Also, the first class tickets for the train were totally worth it.
I just took a look at your post history to see the origin story to this, seems to me you ARE Lemmy?! Every other post I saw seems to be from you…
Yeah, Lemmy is basically just Flying Squid and The_Picard_Maneuver. The rest of us are bots and/or figment of their imagination.
Someone once said that emigrating is trading one set of societal issues for another. If you’re happy with the trade, awesome.
Good luck in your new homeland.
Hey, no crabs are allowed to leave this bucket!
Hey, congrats for taking that big leap, even if it is to the UK (having lived in a couple of places in Europe including over a decade in the UK, my opinion of the UK is pretty low).
It takes a lot of guts to take yourself out of the environment you know (with all it’s implicit expectations of “this is how people behave”) and move into a different environment were people don’t value the same things, expect the same or behave the same.
Good luck!
Thankfully, due to my British father and grandmother, I know some of the basics. But I still have a lot to learn. Thankfully I’ve got us registered with an NHS clinic (waiting to hear back from them) and just got our new phone numbers.
Yeah, it’s a bit of a headache to figure out all those details if you have nobody to help you, though generally you can figure out a lot of those things by talking to coworkers - as a saying from my country goes “Those who have a mouth can get to Rome”
However the “expectations” I was talking about are more the nitty gritty details of interacting with others in everyday life one isn’t really aware are social conventions (because everybody follows the same version of it as you do in your country, so one naturally thinks that’s just the way people behave in general) until moving to a different country and finding out those things aren’t actually universal.
Things like saying “it’s interesting” when an English person asks you your opinion about something is actually being very critical (you can literally use it as an insult), you’re supposed to stand on the right side of escalators if you’re not walking (especially in a Tube station) or that, unless indicated otherwise, you’re supposed to queue for things if there are other people waiting for it.
Figuring this kind of stuff out is actually quiet an interesting personal growth experience, IMHO.
Where do people not line up for something to wait for it?
It’s pretty common in most countries for things like waiting for the bus to not queue and in some countries people won’t even queue when the bus arrives and they’re trying to go in, and instead just try and jostle their way in.
Often it’s more like not respecting the sanctity of the line. Americans got the tradition of the queue from the Brits. It was a source of constant annoyance when I lived in Germany when people would cut the line and others just let them without objecting.
Welcome to Europe! I moved to Germany almost 20 years ago, and holy batflaps am I happy about that choice.
Good luck, I hope you and your child find the UK to be less shitty than America. :)
Having emigrated to France with my kids in 2017, I think you’re making a good decision.
Was this a similar move as with OP? Meaning you had preexisting ties to the country before moving?
actually no. when don the con got elected the first time, i saved up as much as i could, sold as much stuff as i could and just left. I was illegal in France for a while, but did eventually find a job that was willing to sponsor a visa for me. I had to go back to the states to get my visa issued, though, that took a few weeks. I’ve been here ever since, and yeah it’s fucking hard to leave my family back home in the states, it’s honestly much better to live here with my kids than there.
I didn’t know if England was the best choice, but right now I think Neptune is probably better than here.
Nice now flee to Netherlands. Yes you have to learn Dutch but you can use English in shops or so. Small price to pay to be part of a civilized country
A civilized country that voted the party of “Trump from Wish.com” into office. The Netherlands is also run by far right fuck nuts, the next four years are going to be very interesting down here below sea level to say the least. Better stay in the UK while labour is in charge.
Also unless you getting that nice expat salary it will be really difficult to find housing in the Netherlands as a fresh of the boat immigrant and you can forget about social housing.
I have a British passport, not an EU one unfortunately. Also, I barely made it through high school French, so I’m guessing I won’t be able to learn Dutch.
In my personal experience, learning Dutch as foreigner can only happen by a method akin to being pushed into the deep end of a wimming pool and learning to swim - in other words, you have to be in a situation were your only option is to know how to speak Dutch - and I say this as somebody who can speak 7 languages (though 2 of them are at a “just getting away with it” level).
That said, most Dutch speak excellent English and even the State (not the local but the central one) and the Banks will communicate with you in English if you want, so people can live in The Netherlands for decades without speaking Dutch (some of my Brit colleagues when I lived over there were like that).
The Netherlands is certainly a far safer place for a lesbian teenager than Britain and will remain so simply because seeing an sexual orientations as absolutely normal happens at the level of Dutch Society itself, to the point that their first large Far Right party was led by a guy who from the start openly admitted to being a homosexual.
Having also lived in Britain I would say they’re “complicated” when it comes to tolerance because unlike the Dutch, Brits are big on appearances and judging people, so tolerance its not a natural part of the social posture over there IMHO, whilst gedogen is something the Dutch are actually proud of.
I’m not worried about appearance. She dresses punky like a lot of kids here do. And she’s not trans, just a lesbian, so she will be much safer here than the U.S.
