Looking at a map of the west coast, California looks like a unified whole, but living here exposes a very different reality. California is a state with a split personality, divided between the north represented by San Francisco and the south defined by Los Angeles. Both cities encompass all the realities of modern urban America; expensive, diverse and politically liberal, but each has a distinctive style and feel all their own.

Los Angeles is as big as it is glamourous. The many cities that inhabit the area most of the country knows as “L.A.” are so diverse with culture that it’s overwhelming. Hollywood, Glendale, Beverly Hills, Compton, etc., each one with their own sets of lifestyle and stereotypes. But looking at it as an overview of a single area of land, Los Angeles is notable flamboyant and phoney, but of course it would be; it is La La Land, after all.

Cars run amuck, along the dozens of freeway systems and through the crowded streets. Everyone who has a license has a car, and if they aren’t driving themselves, someone is driving them. The public transportation is close to nothing in Los Angeles. The few times I actually took the L.A. subway (yes, there is an L.A. subway), there was absolutely nobody else on it. The buses mostly consist of adolescents and taxis are rare to come across.

Urban culture is as popular there as it has ever before. Nearly every blank wall is littered with graffiti, and music is played everywhere, high volume and booming, of all different kinds. Los Angeles is a very loud place to go. When the cars aren’t speeding by, people practically yell into their phones, and conversations are being spoken all around you. The music scene mostly consists of whatever’s on the Top 40, and you’ll hear the same songs over and over again, on the radio, in the stores at the mall, in restaurants, everywhere. Hope you like that one Katy Perry song that came out three months ago because it’ll play again and again and again. Tons of musicians of different styles create and perform music on the streets and in their garages, and live music is incredibly popular. Still, it’s hard to escape the modern pop and hip hop sounds that play everywhere you go.

The movie scene, on the other hand, is quite diverse. I have a good friend who’s a film buff, and studies the art of cinema down there. According to him, every movie has an audience, and this is especially true in L.A. The multiplexes play the big, loud, explosion heavy action flicks, the newest movie from Disney/Pixar dream team, and the rom coms your wife drags you too, but there’s so many movie theaters that you’ll find something for you incredibly easy. Theaters that play the newest indie drama, theaters that show what the critics are buzzing about, theaters that only exist to show movies that came out years ago, decades ago, even. If you ever feel bad about not being able to see a popular movie from days gone by, don’t worry; L.A. has got you covered. Hollywood’s Golden Age may have passed, but the cinema culture is all but dead in the City of Angels. Homegrown media is huge on that side of the state. Like I said before, live and independent music consistently gets an audience, but there’s more than just them creating their own art. Moviemakers, like my friend, stay up long nights writing and editing films of their own, and content creators popular on sites YouTube vlog round the clock. Artists do their all (or little) and showcase their art in the literal hundreds of art galleries. Skaters carve and paint their own boards, and DIY culture is big in modern fashion.

Los Angeles has its flaws but there’s a reason it’s as famous as it is. It may be increasingly giant, overcrowded, and fake, but there’s simply no other place like it. Whether you grew up in the mansions of Beverly Hills, the projects of the valley, or the sunny suburbs (as I did), you belong to the city, and it’s hard to deny the charm it has forced onto you.

San Francisco, by contrast, is a very quiet and mellow city, the quirky vibe that made the city so attractive to the counter culture is maintained to this day while being refined by their cultural successors, the Silicon Valley techies. Confined on its narrow peninsula by the Pacific ocean on one side and the bay on the other, the city hasn't had quite the chance to expand through urban sprawl and thus the city remains very walkable. The steep hills and narrow streets of Frisco don't lend themselves very well to cars, while scarce real estate makes parking a hassle to find. In response to this, public transportation thrives with the buses, trams, and even the venerable cable cars ferry a constant stream of people around from place to place, meanwhile underground BART chugs along carrying people across the bay and back. If public transport isn't your style, than Uber and Lyft are never more than two minutes away, always happy to serve the city’s civilians where they were born.

