Also, the first class tickets for the train were totally worth it.
Isn’t the UK Distopian in other bad ways? Like insane government surveillance and monitoring
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
[Edit] Most countries have pretty bad surveillance. America is unique in projecting bad things on other countries without having any self reflection.
https://aithority.com/news/top-10-countries-and-cities-by-number-of-cctv-cameras/
https://archive.is/2wN7a (Archived copy)
The UK isn’t great, but its not really an outlier compared to anywhere else.
China has at least 200 million cameras installed in the country. … other countries such as the United States and Germany have 50 million and 5.2 million CCTV Cameras each. The list goes on with other countries with more than 1 million cameras. The United Kingdom has 5 million CCTV cameras installed
In fact
The United States has 15.28 CCTV cameras every 100 individuals, followed by China with 14.36 and the United Kingdom with 7.5.
You know what it doesn’t have? People in power wanting to put queer people in conversion therapy or oppress them in other ways. Which is the main reason we moved.
My daughter isn’t trans, she’s a lesbian, but they won’t stop with trans people. They want to erase queerness in America.
We have our problems, but we haven’t just voted a literal fascist into power so we’ve got that going for us
America is a shithole. I got out in '17 and my quality of life has improved tenfold.
Feel free to not answer because this is identifiable info. However, how did you emigrate? Where to? Did you have a family with you or just yourself?
Admittedly, while I think America is a shit hole as well, It’s got to get pretty bad before I’ll be able to convince my wife. However, I’m trying to plan out our escape plan.
Not who you asked the question to, but I emigrated as well. We are very fortunate to have her mother’s side of the family here, so we’re living with them at the moment.
Sorting through all our life’s possessions and being forced to answer yes or no to ‘do we try to move this to our new home overseas’ was pretty tough.
The most challenging part was selling the house… We are still sitting on that, sadly. We have a great realtor (I hope), but currently we’re jobless and mortgage every month is gouging into our savings.
Thank god video games taught me to hoard funds for the OP items in late game 😅 dwindling fast, but couldn’t have done it without them.
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.
That said, most Dutch speak excellent English
That’s not true, not excellent English. Many speak enough to get by, except the elderly and the young, and some of them speak it well, fewer still excellently. Over four years, I’ve met probably a handful at most who could express their deepest thoughts and desires while pronouncing “th” correctly and their As not as Es.
Many banks won’t take you in if you don’t speak Dutch and it’s harder to find a job (this was in the news just recently, as it happens: nearly all international students are struggling in the job market because they generally don’t learn Dutch, despite there being so many vacancies). You can definitely get by with English, and I’ve heard of many people living here decades without learning Dutch too, but if you want to live well, that’s another thing altogether.
The good news is Dutch is easy if your mother tongue’s English or German but there is indeed a problem in the Randstad of it being hard to convince anyone to let you speak it with them, in part because they often overestimate how well they speak it. There’s a relatively famous quote from colonial Indonesia about how the Dutch colonisers would rather speak bad Indonesian than Dutch, which the Indonesians spoke fluently. I think it’s like a feedback effect with the reputation they have for knowing second languages.
Anyway, details details.
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.
Yes, and I am trading the societal issue of possibly having my daughter tortured for being queer for the one of that not happening.
