Love By the Bay

Louise Rafkin of The San Francisco Chronicle reports on a Flint Expatriate who found love in San Francisco:

A flummoxed Chanda stood up, sat down and basically did a dance of confusion before accepting, though at first she hesitated to look at the ring. "It was so unexpected, I wondered if maybe it was a joke," she says. The supportive Orr community caught the drift and gathered in celebration.

Later that year, the two traveled to northern Germany to visit Jurgen's family in the small, conservative town in which he'd been raised. Despite their different backgrounds — Chanda is from Flint, Mich. — it was increasingly evident that both their values and families were incredibly similar. Flint, says Chanda, is as far from California woo-woo culture as is rural Germany. "But we are not so different," says the soft-spoken Jurgen.