I moved to Lincoln in 2008 for college. Somehow, six years have passed since then.
Residents of bigger cities love to brag about their extraordinary places -- the museums, performance halls, architectural masterpieces, and culinary institutions that are known around the world. And extraordinary places are certainly a wonderful thing to have, especially when out-of-town visitors come calling. We all like a little helping of bragging rights.
But after the novelty of extraordinary things wears off, the vast majority of our time is spent in ordinary places. Places like coffee shops, 9-bucks-a-plate restaurants, grocery stores, and neighborhood sidewalks.
Lincoln has a modest handful of extraordinary places. The Capitol Building, most notably. Memorial Stadium, if you’re a native Nebraskan. But Lincoln will likely never have a truckload of things that knock your socks off at first glance. It’s just not that kind of place, and no amount of shiny arenas will change that.
What Lincoln does have is a wonderful richness of ordinary places.
After six years in Lincoln, I’ll miss being able to take a rambling walk to Cultiva on a Fall day, or stopping by Open Harvest to pick up a walnut scone. I’ll miss afternoons spent wandering through the Vietnamese markets on 27th street, searching for a missing ingredient. I’ll miss the chubby koi fish in the Sunken Gardens, and sweltering summer picnics in Pioneers Park. I’ll miss the sheer weirdness of walking through the Near South, with its turn-of-the-century mansions, mid-century apartment monstrosities, and elusive, fluffy cats lurking on furniture-cluttered stoops.
If you’re planning your summer vacation, I can’t say I’d recommend Lincoln. When you've only got a week, you might as well go somewhere big. Somewhere extraordinary.
But if you've got six years to spend somewhere, you could do a lot worse.
