Congratulations! I hope your move goes well and I hope you love being here as much as we do!

Summers won’t phase you —they are surprisingly humid, but short! And the winters aren’t brutal! It’s so easy to travel all around the northeast!

Also I’ll say the city has a surprising amount of nature and parks that feel like actual woods is amazing and rare of a city if this size. Additionally Baltimore isn’t very sprawled (compared to something like Chicago) so you can get into the actual country in 20 min drive.

I haven’t found traffic to be terrible—especially for the northeast (as long as you aren’t commuting between dc.

My family just fled here from tallahassee, florida for a better place to raise our kids in terms of lgbt treatment, more liberal politics generally, and better attitude towards diversity.

Baltimore certainly has its issues but it also has lots of beauty, tons to do, it relatively cheap for the northeast, has lots of friendly people and is light years ahead of florida on the issues we care about.

for us its an enormous improvement from the southeast. Honestly we lived in Chicago for over a decade and it feels more liberal here to me (which may be because I’m originally from the northeast and always felt some cultural mismatch in the Midwest and a huge cultural alienation from the Deep South)

Ps feel free to message me if you want.

Edit: we have found it to be a more family friendly city than Chicago was. Lots of kids in the area we live.

I wore those flowy broomstick ankle length skirts with the big shirts ALL the time.

I graduated from high school in 1998–this looks very 1990s to me. Yes we had color photography but this shot looks to me like something I might have taken around school on an old black and white Pentax camera while I was in photography class. (It was one of the “shop” classes at my public school along with metal shop and wood shop. Do they still do those classes anymore?)

Also the “yearbook kids” took black and white photos and developed themselves which nobody did with color photos at the time. Since there weren’t cell phone pics and Polaroids were a little old and big to carry around you didn’t really take a lot of pictures in school at all and most of the ones I remember where black and white from those school cameras.

People did use disposable cameras a lot for trips and vacations and out of school. But I really don’t remember many kids taking pictures in the halls with them and getting them developed at the drug store. Maybe teachers didn’t allow it —can’t remember. It also cost $$ to get color pics developed so you didn’t take as many candid shots.