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I was immediately attracted to this question. My 79-year-old father is German and was a young boy during WW2.I asked him to write something to respond to this question, and he provided this excerpt from his memoirs. (I've changed the names of my uncles.)tl;dr: During the war, bad. After the war, worse."In the spring of 1942, as the RAF bombing raids started, our family was evacuated by the German authorities from Krefeld to the Black Forest in southern Germany. The operation was called MUKI (for Mutter und Kinder).By train my mother and we 3 children arrived in Schönmünzach in the Black Forest. We were ordered into a requisitioned hotel. The money the government paid the hotel must have been pretty low, judging by the unfriendly service we received.After a few weeks, we were moved another 15 miles deeper into the forest to the little village of Obertal into the Hotel Sonne and a little later to Hotel Günther. There we had a single room with toilet and washroom down the hall. The hotel was run by two sisters and a brother, who also was a blacksmith. Two of their nieces, Lilo and Inge, were the food servers. The food was without much variation: potatoes, carrots, mushrooms that we helped collect in the woods, and blue trout. I hated the trout because of their bulging eye balls and disliked the mushrooms, they were so slippery.It must have been in the summer of 1942 when we kids played in the garden of the hotel. There was an umbrella stand with a heavy concrete base. In passing, I pulled the stand askew and let it snap back. Unfortunately, my brother Hans was close behind me and the pipe of the stand hit him in the face. He was bloody all over, but this guy is hard to kill, he healed soon enough, but today still has a scar under the left side of his nose.In the fall of 1942, Hans and I started elementary school in Obertal, Walter, our younger brother, followed 2 years later. We were so proud of our satchels, packed with a slate board with attached sponge, and our freshly sharpened slate styluses.One winter evening my mother left us alone in the room and locked the door (this was before the invention of baby-sitting). We were up to some mischief: I collected pine needles from the Christmas tree and stuffed them into an electric outlet. All of a sudden there was a big flash and the light went out. I had managed to put the entire hotel into darkness.Shortly thereafter, in early 1943 we were moved to a farmhouse near the edge of the village. The farmer by the name of Haist and his wife were not happy at all to see the unwanted guests they were forced to take in. They had two children, Alma, who was about 4 years older than I, and her younger brother Egon. We were placed in the upstairs of the small house and had one bedroom, a living room and a small kitchen with a single spigot for cold water. The toilet was half a flight down and consisted of a board with a lid-covered round cut-out hole and a cesspool below, no running water. The bedroom had no heat but was placed above the stable where a pig and a cow were supposed to warm the room from below. It was not quite sufficient, and during the coldest part of the winter we had to hack the ice off the jug and wash basin that served as our bathroom.One day my mother had to run some errands. She again locked us up in the living room and we thought of some new mischief. We found matches and tried to burn off the fringes of the curtains by the front windows. To our disappointment the fringes didn’t burn very well and only generated smoke. So we gave up on the idea, extinguished the smoldering fringes and looked for some other entertainment. I suppose my mother was upset when she came home, but I don’t recall any punishment.Food in those days was strictly rationed and we had to use food stamps for every purchase. My mother managed to get beef bones once a week. First she made a soup from it, then burned the bones on the charcoal in the stove. She recovered the ashes and we had to eat them as our calcium supplement. It tasted almost as bad as the weekly cod liver oil that we had to swallow. (Cod liver oil is rich in vitamins and chemicals, such as iodine. The lack of iodine was causing a high occurrence of goiters among the locals.) One day the local grocery store, the Konsum, had a big surprise: they sold strawberry jam without food stamps. Everybody rushed to the store and bought as much as the store keeper would hand out. The jam was delicious, sweet and crispy. A bit later we found out that the crispiness was dozens of wasps that got processed with the strawberries.In the spring of 1943 I got scarlet fever and an infection of the middle ear. I was quarantined in our bedroom while Hans and Walter were