc also became difficult because my time in both cities was split in half (I was going down to SF 2 weeks a month, sometimes 1 week a month).

For half a year I lived in Amsterdam and my girlfriend in Brussels. We would take turns going back and forth between the two cities for the weekend (little less than 4 hours by bus). It can be done, but it gets really tiresome really quickly.

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