I just moved to Seattle after 7 years of living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I grew up in a lot of cities and countries in my life. Therefore, my stay in the Bay Area was my longest stay in any place in the world. I really enjoyed the ethnic/cultural diversity of the Bay Area and its unique juxtaposition of the beautiful California nature and the fast-paced Silicon Valley life; the great ethnic food, in particular amazing Mexican food, Alfajores, and Soltani's at Maykadeh, were simply amazing artifacts of being in the Bay Area. Though I felt more ties with Cornell as my true Alma Mater when attending Stanford (mainly because undergrad years are a lot more fun), over these seven years I slowly became more attached to Stanford because I was a lot closer to Stanford alumni since I left college. I'm surprised to find that I miss the Bay Area so much despite the fact that I'm also familiar with this area and have a good circle of friends here. Don't get me wrong. Seattle is a nice place and certainly much more in tune with my style than the East Coast or even Southern California.

I'm really interested to find out more about the differences and similarities between the tech culture here, which is heavily influenced by Microsoft, and the Valley. I'll write a few posts about that later. But for now, I'm happy to have survived the move.