Des Moines in Review

Well, this post is a few several days late.  I'm now in Sudbury, Ontario, having driven north from Iowa through Minnesota and into Canada, then east towards Toronto.  Yes, it's the long way, but I wanted to see the north shore of Lake Superior

I've wanted to get my thoughts about Des Moines down for several days now, but I've felt unable to write.  Part of why I've dawdled is that I'm not sure how to write this up.  I looked around Des Moines with an eye towards the things I would do frequently if I lived there, and explored different neighborhoods, spending more time in places I would probably want to live.  So a lot of my time there was spent driving around, checking things out, strolling, and visiting ordinary places like the library, grocery stores, some restaurants, shops, etc.  I did do a couple of non-standard things (which I'll write about later) but much of the time in Des Moines was pretty ordinary, as I intended.

So now I'm forcing myself to write something down, and it feels like the first time I wrote a blog post.  It wasn't great, but I had to start somewhere.  So this might be a rambling narrative of my time in Des Moines, and in the end, will be an incomplete assessment of how much I liked it.  Because here I'll focus on what I learned while in Des Moines, as opposed to the sort of thing one can learn on the internet.

In short, I liked Des Moines.  It was very ... comfortable.  Yes, that's the word.  It wasn't very exciting, but there's certainly enough going on that it's not dull, either.  I flipped through some local newspapers, and there was always something to do, especially live music shows.  I went to one, and was happy with the quality and content (a blues band, doing a mix of covers and original stuff).

I was mildly surprised by the crowd that went to the show.  It was 99% white and I was probably the third youngest person there (seriously) but this wasn't representative of Des Moines's population overall, which was more diverse than I'd expected.  I'm not sure why this show only attracted a certain crowd but anyway...

There are several different neighborhoods, especially when you include the suburbs.  Some of course are those new giant homes, where everything is the same color and none of the trees are higher than 15 feet tall.  But the closer in suburbs and most homes in Des Moines itself are much nicer.  There's a "bad" part of town, but it's more like the poor part of town, where things look shabby and houses are small.  But it's doesn't look or feel dangerous.

When you cross The Thinker with that rabbit from Donnie Darko.

There's also a decent amount of downtown living, which I would look into if I moved to Des Moines.  Different options are scattered around the downtown area.  One option is the gay part of town (which, like Dupont Circle, is not exclusively gay), complete with good restaurants, fun shops, and a great tea house.  It also contains a large asian grocery store, which offers all sorts of foods I like to eat and a lot of weird stuff too.  The regular grocery stores in Des Moines are pretty robust, although I may not be able to get sushi at them (there are some sushi restaurants in town, though).

Getting around town was a breeze.  I didn't sample the public transportation, which consists only of busses and a few free circulators.  But Des Moines is so easy to drive in and park in, that unless I'm too poor to actually afford a car, having to drive won't be the hassle it is in places like DC.  In the middle of the day (and night, while everyone is out being social), parking is plentiful and easy to find.  And where it's not free, it is cheap -- like 45 cents/hour for on-street parking.

Doh!  Time to check out of my motel.  I'll post this much and write more later.  Now that I've gotten started I feel a little better about writing.  Plus, I need to write about the past few days driving around Lake Superior.