Not too bad
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3/30/2008
I lived in Gladstone in Kansas City North from 1992 to 2000 as a young single man. I like the city okay, but I think you will get bored there after about 2 years. There is Smithville Lake which is a fun place to go swim and walk around that is fairly close by. Kansas City has a lot of choices for seeing films. At the time, they had two art movie houses, one retro movie house, and then all the mainstream AMC houses. The art houses show too many gay films in my opinion, though. There´s Westport downtown entertainment district which is a fairly safe place to go although there are a lot of loiterers and a few generally harmless panhandlers there. Kansas City North is a still fairly white town and does not have all the racial tensions that come with diversity. There was a costly attempt to integrate schools in Kansas City, but after millions of tax dollars not working, whites stayed in the suburbs and the blacks stayed in Northeast Kansas City. Kansas City is conservative, family oriented, and a little boring. It´s cheap to live there. They do have some gentleman´s clubs there if you are looking for some decadence. I would recommend Bazooka´s. I liked the community college system they had there and I enjoyed taking some cheap art, music, and acting courses there. UMKC has community courses that offer classes on all kinds of trippy, new age and pseudointellectual pursuits. It was fun going to those classes too. I also learned how to draw in one of those courses. Yup, Kansas City is rock solid. You can always trust it to resist change as much as possible, which is why some conservatives there call it ¨Good ol´Kansas City¨ or the best ¨big small town in America¨. January and February is cold in Kansas City, especially if you come from the south. It can stay down to 0 to 20 degrees for 3 weeks straight. That means you´ll want to stay inside, but you´ll still have to drive in the snow to get to work. There is also a good Wild Oats health food store in nearby Shawnee Mission, Kansas, which was fairly cheap when I was there. The once great baseball team there has fallen on hard times and the new owner will not spend any money to improve it. He owns Walmart so it figures. Traffic is not as bad as other large cities. Crime is not that bad in Gladstone, at least, when I was there. I could leave my belongings in the car without someone breaking in. I did get attack by three teenage boys one night at 2 in the morning. Guess I shouldn´t have been walking around the neighborhood at the time. Gladstone is fairly nice and they have some reasonably priced apartments there.
sp68 | Cherryville, NC