City living has it’s advantages.

Food: As you may have realized by now, I like eating. And though leaving the suburbs means — as mentioned earlier — I’ll have to give up grilling meat and enjoying homegrown herbs and vegetables, I should be able to make up the difference in the new location.

I know the Upper East Side isn’t exactly a hotbed of awesome culinary delights, but the whole access-to-the-subway thing makes a huge difference in the variety of food I’ll be able to eat. And while I recognize and appreciate the joy of perfecting a fried-chicken recipe through trial and error with the deep fryer, it’s better than even-money I’m never going to get it to taste better than what they serve at Hill Country Chicken.

And the variety! Near my new place there are German and Argentinean and Vietnamese places, with foods I wouldn’t even know where to start figuring out how to make myself. And somewhere near a NYC subway stop there is nearly every time of cuisine in the world available.

I expect this will mean good things for those of you who enjoy the food reviews on this site, for what it’s worth. Part of the reason it got so hard to keep up with the sandwich reviews was that I had exhausted most of the interesting sandwiches near my house in Westchester and couldn’t find time to venture out and find ones in the city. So look out for that.

Sidewalks: I love walking. When I first moved to Brooklyn I would find excuses for it: a book I wanted from a store a mile away, a cheeseburger I wanted from a White Castle even further. Then at some point I realized I needed no particular destination, and I took to wandering. Sometimes I plan it. Most times I just step outside for some reason, find the weather pleasant, realize I have nothing better to do, and set off. It’s good for thinking, plus it’s decent exercise.

In my neighborhood in the ‘burbs, though, there are very few sidewalks. That means any walking needs to be done while looking over your shoulder for oncoming cars that might hit you (like I said, there are few streetlights) or at the very least splash you with water from a nearby puddle. It’s not the type of walking conducive to thinking about much besides your own safety.

So I’m psyched to have sidewalks everywhere. I tell people it’s about a 45-minute walk from my new place to my office and they say, “yeah but you’ll never do that.” But I will. I might even do it tonight.

Time, and access to stuff with which to pass it: I used to, you know, do stuff. I’d go see my friends’ bands or check out museum exhibits I was interested in or just go meet up with people at a bar to watch a game. And while that stuff is hardly impossible to undertake while living in the suburbs, the distance — from most of my friends and from the museums and bars and everything — made it something of a pain in the ass.

The difference in commuting time means I’m going to have more than an hour and a half extra every day with which to do stuff. I’m talking a big game now and I realize I’ll probably spend most of it watching TV. But I’ll certainly write some more too — for this site and for other projects — and spend some time going out and enjoying all the awesome things the city has to offer. So that’s cool.