I haven't lived in the Bay, but work takes me there relatively often from my home in Seattle. Most often I've stayed in Palo Alto. Here in Seattle, I know the neighborhoods are notoriously steadfast in keeping their villages quaint... craftsmen-style homes (pepper in some modern cubic houses to taste) with broad green yards and strict zoning laws, lest every neighborhood be infected with the blight of more affordable condos and one or two decent places to grab a drink. In Palo Alto I got a whiff of the same, albeit in distinct Californian flavor. It's an allergic rejection of anything cosmopolitan or urban. Nothing wrong with that but it's no surprise that people would find it also distinctly unsexy.<p>My wife came down with me and we drove around with a coworker who lived there. We explored Mountain View and Menlo Park too, got some In-N-Out. My wife drooled at the big flagship Anthropologie at the weirdly-simultaneously dated and high-end Stanford Shopping Center. We laughed at the $3 million 2-br ranch houses on Redfin. Talked with our coworker about raising kids in a place like Palo Alto, and he gossiped about how PAHS kids were killing themselves on the train tracks – such a problem, they said, that there needed to be a security guard stationed there to watch out.<p>We went to University Ave and took a walk. A pushy salesman tried to sell us facial beauty products at $300/bottle, then we got accosted a couple doors down by a rolly robot thing with a screen for a face. The guy who was video-chatting through it was mute, possibly by some glitch. We reached the end of the street after 10 or 15 minutes of walking; "is this it?". Meandered back and walked into that JOYA restaurant for food and drinks. Sat between a tech company party of some kind on one side, and two meek young guys practicing a sales pitch for their startup on the other. We ate our mediocre food joylessly and Uber'd back to where we were staying down on El Camino, at Dinah's Garden Inn and went to bed early, hoping to get up early, which would let us get out early... Menlo Park and Mountain View, too, just seem like they were all clone-stamped from the same template: 6 blocks or so of faux-quaintess playing host to little boutiques and high end eateries, but nothing much else. Maybe they just aren't towns made for visitors, and maybe that's intentional.