I don't live in Oakland (
Alameda), but my
SO does, and I work there. People do like to dismiss Oakland as a
vast cultural wasteland, but maybe that's because it's not
white bread enough for them. Oakland is incredibly
diverse. It has some very bad neighborhoods, but it also has every other kind. And some odd combinations, such as the
Korean/
Ethiopian neighborhood a couple of blocks from my SO's apartment. Lots of
graduate students from
Berkeley live in the northern parts; there's the
chichi region of
Rockridge,
down-at-the-heels Fruitvale, the nice
Lake Merritt district abutting
downtown,
Chinatown, and so on. It's all well tied-together by
AC Transit and
BART. There's at least one excellent musem (the
Oakland Museum of California), tons of good restaurants from ethnic neighborhood
holes-in-the-wall to the upscale places in the
City Center and
Jack London Square, and a multitude of cultural activities from a city
ballet corps to the
Italian fair.
I like Oakland, from the enthusiasm of
African-American neighborhoods on a
Sunday afternoon to the new
Chabot Space and Science Center. On the route I drive through downtown, there's a flag hanging from a balcony. It says:
THERE.Definitely.