[blankall]

Originally Posted by Bandwagon Surfer

Reminds me of back when I lived in the Bay Area, and we had a few people from Calgary visit. They wanted to go see the farm team in Stockton, and everyone from California was shocked they would want to go there and tried to convince them not to. They insisted and did end up going, showed up in the office the next day in shock about how bad Stockton was.

I think it comes down to most people in Canada only see the big cities in the US, the places interesting enough for foreigners to have heard to them. Most foreigners have no idea how bad rural and small town USA actually is. And wow it is WTF bad.

And the crazy thing is media wise it is portrayed totally opposite, like the cities are the bad parts, when they are actually so much nicer and safer. Having personal done both, I would feel safer walking down the sketchiest street in San Francisco with money literally hanging out of my pockets, than I would driving through Stockton.

I know nothing of Stockton. From wikipedia:

In a 2010 Gallup poll, Stockton was tied with Montgomery, Alabama for the most obese metro area in the US with an obesity rate of 34.6 percent.[70]
In the February 2012 issue of Forbes, the magazine ranked Stockton the eighth most miserable US city, largely as a result of the steep drop in home values and high unemployment.[44]
In 2012 the National Insurance Crime Bureau ranked Stockton seventh in auto theft rate per capita in the US.[71]
In 2012, Stockton was ranked as the tenth most dangerous city in America and the second most dangerous in California (behind Oakland).[72]
In 2013, Stockton was ranked as the third least literate city in the U.S. in a study by Central Connecticut State University, with less than 17% of adults holding a college degree,[73] and ABC.com ranked the city as the third least literate of all U.S. cities with a population of more than 250,000 behind Bakersfield, California, and Corpus Christi, Texas.[74]

I would not have guessed somewhere in California would be tied for most obese city. Nor that a small city would be the 10th most dangerous city in America.