We should move more. Though I mean this generally, of course I mean it especially of myself: when the most interesting single thing I can remember doing in the last couple years was travelling in Europe, and can regard moving to the city of my birth as a novel experience, I think this is a sign that I had become a mite too comfortable in my former state.
I am now a Hamilton resident, by choice rather than forced assimilation. We live in a huge and moderately expensive apartment on MacNab St. S. (near Aberdeen) which can be best described as “faded opulence”: really, I'm not much of a chandelier person myself, and it looks a bit odd over our $30 IKEA table, but the place will be comfortable at least.
(Back when I worked in London on co-op, I declared to a thirtyish yuppie co-worker my intention of living like a student after graduation in order to amass savings, and he laughed and said that he'd never known anyone who didn't allow their living standards to rise with income. He was right, and though I can try to use my relationship as an excuse and argue that I really could have lived an ascetic life were I but single, this argument rings false in my ears. Spend it when you got it, within reason.)
An unintended bonus of our apartment is the potential for conversation fodder from the previous occupants of our place. All our stories about them come from the other people in the building, who were (to say the least) very happy to see them go. Maybe I'll write about them later.
The biggest surprise of moving back is the realization of how little I really knew of my birthplace before. Partly this is because Dundas is an insular place, and my parents didn't bother much to experiment with Hamilton restaurants and culture. The main reason, however, is that I was a socially clueless teenager who also didn't drive. (I am, thankfully, a wee bit less clueless now, but I still don't drive.)
So, living in what is almost a new city is fun and healthy. The biggest perk oif moving, however, is the introduction of mental distance from the past. In the the last couple years in Waterloo, I spent most of my time at home, at work, or in various stores and restaurants near them, and was almost never at any of the places I'd hung out in my undergrad years. Nevertheless, it was hard to excise the idea that I was lingering around, ‘past my time’. Despite growing up in the area, I somehow don't feel that way here.
One thing I'll have to get used to in Hamilton is the comparative scarcity of computer-minded people. In Waterloo, it's quite difficult to go to a restaurant at lunchtime and not hear two people discussing some computer-related subject (e.g. Apache, makefiles, character encodings, etc.) at a heavily technical level. It was unusual to go to Classic Indian for lunch and not run into the development team of Inscriber. Here, you're more likely to hear technical discussions between healthcare professionals (apparently, Hamilton now has more people working in health than in the steel industry), and my declaration that I intend to study computer science is generally met with silence or a disinterested “mmm hmm”.