Boulder the "most liberal city" in Colorado?

A visiting, very lefty law professor of mine from Eugene, living in Boulder for the year, proclaimed Boulder to be a miserable fraud, mostly just a bunch of smug very rich liberals with the luxury of opinions that they can afford. I do think that the city just outsources is sprawl to Louisville and Longmont. But then, I guess people have to live somewhere, and if they packed more folks into Boulder property values might drop. Nonetheless, the traffic in town really sucks bad.

Compared to the Springs, Boulder is communist.

2 types of college students: those who are there to study, and those who are there to ski. and rock climb. and drink inordinate amounts of alcohol. mostly liberal, although i'm not sure how many of them come from places in colorado that aren't boulder or denver.

ex-hippies: lived in boulder back in the day, are either raising their kids now to be liberal, or have already done that and seen them off to college or wherever at which point they cease being ex-hippies and start simply being hippies again.

exceedingly rich people: who knows their political viewpoint.

the thing is, maybe boulderites think of their city as being really liberal because the 3 conservatives who write in to the paper every day tell us we are. but i don't think in my 15 years of living there i ever actually encountered and talked to one conservative expressing their views openly. and hey, at least it's not the Springs.

A visiting, very lefty law professor of mine from Eugene, living in Boulder for the year, proclaimed Boulder to be a miserable fraud, mostly just a bunch of smug very rich liberals with the luxury of opinions that they can afford.

liberal city FITE!!!!!!

Needless to say, being a buddhist from Boulder, i do think that there are a lot of very clear minded buddhists and Naropa students who really can't be grouped into any category. i know quite a few and would hate to see them pigeonholed because some idiots are busy Traversing the Spiritual Plane.

I keep imagining some hippie girl riding up Magnolia with a guitar on her back.

http://www.hellninjacommando.net/movie/pics/drunkenmasterii3.jpg

I didn't mean to pigeonhole anyone, I should say also I liked the atmosphere when I'd visit the campus occasionally, since it reminded me of my undergrad college, a place that also had a visible (but by no means majority) hippie-kid presence.

I think my friends were making fun of a very visible group of people who seemed to put their hippie cred above anything else they might do, and with my lack of knowledge about Naropa/Boulder I didn't know if my friends (former students) were the exception or the rule.

Which is all to reiterate that my impression above is only an impression. I used to notice a lot of prayer flags whenever I'd walk around my neighborhood in Denver, many more so than in any other US city I've ever lived in. Do you know what the buddhist pop. in Denver is?

more xposts
right. typo. gotcha.

xposting til the break of dawn
i'm in NYC now but go back to boulder for the summers.

...and I agree with Mandee on that one.

I loved Denver too. What a nice town.

Sgs, I kinda feel the Denver vibe, and I

Anyhow what I was saying is that I really like Denver now, and I feel like it's a pretty cool place, but when people visit I start to feel self-conscious about it, like it's not as RADICAL as I originally thought. I definitely like it here better than I did when I lived here before (February of 2003 through September 2003).

Although Lost Lake is going to be no more in 2 months time which is going to make Denver 100x lamer.

I was sad to leave, there were things about it I really loved, people and my 'hood, but the suckassness of DU and how much I hated teaching cast an unfortunate pall over my time, especially after I'd spent so much effort moving there. I still think it's a pretty cool place though, it felt like half-town, half-city sometimes, with mostly the good parts of each. As in, there are plenty of good and great things but it's as if you have to know to look for them in a way, they're not on display as much as they are in a larger city.

I'd like to visit there again. I didn't do as much as I could've there--didn't go to the art museum, or any museums really, which is nuts 'cuz I heart museums. It must've been a weird time in my life.

Have any of y'all been to that restaurant up the mountain outside Boulder? the Flagstaff Inn I guess it's called? We were on too tight a budget and too underdressed but it looked cool.

:(

Denver is probably a bit more expensive than Chicago, but not much more.

It's funny -- I've heard people say it's expensive to live there but it didn't seem too bad in general. Or are you talking rent? I meant to check out housing prices there but didn't get around to it. I didn't really get the traffic thing either ... at least, Boulder seems almost too small to really have a bad traffic problem, no? Maybe we weren't driving at peak times though. The buses seemed to come by really frequently.

Last time I was there, aside from driving through, (which was uh 1996, to visit some friends at the University) there seemed to be a disproportionate number of young "liberal" well-to-do post-hippie Phishheads in SUVs (before SUVs were SUVs, actually) that appeared to be taking narcisism to a new level. But, indeed, this is probably a stereotype.

I have a friend who lives near Boulder that I visit now and again and he lives an idyllic life up in the mountains. I'm jealous about that.