moved to stay in the bedroom with Egon. When I got worse I was sent by ambulance to the hospital in Freudenstadt, some 10 miles away. I must have been pretty sick because I had to stay at the hospital for more than a month. Later I was told that both of my ear drums had ruptured. When I finally was discharged the nurse confiscated my only toy, some kind of a construction set with interlocking wooden chips, because it was “contaminated”. Really they did disinfect it and let other kids play with it. I was very unhappy about the loss.In the summer, war came to Krefeld. On 6/21/43 the Royal Air Force (RAF) launched a heavy air raid on Krefeld where we had lived. Our house took a full hit and was totally destroyed. We would not have survived had we not been evacuated before.Once a week we were ordered by the school to collect potato beetles in the fields around town. The beetles were threatening to kill the potato crop and rumors were that the Americans dropped the beetles on Germany, an early application of biological war fare. We had to pick the beetles off the leaves which was ok; they looked pretty in their yellow and black stripes. What I didn’t like was crushing the larvae and the eggs between my thumb and index finger and, most of all, I didn’t like the young Hitler-youth supervisor who hit us with a switch in the back of our knees when we didn’t work fast enough. However, when we were doing well we received small propaganda stickers with a printed “Kohlenklau”, the energy thief with a sack of coal over his shoulder, and “Pst, Feind hört mit” the sticker to remind you that enemy spies where everywhere.During the summer vacation of 1943 we helped our farmer to collect ferns in the woods that he used as bedding for the cow. The fern was spread in the courtyard to dry and piled up overnight. I still remember that one night the three of us kids were allowed to dig some cave into the huge pile and sleep in it. The fragrance of the dried fern was wonderful. We also helped to make hay, a very labor intensive process. In the morning the farmer went out to his large meadow behind the house and cut the grass by hand with a scythe. Every half-hour or so he paused, pulled out a whetstone from his hip pocket, and sharpened the scythe. Frau Haist, Alma, Hans and I used rakes to spread out the grass to dry. In the early afternoon, the grass had to be turned and in the evening it had to be collected into piles. This was repeated for several days until the hay was ready to be collected into a big net which the farmer then carried on his back into the hay loft above the stable. Every evening the farmer sharpened his scythe by straddling a stone bench that had a small anvil at the end, and hammering the edge of the blade razor thin. He then finished the sharpening with a whetstone.To obtain firewood the forester assigned and marked one tree for each family and sent a notice where to find the tree. Our tree was up the mountain some 10 miles away near a logging road. The farmer, my dad, who was on furlough, Hans, Walter and I set off at 5 in the morning. After some searching we found the tree. Dad and the farmer cut it down, chopped off the branches and sawed it into 3 ft. sections. The 3 kids had to drag the pieces up the hill to the logging road and pile it up for pick-up by the forestry people. Hans didn’t like touching the slippery, mossy branches and decided to go home. He snuck away, took the cart with all our food and beverage and rolled down the road all the way home. You can imagine how furious we were, no food or drink and another 6 hours of work and a 3-hour hike back home. At home Hans got a severe thrashing, the only one my father ever administered to him. As a further penalty Hans had to do overtime in chopping wood after the man with the mobile band saw came by and cut the sections down to firewood length.In the fall the farmer called in the local butcher to slaughter the pig. From our bedroom we could hear the poor beast squeal. When we went downstairs, the pig was already in a tub of hot water where it was being scrubbed clean and its bristles were scraped off. We kids had the job to wash out the intestines in the fountain in the courtyard and get them ready for sausage-making by turning them inside out. When the whole pig was processed we all sat down to a “Schlachtfest” (butcher’s party). The farmer’s wife dished out “Metzelsuppe”, the broth of the sausage cooker, and freshly baked bread, followed by various cuts of meat and sausages with potatoes and sauerkraut. It was truly a feast because we could eat without needing our ration stamps.In 1944 we moved from the farm in Obertal to Baiersbronn into one side of a duplex that the town had built for bombed out refugees like us.The house was very