Thanks. In fairness, I can make a list of things I liked about San Francisco too:
* Beach bonfires on weeknights.
* The drive to Monterey. Also, the drive to Half Moon Bay for Halloween pumpkins in a very nice car. There is no better city in the US to own a nice car in.
* Dim sum.
* Freshwater aquarium supplies.
* I used to really like Zeitgeist, although I hear it's gone downhill. The last time I was in town, SF seemed to have a decent cocktail scene going.
* SFBay in general has unusually good access to produce and local protein, if you go out of your way to get it; no, you can't go to Whole Foods or Berkeley Bowl and get something better than you can in Chicago --- but if you want (say) 20 duck legs for confit, there's no cheaper place to get them than in San Francisco.
* SFBay has two amazing campuses to bum around (Stanford and Berkeley) and Chicago only has one.
Unfortunately, I just spent 4 minutes trying to add something to that list and couldn't. I could go on, and on, and on, and on about Chicago. Or NYC. I think --- I can't promise, but I think --- that I could put Ann Arbor head to head with San Francisco and run it to a draw.
Apparently the marine aquarium wholesalers have the whole of the continental U.S. divided into five "zones". The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the zones. :-)
Which campus in Chicago are you referring to? I've enjoyed bumming around NU, UC, and UIC at least as much as I enjoyed bumming around Stanford. I know, NU is not technically in Chicago, but it is as close to the loop as Stanford is to SF.
I lived in Evanston for a couple years and NWU never felt like a "campus" to me; more of a college-y suburb.
I actually went to UIC, and went to St. Ignatius for high school, just blocks away from UIC campus. I can't imagine going there for fun.
The University of Chicago campus is a destination campus. It's actually pretty amazing. It has every bit as much character as Stanford; you could totally go there just to hang out and read a book.
I'm partial to the University of Chicago, so you won't get any disagreement there.
Evanston is new to me, but the campus of NU seems very pleasant -- I really like the piece of lakefront path that seems integrated into campus. Of course, the undergraduates are just starting to return, so it might be very different in a few days.
As for UIC, my friends and I would always bowl there as undergraduates, and some of the restaurants on Taylor street were much better than you could get in Hyde Park for similar prices. In other words, at least one group of undergraduates at UC would go to that area for fun.
Strange, as I seem to find that the UCB and Stanford campuses are about as radically different as NWU and UofC. Stanford and Northwestern both have a similar insulated feel -- they existed before the suburban growth that surrounds them and as a student you can go weeks at a time without leaving the campus. UofC and Berkeley are both in the middle of an urban zone that existed before the school and have had to fight for every square foot of campus space; at both places it is hard to ignore the fact that you are crossing chunks of "city" to get between some university buildings.
It's weird, because I'd say the opposite; UofC feels more like Stanford to me, UCB feels more like NWU.
Hyde Park is part of Chicago, but it's an isolated part; it barely has train connectivity (unlike NWU), and it's walled off from the Loop by housing and light industry that is only now started to be gentrified away.
(I grew up on the south side, lived in Evanston, and had friends in Hyde Park in high school, but I didn't actually go to UofC).
I guess the view from on campus was a bit different from living in Evanston. I spent a lot of summers in Evanston as a kid visiting relatives but when I hit campus as a freshman I was surprised by how few people went more than a half-mile west of Shoreline (which was really a bummer to a freshman dying to show his new friends all of the cool "local" info he had; for most people if it was more than four or five blocks from Shoreline it was too far away...) OTOH, since I was living in a residential college that was east of shoreline it might also just be an anomaly of my own experience on campus.
* Beach bonfires on weeknights.
* The drive to Monterey. Also, the drive to Half Moon Bay for Halloween pumpkins in a very nice car. There is no better city in the US to own a nice car in.
* Dim sum.
* Freshwater aquarium supplies.
* I used to really like Zeitgeist, although I hear it's gone downhill. The last time I was in town, SF seemed to have a decent cocktail scene going.
* SFBay in general has unusually good access to produce and local protein, if you go out of your way to get it; no, you can't go to Whole Foods or Berkeley Bowl and get something better than you can in Chicago --- but if you want (say) 20 duck legs for confit, there's no cheaper place to get them than in San Francisco.
* SFBay has two amazing campuses to bum around (Stanford and Berkeley) and Chicago only has one.
Unfortunately, I just spent 4 minutes trying to add something to that list and couldn't. I could go on, and on, and on, and on about Chicago. Or NYC. I think --- I can't promise, but I think --- that I could put Ann Arbor head to head with San Francisco and run it to a draw.