Quinn Leaves Home

There is a cliche that I have heard many times that goes "you can't know where you're going until you know where you've been." I don't know how true that is, but I like my memories. So let's take a look at where I've been before we talk about where I'm going.

I grew up in the East Bay, a suburb of San Francisco, California. If you ask any kid between the ages of 10 and 30 from the Bay Area, they will all surely tell you, that this is the greatest place on planet Earth. Now, I have not seen most of this Earth (although I do plan to), and neither have these kids, but they might actually be right. I am incredibly lucky to have grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I am a little spoiled because of it. Every time I leave California, I scoff at the lack of fresh veggies, glorious sunshine, proximity to surf and snow, and mix of cultures and ideas that are all so prevalent in the Bay. I am so grateful for my childhood there, and I would not have wanted to grow up anywhere else in the world. I will always be a flip-flop and wayfarer wearing California girl and won't be able to pass a single summer without returning to Cali (tell my mother that, it will make her supremely happy).

However, 18 years was enough of the Bay Area for me. After that I popped my little suburban, private school bubble and moved to big, bad New York City. I love New York.  Ever since I first visited the city at Thanksgiving in 2005 I knew I would live there some day (it was a feeling like I had found the piece of my heart that had been missing). And I did just that. The 8 months I spent in New York during my freshman year at NYU were incredible. My dorm was in the heart of Greenwich Village, right between Washington Square Park and Union Square, and I had a view of the Empire State Building from my tiny window. Not everyone (in fact, very few people) are privileged enough to have such living arrangements--and I was only a freshman! Plus there was the Divine Nine that made the academic year especially awesome, but that is a story for a different time.

And so now I find myself living in Bloomsbury, London. Where our story (as it relates to this blog, anyway) really begins.

So I am a California girl, whose heart resides in New York City. But I must admit, I have never met a city I didn't like.