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Travel Discussion
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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I posted earlier about having lived in both London and DC. You can't really meaningfully compare your experience vacationing in a place with living there. If you haven't had to work in a place, pay taxes there, hire a plumber, or try to find a decent school for your kid, you dont really know it. Most Americans would be horrified at the condition of rental apartments in the UK (run-down, no clothes dryers, no garbage disposals), much in the same way that Londoners would be horrified to discover the number of important US cities that are wholly inaccessible by public transit. Most Americans would also be frustrated by the need to be on hold for 40 minutes starting at 8 am to get one of the NHS appointment slots available that day at your local surgery, with its 10000 person patient docket. They would also be shocked to hear the NHS mammogram lady say, "See you in 4 years." On the flip side, Americans would also be pleasantly surprised when their NHS mammogram, scheduled for 10:30, actually takes place at 10:30, something that you could be sure wouldnt happen in the US.[/quote] All European cities have small apartments with few amenities - it comes with being old and crowded... why pick on London?[/quote] London is much bigger and more crowded than most European cities. And even more expensive. For people who have known London for a long time, what's changed in recent decades is significant population growth, in part driven by mass migration, which has added enormous pressures to the housing market and making everything much more expensive. The transit links are overburdened because there's more and more people crowded on the busses and trains. Even the NHS crisis is in part driven by the explosion in demand for NHS services by a growing population that is driven by migration. People are actually now finally allowed to state what was the obvious for a long time without being judged/shamed as racist or bigoted, but the tension remains there. The average house size for new builds in Britain has shrunk noticeably in the last 20 years in response to this so most of the new flats in London are tiny, as well as in the rest of the country. The list of complaints goes on. If you are well off or have privileged access to embassy resources, you are immune from much of this. I do still think London is a fantastic city but my tolerance for its quirks isn't what it was 20 years ago when it was a fairly different place. [/quote]
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