Urban culture is thriving in San Fran (though still very different from L.A), following the same bohemian course its hippie ancestors did. Walking in historic neighborhoods such as the famous Haight-Ashbury, the weirdness of San Francisco is on fully display where the outfits are trend defying, the shops mystifying, and the people label diversifying. That part of town has been the Summer of ‘67 since ‘67, the folk and classic rock lifestyle still as relevant today as it was fifty years ago. My friend described San Fran as “a living, breathing Simon & Garfunkel album,” and come to think of it, that’s exactly what it feels like.

The artistic energy of San Francisco has been devoted into politically charged, self expressive art projects or tech. Walking down the streets, it's no surprise if you come across some mural on the wall next to you or see someone advertising their latest self liberation art exhibition. If anarchist politics and cultural avant-garde aren't your thing and you get your kicks on microchips and coding, then SF has a special place for you. The City by the Bay is the tech heart of the world, always finding new boundaries to push past and innovative ways to wire the world together. If you've heard of a tech company, chances are good that they probably have their headquarters here: Twitter, Facebook, Lyft, Pinterest, Airbnb, and the king of them all, Google, call the city home.

Music and film don’t have much of a pace up here in the cultural fabric of city life. There are perhaps a dozen cinemas in all of the city, mostly devoted to exotic arthouse films. You're better off trying to catch the latest blockbuster on Netflix than the few current theaters in town. Musically, San Francisco largely keeps to itself, with places playing their own soundtracks without intruding on one another’s spaces. But the lack of bombastic style doesn't mean that the city lacks for musical quality. If you're willing to look, you can find some very interesting spots that cater to your musical tastes. Why just the other day, my friend and I went to Downtown and found this swanky little jazz club for a night of fun on the town.

Now any discussion of San Francisco isn’t complete without talking about the weather. L.A. may be land of eternal sunshine where a cloudy day is cause for considerable fuss, but in SF, the weather is much more volatile. Being by the ocean, the days in the city are cool almost to a fault. It’s rare that a day is over 75 degrees, and in response, virtually no homes have air conditioning. Rain is also a much more prevalent force, with storms blowing in with their own wild tempo. Perhaps because of this, San Francisco is much greener than Los Angeles.

The Golden City may be a little self righteous and off beat at first meeting but after getting to know it you become ensnared by its charm. It’s the perfect place to let your freak flag fly and explore just ‘who’ you are and after you've been here a while you realize you'll never find another place quite like it. Whether you're working downtown, relaxing in the park, or just taking in the sights you'll realize that the city has left its mark on you.

California as a whole is a hodgepodge of culture, all of it coming from the different corners of the world. The racial diversity in the entire state is obvious, and because of this, we have a lot of influence on our cuisine and architecture. That being said, the foreign influences are very different in Los Angeles and San Francisco, despite being separated by only a few hours. Both have Spanish names, yes, but the culture of Latin America is thriving in L.A., its food, and its neighborhoods. Hispanic inspired architecture makes up a lot of the homes in L.A., and Spanish is the second most spoken language. According the recent Census statistics, European caucasians are actually a minority in this city, with Latinos making up 47% of the population.

Compare that to San Francisco, where that ethnic group only makes up 15%. Also according the the Census, the percentage of Asians in San Fran is higher than the percentage of whites in L.A., so culture of the Far East is prominent here in The Bay. Los Angeles has a Chinatown and Little Tokyo and whatnot, but they pale in comparison to their counterparts in San Francisco. That being said, one of our most famous features in the city are the Victorian-style houses.

Speaking of houses, it is way expensive to live in San Francisco properly. L.A. may be crowded, but you can at least afford a house or an apartment, whereas San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the world. Both cities get good weather in different forms, but there is zero doubt that Los Angeles is the place to be if your into the ocean. Surf culture and swimming is a standard out there, while in SF, our beaches are mostly used as warf areas. That, and we’re very foggy, but that’s much better than the infamous L.A. smog. Los Angeles has the desert, San Francisco has the forest, L.A. has the Dodgers, SF has the Giants, but at the end of the day, which city is better? Neither.

Both cities have their strong points and they are suited to different types of people. They are each an important part of what makes California such a rich and excited place to live. The lifestyle, the arts, the food, everything about both these cities is enough to warrant a visit. Now the real enemy is that overblown concrete jungle called New York leering at us from across the country.