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I miss LA almost immediately when I leave it, and I don’t even live there
I think 5M people for me is comfortable, and 10+ in a metro area is great.
I really don’t do well in smaller cities (I really struggled with SF for the first couple of years)
I love the diversity and cacophony of mega city life, filled with people of all backgrounds, speaking dozens to hundreds of languages, with delicious food from places I have never heard of
I’m certain I’ll take to Mexico City with a similar enthusiasm so I can’t wait to go. I miss Bombay, Jakarta, Bangkok
I’ve learned to like quieter, smaller places, but the anonymity of giant cities, the presence of multitudes of people, the smells of everyone’s food, is everything that feels important to my own humanity and is still my default happy mode. Being around people. Many of them. Eating a lot of their food!
The way I like to live is, I like to go to restaurants where I don’t know anything on the menu, and if I see someone ordering something I don’t know, I like to order it to try it.
I feel like that maps to every aspect of my life.
Despite being autistic, my adhd animal brain is very much in charge here, and honestly? It’s amazing and fun
I have the most fun in big, huge cities. I like to go to places I’ve never been, take different routes to and from, talk to people I’ve never met
@skinnylatte I was just going to say: CDMX is the most _alive_ city I've visited since NYC in the 70s.
I fell screamingly in love with it at first immersion.
I'm adding Bombay, Jakarta, and Bangkok to my list of gotta-visit-sometime.
In such close proximity to so many humans, we feel them/us with so man more senses.
(And CDMX has some pretty awesome food. Just saying.)
@skinnylatte Mexico City is wonderful! Coincidentally, I’m headed there later today 
@skinnylatte Yes, I think you will like Mexico City, it's really the one place in Mexico big enough to be truly international and have lots of different cuisines besides Mexican. Including Japanese fast food chains that don't exist in the US.
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland) has some of that, despite very much not being a megacity.
@SleepyCat I liked Auckland when I was there. We got married there. Not quite a mega city, but I took to it far more quickly than Wellington (which reminds me more of SF). Same with Sydney over Melbourne.
@skinnylatte I'm from the Not-Quite country originally ("country town" suburbs) and, having grown up listening to people talk about how much the city sucks, music and TV talking about "getting out of this city" and "escaping to the country" I've gotta say... I don't get it. Ilive in a city now, and it's so much better. I can actually take public transport or walk places. I live walking distance from places, services, restaurants that wouldn't have even *been* in the town I grew up in (1/2)
@skinnylatte to say nothing of the fact that there's actually community here, and it's collaborative and cooperative! Would I like to have a massive garden and beautiful views of rolling hills, yeah, maybe, but that fantasy very quickly collapses when I start to think about having to drive somewhere that closes at 17:00 just to get milk 
(2/2)
@darohan I grew up somewhere where I would have struggled to have even eaten the same cuisine twice in a week (as that’s unacceptable), much less the same dish or type of food, so it’s been a culture shift for me coming here. I don’t feel it as acutely in SF / LA, but the idea that that’s the exception rather than the norm is hard for me to understand
@skinnylatte An intern from Hong Kong worked at our facility for a year. He also found SF not big or dense enough to suit. He would travel to New York to get his fix of real urban life.
L.A. has been getting denser for some time, but I still think of it as “a dozen suburbs in search of a downtown”.
@SVChucko I brought some new Singapore expats to the Mission and Richmond. They looked around and said, why did you bring me to the suburbs?
They all moved to New York after
@skinnylatte I’m not aware of many places in the US that have anywhere near that population density. NYC, yes, maybe Chicago. Beyond that? Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any.
@SVChucko also the type and style of transit and physical space infra. New York and parts of Chicago feel most like London, HK, Singapore etc. even other big U.S. cities are super car / suburb centered with not the same types of walkability and density. I wouldn’t say Bombay or Jakarta are walkable either but it’s more about.. I dunno, some difference in philosophy? A lot of US life is about keeping people out, and others away, vs living side by side and sometimes uncomfortably
I know LA fits in the definition of a car centered mega city, but given that it’s the only place in the world where I can taste the vast range of Chinese, Thai, Korean, Mexican and Salvadoran foods, I’m willing to accept it haha
@skinnylatte You clearly understand the US a lot better than many of us natives.