My rent is pretty damn cheap. I think it's a renter's market here. To buy a house is pretty ridiculous, but I think that's pretty much everywhere. I pay $475 all utilities included for a washington park 1-bedroom (it's tiny, though). Groceries are the only thing that seem overpriced to me.

Boulder is far more expensive compared to Denver. I think most one bedroom apartments are $700-1000 where they are probably $450-900 in Denver (depending on neighborhood and etc.)

in other news, thank fucking god Pete Coors didn't get elected to Senate, though there's a running bet going on in my family on how long it'll take Salazar to switch sides.

Longmont also has that Macdonalds with the choo-choo

And the TWIN PEAKS MALL

yes, the mont is all twin peaksed out. twin peaks church! scary. longmont also has some of the best mexican food i've found in colorado.

^^ no freaking way

is a mound of guac standard taco topping in CO or is that just an Albertaco thing?
can someone briefly say why The Springs is so bad and hated? Got family there but haven't been there for 20 years other than brief pass-thrus/stopping at Garden of the Gods/horrible sushi experience.

no freaking way to the mexican food or the twin peaks church / mall?

No freaking way to the Mexican! Or, I mean ... are you just comparing to northern Colorado, or have you eaten down south and you're still going with Longmont? I have a hard time believing Mexican in Longmont has surpassed what you get down around/past Pueblo.

Colorado Springs is largely bad and hated for being intensely conservative/evangelical, and having served for a long time as a center for lots of varieties of huge right-wing religious groups who want to focus on your family. It has self-consciously whitebread ideas sometimes, possibly due to fear of Mexicans; possibly due to its geography being somewhat deformed and disconnected in ways that completely blast any notion of human beings living in a community with one another, partly due to weird land speculation that went BOOM during the 80s savings-and-loan scandal; also possibly due to the Air Force Academy and NORAD being nearby. Also lots of people are weird. Also the Mexican food is not as good as it is further south, though if you live further south the Springs is a good place to go for bigger malls, with Chick-Fil-As. In sum, Colorado Springs is weird and conservative and creates a weird liberal enclave/prison around Colorado College, but on the plus side, the stretches of I-25 leading out of it are very pretty and worth driving on.

yeah, i guess i would amend that to best mexican food on the front range (boulder, denver, ft. collins etc.). Actually have spent next to no time at all down south, though I'm planning on it this summer.

The drive to CO springs is pretty, and Manitou Springs is cool for the penny arcade thinger, but last summer my sister and I decided to drive down to CO springs to look around and go hiking and things and we decided that town is really, really hideous.

It does have a ZOO on a MOUNTAIN though which is cool.

I'm totally a northern colorado girl though.

This comes from growing up in Greeley I 'spose.

i went to a party near lefthand canyon (betw. boulder & lyons) a couple weeks back and it was a serious Boulder yuppie kind of scene. Very well-off pseud-bohemians. I won't front, though, I'd live up there in a second if I had the $$$. Outrageously gorgeous.

thanks for the springs lowdown, nabisco. it seemed like a weird place to me, but not necessarily in an unpleasant way. but like i said, have spent hardly any time there in the past 20years.
where is the good mex food south of Pueblo? Along I-25, or further west, in the mountains? I couldn't find any good food til I hit New Mexico.

Well, I grew up in Pueblo, so I'm biased toward the Mexican around there. There's not much to point to outside of that in terms of specific towns, but anytime I had decent Mexican in small towns anywhere in the area -- Canon City, La Junta, Trinidad, wherever -- it tended to be a lot better than up north. (Never mind crossing the border into New Mexican goodness.)

(Now that I think about it, I'm not actually sure I-25 passes through much of anything between Pueblo and New Mexico -- Trinidad? Walsenberg? Rye? So yeah, once you're past Pueblo, you tend to start checking the mileage for Raton and not stopping.)

yeah it's pretty much a no man's land past Pueblo on I-25, but I had fantasies of there being a Shangri La of Mexican food hidden in those mountains.
If I'm not mistaken, Longmont has a huge ConAgra processing facility (chickens, for sure, don't know what else. i used to work at their HQ in HR), and employs a good deal of Mexicans, which would explain the food oasis there.

Mandee - a ride from Boulder would be reaaaally awesome if you it's convenient for you. The only thing is that I'm going to be at work until about 5pm or so. Is that too late to swing through Boulder? If so, that's cool, I'll just take the bus to Denver, it's not a big deal.

<3 nabisco's second paragraph up there in his colorado springs post

Zach I probably won't leave Greeley until 6pm or so... so yeah, the work issue isn't a problem.

awwwwwwesome.

