Living in different places can be very similar or very different. It all depends on where exactly those places might be. Being raised in a small town and moving to a big city would constitute a very different change. While, growing up in an extremely small community has benefits, it has drawbacks as well, so moving to a big city like Long Beach, California was very exciting and scary all at the same time.
I was born in Juneau Alaska, and moved to Gustavus, Alaska when I was two years old. I don’t have really any great memories of living in Juneau. I do, however, have many fond memories of growing up in Gustavus. Gustavus is a small town northwest of Alaska’s capital city of Juneau. It is the gateway to Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. The population is about 400 people year round. There is one school – K-12 where I attended most of my life.
As a young girl I did things like you would think of a small town country girl doing; running around in fields, walking down dirt roads with my dog, and playing in the back yard. I loved Gustavus when I was a child. In the later years, though, it was not as much fun. There was not that much to do for a teenage girl. I did play sports, but there were minimal games and such to suffice the aspect of playing these sports. I remember thinking to myself: why would anyone wanna live here?
When I was 16 years old I moved down to Long Beach, California. The weather was warm and sunny everyday! Not like in Alaska. There were warm beaches to go to for swimming, movie theaters to attend, concerts to listen to, the list goes on and on. I was in heaven. I had visited cities before, but never lived in one.
School was the most different thing of all. There were 5000 kids that attended (just high school)! There were locked gates, ID cards and security personnel. I had never experienced anything like this before. The teachers were not involved in one on one with the students. Another big