Oakland

If you don’t know where you are you are in Oakland and it is not meant to be taken lightly. If you dont know ppl in the part of town you are trying to go to it is better not to go (East Oakland) Not a fun place less you make it to a side show. That shit is so much fun. But there is also alot of good in the O if you can make it to the jazz club call yoshis i think or if you can get to Berkley so much t do in a 2 mile radius.

Going to college in Oakland has been a huge difference from growing up in predominantly white, coffee bleeding Portland, Oregon. Oakland is a truly diverse and vibrant city, which lacks the glitter of San Francisco across the bay, but makes up for it in grit and countless opportunities for discovery.
Lake Merritt is simply beautiful, as is Chabot regional park, and sunset from the top of the Oakland hills rivals any other west coast sunset there is.

Once I wanted to live in you. But your secret got out. Now you’re the Brooklyn of the West.

Oakland gets a bad rap but I found it to be an easy city to get around and a nice, calmer complement to its big sister San Francisco.

Sister attends Mills here. Visited once already. Visiting again in a month for her graduation.

I absolutely love Oakland, and I wish it were a place everyone would want to visit, but in reality, it isn’t, and there are reasons for that.

One is that anyone who comes to the Bay Area from across the U.S. or halfway across the world, wants to spend their time in San Francisco, or up in Napa, or out in Yosemite, or down in Monterey… not in Oakland.

The truth is that Oakland is a pretty laid-back, blue-collar town with some isolated neighborhoods of trendy eateries and shopping, and some areas of artists and musicians just doing what they do.

I don’t ever really advise tourists to spend time in Oakland; there’s just way too much other world-class travelling to be done in the immediate area to make Oakland an attractive use of your time.

That said, you could easily stay in Oakland for alot cheaper than staying in SF, and commute in every morning on BART with the rest of us. Also, the weather in the East Bay is almost always nicer than the weather in the city. But, one travels for the city experience, so I doubt the five or ten degree difference really matters to most travellers.

That said, if you plan on moving to the Bay Area, I suggest looking into Oakland. It is an awesome place to live.

///lives in oakland

I loooove OakTown! its soooo awesome for “diverse” people to go meet others. I LOVE it!

I lived in Oakland after grad school in Berkeley. I love Lake Merritt. Rockridge is fun.

I’ll always love it’s character, the people, the climate.