I like San Francisco. However visiting different cities makes me envious.

“Take a look at this,” said my husband, pointing to a handbag and a Mac laptop that were left unattended on the next table right next to the street. “She just left her things when she walked into the café.”

“I would never do that in San Francisco,” said my daughter.

“Shall we steal it?” my husband was joking.

As a 23-year-old resident and patron of San Francisco, my husband and I went to Boston, a metropolis of nearly 700,000, taking our eldest to college.

The laptop incident at an outdoor cafe threw us into further discussion about how superior Boston is to San Francisco. This historic east coast city, with its cobblestone streets and 35 colleges and universities, looked fresh and radiant compared to our homeland, where we had grown tired of the perishable housing problem, dirty streets, and increasingly devastating forest fires that shrouded the city in smoke.

With no information beyond what we saw and no crime data, we concluded that Boston is safer than San Francisco, perhaps because our parental instincts about getting our daughter to a safe place tarnished our judgment. We agreed that we would never leave anything of value unattended in San Francisco, where our friend’s purse was stolen from a restaurant in Castro and another friend’s son was stolen from a thief using his laptop in an open window of a cafe in the Mission District stole, was stabbed.

Boston has an abundance of cobblestone streets and brick buildings.

Sean Pavone / Getty Images / iStockphoto

As we strolled through the green, sandstone-lined streets of Boston, their gardens and flower boxes full of flowers, we said, “It’s so much cleaner!” And “There are so many trees!”

We noticed that most of the storefronts in the neighborhood shopping districts like Newbury Street and Charles Street were busy, unlike San Francisco, where so many seemed empty.

A pedestrian bridge in Boston leads to the Charles River Esplanade.

S. Graff

As we crossed a freeway on a pedestrian bridge, my husband pointed out a freshly mown area of ​​grass next to a freeway.

The bridge took us onto an esplanade that traced the length of the Charles River and connected us to the Emerald Necklace, a 1,000 acre chain of parks connected by parkways and waterways and designed by the famous Frederick Law Olmsted landscape. It was all remarkably quiet.

The Charles River Esplanade, a public park in Boston on the Charles River, traces the length of the river and connects to the Emerald Necklace.

Eduardo Fonseca Arraes / Getty Images

To two parents who abandoned their daughter across the country, all of this “Boston is better” conversation felt comforting. We sent them to a place with better public transportation, more trees, more history, cheaper baked goods, better behaved dogs, cleaner streets and cafes where you can just leave your laptop unattended when you take a toilet break.

My mother always advised me not to make comparisons that arouse jealousy, competition, and unhappiness. But when I travel, I inevitably find how my home, San Francisco, and wherever I visit, is different.

Sometimes the contrasts are small. For example, in Encinitas, a suburb of San Diego, where I sat at home for a week this summer, the tacos were tastier than those in the Mission District. Decades ago in Paris, a picnic dinner in the Luxembourg Gardens at dusk was interrupted by a crowd of park workers whistling and alerting everyone that the park is closing and that you must dispose of all of your rubbish. Would something like this ever work at Dolores Park? I wondered.

But sometimes the differences are more momentous. On a trip to China a few years ago with my daughter, for example, I was amazed at the abundance of sparkling clean public toilets in Beijing, which are available in almost every block and supervised by supervisors. I was overwhelmed by the huge transport system with trains rolling one after the other into stations and even going to dark corners of the city.

In Mexico City, I took a nightly stroll downtown, where an army of city workers was scrubbing the sidewalks with buckets of disinfectant and brushes. I couldn’t help but think that Valencia Street, the shopping street near my home in San Francisco, could use a thorough cleaning.

The problem with such comparisons, of course, is that they are superficial. They are not backed up by numbers or research, and they have no knowledge gained from living in one place for years, experiencing its seasons, sending your kids to public schools, navigating the traffic and reading the local news every day. They take root in the problems of the city and may take their best qualities for granted.

In this file photo, pedestrians stroll down Newbury Street in Boston, Massachusetts.

Maremagnum / Getty Images

When you are on vacation, you often only see the shiny facade of the place you are visiting – the most beautiful streets, the neighborhoods recommended in the travel guides, the immaculate museums – the pride of the city. The experiences are enhanced by the joys of travel – the reduction of stress from being away from work, the sound of a cocktail at lunch, the thrill of seeing something new. Through the rose-tinted glasses of a vacation, these cities appear remarkably liveable, and if you’re like me, you might log on to Zillow, look at house prices, and dream of moving to this destination permanently.

“Look at that waterfront apartment that’s only half a million in Seaport? Do you know what that would cost in San Francisco? “

In Boston, where the average home sale price is $ 715,000 compared to $ 1.5 million in San Francisco, it was easy to imagine moving across the country with my family – especially since I’ve never seen Beantown in the winter and Shoveled snow to get out of my house on a freezing cold morning.

But the fantasy was often cut off when I stopped talking to locals and told them I was from San Francisco. They reminded me that I also lived in an amazing place with near-perfect weather, wonderful panoramas, lots of jobs, good food and a history of social revolutions.

In a shop on Newbury Street, the owner told us he was driving cross country in college to visit Haight-Ashbury.

“I love your city,” he said and I thought I do too.

Maybe the grass isn’t greener? Victorian style houses in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco.

hate / Getty Images

The person I would have liked to talk to in Boston was the woman who left her laptop unattended in the cafe. After about five minutes she returned to her table and yes, her things were still there. I wonder now if she was just an unsuspecting person putting her things everywhere, and Boston is really like any other city. Or maybe it really was proof that Boston is safer. That parent will stick with that version of the story.