I've always wanted to live in the Elizabethan period, in England of course. I probably would find it horribly smelly but the language and dress and sense of adventure and enterprise have always really appealed.

My only interest in time travel relates to music. I'd happily go back and see The Who in 1963, The Band in about 1970, Dylan in 1966 or so...The Clash in '77 or '78...

Luckily, to paraphrase many comics, as a white dude, I can time travel without concern.

Fin-de-[last] siècle Vienna

As a female, I'd not like to go backwards in time and be "someone's property"; I'd go for some future time when things (hopefully) are better.

I'm fine in this era. A while back I had some sort of infection that lasted about 9 weeks. I had trouble breathing, a cough, headaches, body aches, fever and more. Had two types of antibiotics and an inhaled steroid and a bronchial dilator. After I started the second round of antibiotics it was annoying and tiring but I could get on with my life. In most other times in history I would have been very ill for a couple of months at least. It may have killed me. Many eras sound like they would be interesting to live in but I would not like to go back to the way medical care use to be. I have always been quite healthy. I can't imagine what the lives of some of the people I know with chronic problems would have been like in the past.

I would like to have been born 10 years earlier. That is to say, I would like to have been 10 years older in the 1960s. I was born in 1959 and kind of missed the sixties, being too young to appreciate them.

I'm pretty obsessed with the late Victorian era mostly due to researching our house and neighborhood but as usually, it was only a great time if you were in the right class/race/gender. I live in a mostly restored area of 1860 to 1890 townhouses and it's a wonderful place to live but it's instructive to remember that pretty much only English, Scottish and German families were allowed to live here and the Irish, Italians and Czechs were forced to commute into the area to work as servants for the rich families or to work in the mills that those rich folk owned.

I agree with mightshould; if I had to stay female, this is unequivocally the best time to be living. But if I could just time travel, I'd go back to the late 1870s or 1880s. So much our contemporary culture was developing nascently then, and I'd really like to experience the sensory aspects of the events - like the great fairs, the seaside resorts, the happenings and spectacles - that at present I can only access through words.

First dynasty of Uruk, circa 2600 BCE.

The next one. Or maybe the one after that. I want spoilers.

Splunge...you do realize if you were ten years older in the 60's, you most likely would have been drafted off to Vietnam at some point, right? I was born in '58 and thank my stars I was too young to be drafted. In any case, the 60's didn't end until about '74 or so, so you got to enjoy some of it.

Questions like this have the unspoken assumption that one would also belong to the social class (usually the monied upper classes) that defined the awesome part of the era, and not the lower classes that kept the gears grinding in support of those upper classes. That concern aside, I, like Miko, would prefer to simply time travel and somehow be a close observer to the nascent technologies being developed throughout the late 1800's through the first half of the 20th century.

You are right about the implicit assumption, Thorzdad. For this question, I figure one could be male if one wanted as well. (Unless one were Elizabeth I it would be a lot less fun to be female in my favorite choice of era.)

If it was just for a few years rather than forever I'd love to spend some time in pre-discovery North America