small, the living room was 7 by 12 feet, the eat-in kitchen was 8 by 14 feet, and there was a single bedroom upstairs, about 10 by 12 feet. Hans and I slept in a regular bed, Walter slept in the big bed with my mother and later, after my dad got back from the POW camp, he had a crib in an alcove. Later that year, Frau Ilse Mueller - who lived in the other half of the duplex - let us use her upstairs bedroom and the 3 of us kids had a bit more room.The house had no road connection and no water. We had to haul the water by bucket from a neighbor some 300 yards down a path to the road. For three more months we kept hauling. When the town finally installed a single tap in the kitchen, it was truly a high point in our lives.The toilet was a hole in a wooden bench, again with a cesspool underneath. It smelled terribly, especially during the hot summer days. Worst was the maggots that kept creeping up from down below. We didn’t have any toilet paper; none could be bought in the empty stores. So my mother sacrificed the love letters my father had written to her from the war, for us youngsters they were fascinating and so romantic.Meanwhile, our neighbor, Herr Lampert, decided we needed a road, so he organized the neighborhood and we built a dirt road, about 200 feet long, to connect to the main road. We logged tons of stone from the nearby Sankenbach creek and set them by hand into a foot-deep road base. The bed was consolidated with rams made out of tree stumps. On top we put gravel and sand, and our foot path turned into a respectable piece of road.In early 1945, the front was drawing nearer and bombs started falling nearby. One bomb hit Café Mueller and killed their only daughter. My mother barely escaped a machine gun salvo from a low-flying French fighter plane. She feared for our lives and we all went back to the more remote village of Obertal. There we shacked up with our friends, the Siehr family, into a 3 room+kitchen apartment. They had 3 boys, our best friends, and a younger daughter. Their father was a chemist who had volunteered to join the army in 1939 and was killed in action during the first few weeks of the war. Frau Siehr became a war widow at age 28 with four children, then 4, 3, 2 and 1 years of age. There was one bedroom for the children with triple bunk-beds for the boys, and the three of us doubled up with the boys head to toe. The girl had a small bed in the same bedroom.Then, one day in April of 1945, the French army moved into the village. The German army had retreated to guard the next bigger town of Freudenstadt. Hans and I, at age 8, had to join the “Volkssturm” (People’s Army), the last resources of the army, consisting of men over 70 and kids of 8 to 15 (everybody between 15 and 70 had been drafted earlier). We had been trained, using wooden mockups, to shoot RPGs at the incoming tanks. But the German army retreated and had taken all the real weapons with them and, luckily, we didn’t have to make that “last stand against the enemy”. The village surrendered to the French without a shot being fired.Then the French started to search each house for soldiers and also for quarters for their officers. They came to the upstairs apartment and knocked (!) at the door of the children’s room. My mother had posted all 7 children by the door; when the soldiers opened, they exclaimed “Mon Dieu” (dear Lord) and shut the door. We kids then moved swiftly through a connecting door to the living room where Frau Siehr posted us near the door. The soldiers knocked again at the next door and saw another mother with 7 more children. With a baffled “beaucoup d’enfants” (lots of children) they gave up on their search for accommodations in the house.After the armistice was declared there was great joy all around. Our family went back to Baiersbronn to our “Behelfsheim” (emergency shelter) as it was officially called. There we found a big mess. French soldiers had celebrated the end of fighting with a big party and had turned the place upside down. Also, they ate all our food and we had nothing left to eat. One of the French soldiers, he called himself Bari Mulut, an Algerian, came by a few days later and asked my mother to hide him; he was a deserter and just wanted to go home. We hid him in the attic and played ignorant when the French MPs came by and searched the house. They overlooked the trap door in the ceiling, leading to the attic.At that time, food rationing was not working anymore; the whole civilian service structure had collapsed. We went around to several farms and tried to get enough food but the farmers were reluctant to accept the worthless “Reichsmark” currency. My mother taught us some French and we went begging at the hotels the French had requisitioned. “Avez-vous des conserves