The city is an enigma to me.
Shits fucked. The sort of place where people get arrested for feeding homeless people in the park while billion dollar theme parks are staffed by people who are living out of their cars.
I grew up in Orlando and worked in Universal food service (in Seuss land, it was a nightmare fever dream) in college one summer in like 2013. The employees there were part college students living with their parents still and just earning some spending money (me), weird christian service mission groups from like Indiana where you go and like work in a theme park (what the fuck), and absolutely tragic trapped wage slaves, who got like a music design degree from a fly by night school which is now totally useless, and were working 3 different jobs because each would only give them 20 hours. Mind you that FL has no minimum wage, so we were working just above federal minimum at $8/hr.
Absolutely fucking awful experience.
I've since fucked off to the direct opposite side of the country.
Glad you escaped, comrade. I'm frantically trying to get my friends and family to evacuate the state as it goes further and further off the rails. My sibling is finally coming around, but everyone else keeps making jokes about oceanfront real estate in Central Florida or assuring me we just have to vote.
Once you leave the immediate vicinity of the theme parks it’s like any other sprawling urban & suburban hells cape of southern car dependence with precious little cultural authenticity. Some smaller, quaint downtown areas like Winter Garden and Sanford are basically bourgie PMC drinking spots.
Neighborhoods extremely segregated and overpoliced like everywhere else. Poor people are being pushed further and further away from the city due to rising rents which have massively increased in the last couple of years.
Source: currently live in greater Orlando. AMA
it’s a hellscape, but sort of entertaining to visit if you treat it like one big amusement park. everything outside of the amusement parks is kind of a hyper-real imitation of what an actual city is. it's truly bizarre. tons of weird tourist traps. It's just a strange time - I'd go back but bring hallucinogens
my heart aches for anyone who lives there
I have now started organizing a fellas expedition to Orlando where we only go to low budget tourist traps and drink 40s from the gas station
If you need a second tour group I can submit my application, I have a breadth of experience drinking Cobras in the 7/11 parking lot
tbh if you want to come hang out in Orlando with a bunch of queer weirdos at some point in early winter everyone is welcome. There will be a Canadian detachment and American detachment. I want to black out at Gatorland.
I live just outside Orlando and drive to it for work, it's a fucking nightmare. The city is very nearly all sprawl. If you glassed every last square inch the only loss would be the life there. Everything else about the city is completely worthless.
I'd rather live on a mattress floating on the ocean than in Orlando.
Kid friendly Las Vegas plus humidity.
Everyone leaves much poorer than when they showed up, with nothing to show for it.
nothing to show for it.
I love my $100 plush baby Yoda thank you very much
Hot, muggy, a mess to drive through/around, largely in service to the tourism industry, very little character outside of that
Outside of the major theme parks (disney and universal) you'll see a lot of little water parks and go kart tracks and stuff. Lots of strip malls too.
There's an all you can eat lobster restaurant, but you have to finish the whole lobster before you get another. My gf's friend's boyfriend ate 12 lobsters then slept for 16 hours.
i grew up and lived there for more than a quarter century. it is one of the worst places in the US. the police violence and background level of stochastic violence are remarkable. you would probably have to be in some low-intensity conflict / unstable demilitarized zone to find something more overtly fucked up, which is only because Orlando isn't littered with unexploded ordinance to make IEDs out of. shit absolutely pops the fuck off in the places tourists aren't found. sometimes its the cops doing it. sometimes it's not cops. it is an angry, overpoliced city and the people running it seem committed to making the place Thunderdome by gutting or crushing any infrastructure that aids people caught between the gears.
if you want to go anywhere, you're in a car. the volume of 6+ lane highways and gargantuan parking lots is disorienting. i swear to christ, you could stand on the curb in front of a business and not see the business across the street due to the curvature of the earth. there are a shitload of areas that don't even have sidewalks. and there's going to be shit traffic unless you take toll roads. not long before i left, orlando was #1 in the US for incidents of road rage that ended in assault and incidents of road rage ending in homicide. news stories about people shooting at each other on roads are only making the evening news if a cute kid gets clipped or a celebrity is involved.
i have lived, traveled, and wandered around many other places in the US with supposedly rough reputations, and almost everywhere feels like goddamn Mayberry RFD compared to Orlando. i hate going back for family shit.
everywhere you look there is anger, desperation, corruption and grifting. the damn sports arena is named after Amway. if i was told i had to live and work there for a year or die in agony, i would choose to die in agony.
