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Erik: What has been your approach to determining what city is best suited for you?
Andrew: We recently moved to Durham, North Carolina and we had a little bit of freedom
to determine where we wanted to be and when my wife and I sat down and thought about where
we wanted to be there were a couple of different things that we wanted to do. One was quality
of life was very important and that's determined by cultural activities, outdoor activities
and affordability. And the other was, making sure that there were professional opportunities
for both of us. Professional opportunities on my side was kind of taken care of because
I was going to work, I was just changing offices within my organization. For my wife as a writer
she wanted to make sure that there was a good artistic community there and a really supportive
writing community. So, when factoring those things in, we kinda settled on Durham. Durham
is a growing community. It's very -- it's undergoing on resurgence right now. It definitely
went through some tough times sort of post-tobacco world where -- it was a tough town. It was
very gritty. It's still gritty and patchy in places but it also feels a big sense of
rebirth. And those things are really exciting for us. You know, we love New York, we love
San Francisco, we love D.C. It's hard when you've got one person who's an artist and
one person works for a non-profit to kind of live the kind of life you wanna live. In
Durham we could buy house, we could do the things that we really enjoy in terms of cultural
activities, outdoor activities and it feels like we're part of something that's growing.
There are a lot of people that have been moving there lately -- Someone at the New York Times
is in love with Durham. They keep writing, these great, these great reviews of restaurants
and things to do in the area. You know, the Durham magazine said, you know, we're one
part Brooklyn, one part Mayberry. And it's kind of a funny, a funny description but I
think apt in a lot of ways. It's just an exciting place to be and so some of these second tier
cities are growing this way -- I heard the same thing with Louisville, same thing with
other communities that have been, you know. As some of the bigger cities get more expensive
and harder to, harder to live in and make a -- have a comfortable life in, while they're
still going to be wonderful places. There are communities like Durham that are providing
opportunities for people that are looking for something different and we just love it.
It's been -- we've been there for about six months and we just -- we love it. I went to
grad school in the area both at Duke and Chapel Hill and the area has changed a lot but there's
still a lot of -- a lot of things haven't changed. They're still great and so we -- it's
fantastic.