pour nous?” we asked again and again. We also eagerly picked up cigarette butts, rolled them into new cigarettes of ever increasing nicotine content, and traded them against food at a farmer’s. One day we were very lucky, a French officer gave us eleven 32 oz. cans of meat and vegetables, it was a memorable day. Other days we were not so lucky and the entire food for the four of us consisted of a single sugar beet that the farmers usually feed to their pigs.There were no toys around so we made some ourselves. We carved little boats from thick pine bark and let them float on the puddles in the ditch behind the house. We made whistles from willow branches, stilts from square-cut slats, catapults from beer-bottle tops and slingshots from inner tubes, discarded by the French soldiers.The French commanded every inhabitant of the town to watch a film about the Holocaust at the movies. Everybody was horrified and some people said this was all propaganda. Apparently, they had lost their clear thinking after years of Nazi propaganda.During the summer of 1945 stores had nothing to sell. To survive, my mother, Hans and I went on “Hamster Reise” (shopping trip), where we scratched up some tradable goods, among them mother’s pretty lingerie that dad had sent her from Paris, loaded them on a hand-wagon and walked first from Baiersbronn to Obertal, staying at Siehr’s for a short night. The next morning at 3 am we moved on across the “Ruhestein”, the watershed between the rain-drenched (130 in/yr) eastern part of the Black Forrest were we lived, and the fertile Rhein valley. We walked 22 km (14 miles) to Kappelrodeck, Hans and I barefoot because we had no shoes, to a farm where we traded our goods. We got some 140 pounds of potatoes, fruit and vegetables. By then it was almost noon and we started our trek back. While progress in the valley was fairly good, things got really slow climbing up some 10 miles to the “Ruhestein”. Luckily, that day there was a farmer who put a pair of oxen to work, trailing a bunch of ropes for us and other “Hamsterers” to hang onto, helping them to move their handwagons up the steepest part of the climb. Down the other side it was easier, 5 miles back to Obertal and then another 5 miles to Baiersbronn. We got back home just before curfew at midnight, an exhausting 21 hour, 33 mile barefoot trek. The trip added several new layers to the callused soles of Hans’s and my feet.The next day we had to start preserving our food. All fruit was sliced and air-dried. For that we took the doors off the hinges and covered them with the fruit slices to dry outside on the grassy patch in front of the house. After the drying, the unpainted doors had a negative leopard pattern with light spots where the fruit slices had been and sun tan around them. Carrots, potatoes and beets were stored in a sand bed in the basement. Cabbage was shredded, salted and fermented into sauerkraut in a big ceramic jar, eggs were stored in silicone gel in another earthen jar, and bread was air-dried. We had no refrigerator, and only glass jars with lids, but without rubber gaskets which then rendered them useless (all rubber had been reserved for tire production for the army).We did the trip twice more during that summer. On one of the trips we found another friendly farmer who too was trailing half a dozen ropes behind his tractor for people to hang on and get pulled up the mountain for a few miles. His tractor had a “Holzvergaser” (wood chip gasifier) that generated carbon monoxide by partially combusting wood chips in a man-size vessel mounted on the side of the vehicle. The monoxide was then burned to carbon dioxide in the engine, generating just enough power to pull the whole convoy up the hill.My dad had a tough summer as well. During the last days of fighting in April of 1945 he was with a few other soldiers on the south-shore of the Danube River in Ulm. The Americans were on the north shore. My father was happy to see them, so he stood up and waved to them across the river. Next thing, the Americans trained their mortars on him and he jumped back into the trenches, barely surviving the attack. A short time later his unit was overrun and he ended in a POW camp in St. Avold in Lorraine, France. The Americans were mean to the officers, ignorant about the difference between the regular army and the SS-stormtroopers. My dad was regular army, but the Americans gave all of them their Holocaust special. They fed them 4 course dinners where, e.g., the fish course was a single sardine that had to be divided between 8 people. They made them sleep under the clear sky, no tents or other shelter. Luckily, it was a dry and warm summer, so they survived. My father weighed 210 pounds going into camp and 98 pounds when he was