I'll send you an email with my address. It's not hard to get to - it's a few blocks west of Broadway, on the Hill.

hey zach, change of plans - my friend's band is playing downtown tomorrow (20th & Larimer somewhere) and then there's a party thinger afterward. wanna come down for that?

YES, that sounds great. Although, I may have to be lame and leave the party early, because I think the last bus back to boulder leaves around midnight or so (I could be hilariously wrong on that).

no, last one leaves at 2:20 am duder!!!

we could send you off at union station which is like 2 blocks from the party

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v209/Mandalion/Picture2.jpg

whoa, gnarly!

Cool, what's the name of the bar/venue then? I can just meet you there.

i'll email you, im still gathering details

Mandee, I just got back from Denver about 20 minutes ago. What a fucking awesome weekend trip! I laughed so hard and so often over the past few days that I actually have a sore throat (best sore throat ever). We gotta do it again sometime soon.

PS Please don't tell anyone how much I cheated at air hockey oh wait what am I doing

most entertaining air hockey game ever!!

yeah man it was great to meet you and me and all my friends had a blast!!! and you are welcome to our couch in denver anytime.

Just got into an 40 minute long argument about THE ENVIRONMENT AND ENERGY where he said that I was a hypocrite because I only am a vegetarian (a decision I made on grounds of energy use) and don't go "100%".

LATE UPDATE

he walked in and totally apologized. Maybe's he's not so bad.

SRY SO DRUNK BOULDER

I have a hard time making up my mind about Boulder. When we lived there, my friends and I used to compare it to Dairy, from Stephen King's, It. You keep looking around hoping that someone else will acknowledge that there is something terribly wrong about the place, but, like you said, it's all glazed over eyes.

That being said, there were days when shit was way bad, and all I had to do was take a look at the flat irons and it would wash away.

I was planning to move to China this fall, but salary expectations and visa problems are making that less of a viable option. I think my girlfriend and I are moving to Boulder in August.

Where are you from originally, ZS?

im ogin to colorado for a month on tuesday and completely bypassing boulder HAHA FU BOULDER

what are you doing here jhoshea

Benjamin -

I'm originally from near St. Louis, Missouri. A small town called Farmington. But now I'm living in Ithaca, NY, but only until I graduate next May. Then somewhere else. I HAVE NO HOME.

Mandee

I'm coming to Denver on Thursday night/Friday/Saturday afternoon. If you would like hang 10 gimme a call!

Alright, they don't like the "1-2-3-4-5, 6-7-8-9-10, ELEVEN TWELVE!" song, or the animation. FUCK THIS.

Mandee - wanna see Matmos tomorrow in Boulder? Pleeeeeeeease?

i'm down for Denver drinks on July 26th

I loved Boulder when I visited. especially Boulder Brewing company

Alright, they don't like the "1-2-3-4-5, 6-7-8-9-10, ELEVEN TWELVE!" song, or the animation. FUCK THIS.

what the fuck are these people

Z S email me at dr dot drew dot daniel at gee mail dot com so that I can list you in Boulder brah

Drew, I just emailed you, but since it's already 6:30pm I'm assuming it's too late for guest list action. No big deal though, I'll be there either way.

WAIT IS IT TONIGHT OR WEDNESDAY ZACH!!?!?

sorry i just now saw this! AND I JUST GOT HOME FROM WORK AND I STINK!

Jordan is speechless!

mandee, did you get my ilx mail?

OH! Jordan!!! The email I am registered under is no longer valid - email me at mandee wr!ght at gmail dot com

oh cool, i re-mailed you

They're still cool dudes though. My roommate says "Yeah, right?" anytime he agrees with someone else, which is endearing.

-- Z S, Monday, May 26, 2008 4:22 PM

RONG

omg boulder is my least favorite place in the world

-- jhøshea, Tuesday, May 27, 2008 9:13 AM

RITE

Anybody lived in Ouray or Silverton?

I moved back here, to Boulder. I got dragged to some awful show at the Boulder Theatre (Charlie Hunter), with a bunch of people standing around not even paying attention to the music.

This is the weird thing about the jam band scene. Most of the people I know who go to these shows walk around and socialize, meet people they saw half way across the country at some other lame show, and only intermittently notice the music.

Other than that, I am extremely happy. I've lived here before, when I could hardly bare it,but now I've got a decent job and can actually enjoy the place. Side note, this is one of the most fit conscious cities in the country, yet when I live here I pack on the pounds.

Family vacation in Steamboat Springs next week, meeting up with even more family. I've always had an irrational hatred of Colorado, so I admit I am prejudiced, but I'm also open to having my mind changed. So: what am I in for? Hippies? Bobos? Bozos? I'm sure it will be fun with fam regardless.