discharged 7 months later.Things got better when my father came back from the POW camp in November of 1945. As a former officer, dad had to register and report every Saturday to the police station in Baiersbronn. Hans and I were with him one day when Hans saw a sign on the way out where the new administration was looking for “Applicants with business education”. Dad applied and just a few weeks later got a job with the “Preiskontrollbehoerde” (price control agency) in the newly established regional administration. He got a 98 cc motorbike as the official vehicle. His job was to visit shops and businesses and control that they adhered to the fixed prices set by the authorities. But his main concern was how to feed the family. So, he always brought a brown bag with him when he checked the local butcher or baker. He told them “I am not corruptible, but I have to feed my family with 3 small children”. Depending on the “crimes” he discovered, the bag got filled, more or less, with food. Once he brought back 4 pounds of lard, an exceptionally good day. At home, we cut it all up into little cubes and rendered it on the stove. The greaves tasted delicious with some salt, and the grease was a welcome change from frying potatoes without any fat. We didn’t mind that the grease was more like wax and stuck to the roof of our mouths.Here ends the WW2 story and what it was like for me to grow up during that time in Germany."Copyright (c) 2015 by Klaus Schatz, not for reproductionHope you enjoyed reading this, I sure did. :-) War sucks...EDIT: My daughter and I traveled this summer with my father to see this area where he grew up, and many of the landmarks that he describes in his memoirs. Here is a picture of the elementary school he attended with his brothers:This is one of the main forest trails that they used (not paved back then):The town of Kappelrodeck that they did the very long hikes to:The little duplex house in Baiersbronn shared with Frau Müller:And a picture of a photo of my dad and his brother Hans going to school:All photos (c) Derek Schatz, not for reproduction

10 REASONS TO MOVE TO ASHEVILLEThere are a lot of great places to live in the United States, not to mention around the world. Why consider Asheville and the North Carolina mountains? Here are 10 reasons:1. Live in One of the USA’s Most Beautiful Settings: Asheville is in a valley at around 2200-2400 feet, but it’s surrounded by the highest and most beautiful mountains in the East, including Mt. Mitchell, highest peak east of the Rockies. You can be having a cappuccino Downtown and in 30 minutes be somewhere in nearly 2 million acres of wilderness.Two of the most visited National Park Service units in the country are here: the Blue Ridge Parkway, which gets 14 to 22 million visitors a year, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which gets 11 million visitors a year, about an hour away. Plus, there are two huge national forests, Pisgah (513,000 acres) and Nantahala (531,000 acres) and many state and local forests and parks.You can do just about anything outdoors. There are more than 50 golf courses around Asheville, 4,000 miles of trout streams, 1000s of miles of hiking trails, rock climbing, white water rafting on the Nantahala and other rivers, several snow ski resorts, about 400 waterfalls (250 in the Pisgah National Forest alone), many ziplines, mountain biking, gem mining and more.Plus, right in Asheville is the amazing Biltmore Estate – 8,000 acres of gorgeous parkland and gardens, with the largest private home in America and the country’s most-visited winery. With a relatively inexpensive annual pass, you can visit and enjoy the estate any day of the year.2. Enjoy Our Four Seasons Climate: With elevations from around 2,000 to 6,700 feet, the Asheville area is literally one of the coolest places in the Southeast. Temperatures here are 10 to 15 degrees lower than in the lowlands, which makes a huge different in comfort. Spring is green and delightful. Fall is glorious with the changing leaf colors and crisp days and cool nights. Summers can be warm and a little humid, but anytime you want to escape you can hop in the car and drive to a mountain top. At the highest elevations, it only rarely reaches 80 degrees even in July. Winters do see some snow, around a foot in Asheville to more than five feet on some surrounding peaks, but compared to the Northeast or Midwest, winters are moderate and not too long.3. Dig Asheville’s Amazingly Vibrant Downtown: Downtown Asheville is active day and night, packed with visitors and locals. On a summer weekend around Pack Square you can hardly walk. Parking lots are full.From the mid-20th century until the 1980s Downtown Asheville was a dead zone, but in the last 30 or 35 years it’s been transformed into one of the most vibrant small cities in the U.S. with hundreds of restaurants, clubs and bars.And it’s virtually all local and independent – for instance you can walk through most of Downtown and find a couple of dozen coffee shops but not a single Starbucks (though there are some Starbucks around). There are only a few big chain outfits Downtown, including some chain hotels.Downtown has several dozen condominiums developments, with hundreds of condos priced from the $200s to well over a million. In and around Downtown, many within walking distance of the heart of Downtown, are vibrant neighborhoods with houses and apartments in all price ranges.4. Choose the Lifestyle You Want: If a condo or apartment in Downtown Asheville isn’t your cup of tea, never fear. The Asheville area has all sorts of homes and places to live, in all price ranges. Safety is important, and it’s good to know that crime rates in Asheville and Western North Carolina are generally far below national levels.Among Asheville’s long-established neighborhoods are tony Biltmore Forest, developed in the early 20th century from a part of the Biltmore Estate, and Lakeview in North Asheville, set around a private lake.Also in North Asheville are Montford, the city’s “B&B District,” and serene and lovely hundred-year-old neighborhoods such as Grove Park, Chestnut Hill and Kimberly, where many of the homes are on the National Register of Historic Places. Or, look for more affordable options in West Asheville, formerly a blue-collar section that has become Asheville’s hipster neighborhood. The Enka-Candler and Leicester areas are the new growth areas of Buncombe County for more affordable housing. An up-and-coming area for creative types is the River Arts District, where hundreds of artists and crafters have studios, and plans are afoot for lofts and other housing.If you prefer a planned subdivision, the area has many, gated and not, including the 1,000-acre mixed-used Biltmore Park in South Asheville, Biltmore Lake in the Enka-Candler area, with some 1,100 homes, townhomes and condominiums. Look north at the upscale Reynolds Mountain, Pinebrook Farms, Maple Trace in Weaverville and French Broad Crossing in Madison County. In Hendersonville, you’ll find developments starting in the $100s and going to over a million, including Kenmure, Cummings Cove and Carriage Park.Perhaps you want a mountain cabin and a few acres of land for gardening and organic farming, or to keep your horses, goats, cattle, llamas or bison. In Buncombe County, tracts of land in the 25-acre range are asking an average of around $17,000 and acre, but the farther out you go the lower the price of land. Overall, undeveloped land in Western North Carolina sells for an average of round $7,500 an acre.Likewise, homes in Buncombe County have a median sales price of about $300,000, or around $190 to $200 per square foot, but in adjoining Madison County the median sales price is about $220,000 or $160 a square foot and in Haywood County the median sales price is under $200,000 or about $150 a square foot. With only a few exceptions, such as Highlands and Cashiers, the farther you are from Asheville, the lower the housing costs.If you’re looking for a retirement community, the Asheville area has many “active 55+ communities” including Beaverdam Run, Viewpointe and Creekside in North Asheville, Crowfields and Hills at Avery Creek in South Asheville, Brigadoon in Candler (Asheville West) and Blue Ridge Villas in Hendersonville. The area also has several large, high quality retirement communities with full continuum of care options, including the Givens Estate complexes and Deerfield.5. Eat and Drink Like You’re in a Big City: For a small city (the population in the city limits is around 93,000 and in the county 260,000), Asheville has an amazing selection of restaurants, bars and nightlife. A new restaurant opens just about every week. With more than 600 restaurants in the Asheville area, you can eat at a different spot every night for two years, and then you have the food scene at all the quaint mountain towns around Asheville to explore – Hendersonville, Black Mountain, Waynesville, Weaverville, Highlands, Bryson City, Brevard and more.Food is happening in Asheville’s River Arts District, at 12 Bones, Bull & Beggar, Vivian and elsewhere, not to mention other parts of Asheville. Around and near Pack Square and along Biltmore Avenue has become a hot dining area. Rhubarb and Benne on Eagle are among newer spots there, adding to all the popular places that have been there awhile, like Cúrate, Limones, Wicked Weed, Chestnut and Posana.The so-called South Slope south of Patton Avenue has Cultura, Buxton Hall Barbecue, Storm Rhum Bar and Bistro, and a growing number of brewpubs. In fact, the South Slope is now known as Asheville’s craft brewing district. Asheville was voted #1 Beer City in America for four straight years in an online poll by Imbibe magazine and named one of five top beer cities by Forbes. The Asheville area now has about 50 craft breweries and brewpubs (around 30 in the Downtown area alone), more than some large cities, and more are coming. Nearly every serious restaurant has a long list of local beers on tap, and increasingly you’ll also find artisan hard cider, sake and even upscale moonshine. National craft brewer Sierra Nevada has opened its Eastern brewing center near Asheville (Mills River), and New Belgium (in late 2019 acquired by Australia-based Lion Little World Beverages), located its second national brewery and distribution at the edge of the River Arts District. There are several brews tours and cruises, plus a Pubcycle – 13 people pedal around to various breweries.Elsewhere in Downtown there’s Red Ginger, Zambra, Chai Pani, Table, Bouchon, Strada, Mayfel’s, Salsa’s, Isa’s Bistro, The Market Place, The Greenhouse ... the list goes on and on.West Asheville is still the hipster district, and lots of restaurants and bars, such as Jargon, BimBeriBon, Foothills Butcher Bar, Isis, Archetype, Gan Shan West, WALK, Pizza Mind, plus old standbys like The Admiral, Universal Joint, Sunny Point, Rocky’s Hot Chicken Shack, Westville Pub and others.North Asheville is seeing a bunch of new spots such as Jettie Rae’s along with well-established favorites like Nine Mile (also with a West Asheville and South Asheville location), Vinnie’s, Plant, Avenue M and others.Other top restaurants: Dining Room at Inn on Biltmore Estate and Fig Bistro, Corner Kitchen, Red Stag Grill and Rezza in the Biltmore Village area. For steak, the local outpost of Ruth’s Chris Steak House is the red meat leader, but dozens of other restaurants serve up great beef.Speaking of beef, try the big, inexpensive cheeseburgers at Storm Rhum, Farm Burger, Avenue M, Tupelo Honey, Early Girl, Rankin Vault, Foothills Butcher Bar and Pack’s Tavern to name a few. Famed H&F Burger opened its first location outside Atlanta on Biltmore Avenue in Downtown in December 2019.The prevailing food ethos in Asheville is farm-to-table, natural, organic, Southern with a local twist.However, you can also enjoy Korean, Thai, Indian, Cuban, Brazilian, French, German, Italian, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Mexican (there are around 70 Mexican places here, of all varieties and hyphenations, including more than 40 authentic taquerias), Lebanese, Ethiopian, Nepalese, Mediterranean or whatever your heart and stomach desire.Note: Due to Covid pandemic, some restaurants and bars have only limited hours or may be closed on some days. Check locally.6. Take Advantage of the Booming Economy: In recent years, Asheville has been near the top of all cities in North Carolina in job creation and near the bottom in unemployment. The Asheville region’s $20 billion economy is diversified, standing on several legs: With a roster of new hotels, resorts and motels, some 50 B&Bs and inns, the draw of Great Smokies and Blue Ridge Parkway and the great outdoors, not to mention the nationally known Biltmore House and winery, Asheville’s tourism and hospitality industry is one of the strongest in the South. With a population approaching half a million in the five-county Metropolitan Statistical Area, Asheville is the commercial hub of the region, with a powerhouse wholesaling and retailing sector. Asheville is also the medical, legal and financial center of Western North Carolina, and it’s an appealing place for physicians, dentists, attorneys and other professionals to practice.The creative economy is a big part of Asheville’s dynamic, with thousands of working artists, crafters, writers and musicians living and work here. Even manufacturing has not been left out. Although the number of manufacturing jobs here has fallen as has been the case nationwide, still 9% of Asheville-area jobs are in manufacturing.Again, the pandemic is having an impact on Asheville, especially its hospitality and tourisms industries.7. Explore Your Creative Side: Art and especially craft art have been keys to what Asheville has become. Nobody knows exactly how many working artists there are in and around Asheville, but it’s estimated that there are several thousand potters, painters, sculptors, glass blowers, fiber artists and others. They’re concentrated in the River Arts District, in West Asheville and in areas around Asheville such as Penland School near Burnsville, which is perhaps the best crafts school in the country.There are around 50 art and crafts galleries in Asheville alone, about the same number as in Atlanta. Asheville was named the #1 and #2 (in different years) small arts city in American by AmericanStyle magazine, along with places like Santa Fe and Sarasota.There are other creative workers here, too: MovieMaker magazine named Asheville the #1 town to live and work in as an independent moviemaker. Asheville has a thriving amateur and professional theatre scene. There are at least 100 museums in the region, including the Asheville Art Museum, which reopened in late 2019 after a two-year expansion and total renovation, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, dedicated to preserving the history and ideals of the radical experimental college that made a name for itself in abstract impressionist art, modern dance, literature and avant garde thinking from 1933 to 1957, and even a museum focused on the great art of the pinball arcade, the Asheville Pinball Museum.8. Live in Harmony with History and Historic Architecture: In the South, Asheville rivals Savannah and Charleston for architecture and arguably has a wider variety of building styles than those cities. It was a resort area for wealthy Low Country South Carolina and Georgia planters in the 19th century.Then came the building of Biltmore House, the largest private home in America, in the 1890s, with great architects, artisans and many hundreds of skilled workers, who moved on to the construction of thousands of new homes and commercial buildings in the booms of the early 20th century. The bust of the Great Depression stopped building and reconstruction until the 1950s, leaving most of the Art Deco and other architectural masterpieces untouched.Thus, Asheville has a large inventory of historical buildings. Asheville has more Art Deco buildings than any city in the Southeast except Miami Beach. Prime examples are Asheville City Building, First Baptist Church, Asheville High School and the S&W Cafeteria Building.But there also are many other styles such as All Souls Episcopal Cathedral in Biltmore (Romanesque Revival) and Basilica of St. Lawrence on Haywood St. (Spanish Baroque Revival), plus beautiful old homes the late 19th and early 20th century, with hundreds of examples each of Craftsman style (Arts and Crafts), Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, Tudor Revival and the pebbledash stucco English style of Richard Sharp Smith.9. Get Your Liberal Fix: Get your liberal on in Asheville. It is one of the most progressive small cities in the South. Asheville went heavily for President Obama in 2008 and 2012 and for Hilary Clinton in 2016. In 2020, it voted heavily for Joe Biden. The local register of deeds, Drew Reisinger, was the first public official in the South to hand out applications for same-sex marriage. The majority of political positions in Asheville/Buncombe are held by Democrats.PETA once named Asheville the most vegetarian-friendly city in the country. Yoga Journal called it one of 10 “fantastically yoga-friendly destinations.” The local NPR station, WCQS, now a part of Blue Ridge Public Radio, gave away “Cesspool of Sin” tee shirts, proudly celebrating the comment of a Charlotte-area conservative politician about Asheville.On the other hand, if you’re more on the conservative or libertarian side, you’ll find plenty of like-minded souls in the mountains around Asheville, along with back-to-the-earth organic types. Much of Western North Carolina was settled by the Scots-Irish, who are notoriously independent-minded.Whether you’re left, right or just don’t care, you can find your place in Asheville and Western North Carolina. Fact is, most locals don’t give a hoot what your politics are, as long as you don’t try to impose your views on them.10. Be Prepared for a Friendly Welcome: Everybody says that about just about every place. But in the case of Asheville and Western North Carolina, it’s actually true. Be forewarned, though: At first, you may think that’s not accurate, because the old-time mountain people here sometimes tend to be standoffish to newcomers.But, take our word for it, they’ll warm up to you.The diversity of people from all over the country and the world who have moved here, especially over the past 20 or 30 years, adds an extra layer of welcome. Among your neighbors, you’re almost certain to find someone from “back home,” whether home is New York, California, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia or Mexico, Germany, Canada, U.K., Ukraine, France or elsewhere.An eclectic mix of people creates the Asheville and Western North Carolina vibe – old hippies, young hipsters, retirees, tourists, students, artists, eccentrics, New Agers, the LGBTQ+ community, plus mountain people, most from Scots-Irish backgrounds who first came to this part of the country in the 1700s and 1800s.