Ask HN: Who has moved from the U.S. to Europe?

I'm just outside London, moved here to marry my English wife from Vegas. I work part time doing basic IT for a US law firm due to health issues after heart surgery, and Yankee dollars are worth jack shit here - I'm not making serious tech industry money, but over here it's barely enough to survive on.

Housing is always smaller than you'd get in (at least the western) US for the same price, and I'd bet that's true pretty much everywhere in Europe. Speaking the same language is useful, but Covid has made it hard to make friends or do much.

Despite its reputation, I find that Europe is far more provincial than the US when it comes to food - a lot of stuff you think of as ubiquitous in the West will be "foreign" food and harder 48 to find. (And if you like tacos, stay on that side of the pond.)

Benefits: it's a lot quieter and generally less dangerous than the US. The NHS is absolutely amazing and you'll never want to deal with the American system ever again. People tend to be less aggressive.

From an entrepreneurial standpoint I'm sure it's much harder to get up and running, but I'm old enough to not care anymore. If I could work legally for a UK startup or tech firm doing basic dev I'd be happy enough and well-paid enough to never feel the urge to start my own ragged little thing again.

It is colder in most of Europe than the US, in my experience (not just living here but traveling extensively in my life). If you're a Cali kid, you will miss the sunlight, especially in the winter. It's like a fucking Joy Division video here from October through April. :-D

I think if my wife and I could afford to split our time between here and Vegas, we would. But that's just not in the cards right now.

But hey, at least they're not on the brink of civil war here and the curry is good.

> brink of civil war

I think that might be overstated.

> NHS is absolutely amazing

I've read and heard that for a non-emergency appointments, the wait could sometimes be months. Is that also overstated?

> It's like a fucking Joy Division video here from October through April. :-D

So people used to the Pacific Northwest would fit right in.

> Despite its reputation, I find that Europe is far more provincial than the US when it comes to food

That might be an external reputation, but it wouldn't be one that Europeans would have. People forget that Europe isn't a country, but a collection of different countries, all with long histories, and long histories means a lot of regional differences even _within_ countries.

> It is colder in most of Europe than the US,

I think people forget how far north Europe is: Paris is further north than Seattle. For how far north everything is, Europe is positively _balmy_!

> It's like a fucking Joy Division video here from October through April.

And that's why, especially in Northern Europe, a lot of the culture is around, for want of a better term, coziness: it's only a little to do with the cold, and everything to do with the dark.

The wait is really months.

Also the quality of the NHS is pretty bad. The NHS being great is the usual state-backed propaganda you can hear in a lot of other European countries to justify spending all that tax money on healthcare.

Just from my personal experience: They skipped some safety measures they were supposed to follow during a birth delivery, they dealt terribly with one of my newborns after birth, they recommended removing 4 teeth of a 2 year old (we went private and all his teeth are fine and have been properly cleaned), they said that what we thought was a cavity was just a "discolouration" (it was a cavity, we dealt with it privately).

Luckily most decent employers pay private insurance (BUPA is very popular).

Seattle is further south than Paris, so make of that what you will!

> I've read and heard that for a non-emergency appointments, the wait could sometimes be months. Is that also overstated?

Depends on where you are. I lived in the UK until last August and am now in the US. When I lived in London and Oxford I found the wait times to be very quick - in Oxford I could get non-emergency appointments the same day, possibly due to the high number of GPs and University hospitals. In London it was same week for everything I ever had an issue with. I believe in the less well-off areas, especially in the North of the country, there are areas with far lower staff numbers so the waiting time inflates. Worst-case scenarios in worst-case areas do have multiple-month waiting times nowadays.

I moved to UK from Europe and I wouldn’t really say NHS is convenient. It is universal healthcare and you are not facing a bankruptcy most of the time in case of a health condition. Preventative and diagnosis treatments are so slow. In case I need to see a GP, i must try reaching them at 8ish in the morning otherwise they will simply ignore you and tell, call tomorrow.

> Also the quality of the NHS is pretty bad. The NHS being great is the usual state backed propaganda you can hear in a lot of other European countries.

Not really. The NHS itself and the various NHS trusts have been continuously drained of funding over the past few decades. The NHS runs on a shoestring.

If you want things to improve, Tory cuts need to be rolled back.

The wait for non emergency treatment on the NHS can certainly be long, and COVID has made that worse. But if you're a software developer you can afford to buy or be provided decent private cover to buy your way round the queue - and since the NHS is there to cover all the difficult cases, the private insurance is much cheaper and far less likely to engage in scammy billing.

Private health insurance is a bit of a scam for anything serious in the UK though - they don't have the ability to do anything out of the ordinary or complex and send you to the NHS hospitals when they are out of their depth.

> at least they're not on the brink of civil war here

I realized that this answer might be pretty biased after reading this inaccurate statement

> For how far north everything is, Europe is positively _balmy_!

Thanks to the Gulf Stream. One potential risk of climate change is that if the circulation patterns are disrupted, our nice supply of warm water from the Atlantic might cease and it would actually get locally colder.

Yeah, unclear how this is relevant to the US->Europe topic.

Moving from LA to Minneapolis will be depressing, moving from Rome to London will too.

> I'm just outside London

> ... I'd bet that's true pretty much everywhere in Europe.

I think those two statements are very far apart.

> if you like tacos, stay on that side of the pond

I find it extremely hard to believe you can't find good tacos in London.

Last time I visited London and Paris I was overwhelmed by the variety of cuisines available. Probably the ubiquity of tacos in the US is replaced by food from every random tiny country you can think of.

Of course this isn't always applicable outside these 2 megacities; you're more likely to find more Turkish restaurants everywhere than Mexican ones everywhere in Europe.

The problem is that you have to go through a GP first, which has a budget and tends to be very conservative. Many GPS will try some silly experiments for months before writing a referral. But once you get a referral it’s reasonably quick. Many companies now offer health insurance with private GPs, which tend to be less unreasonable re: referrals.

Said that it is much worse than Germany or France. To this day I don’t understand the British obsession for a healthcare system that would be acceptable in a middle income country (say Russia or Mexico), but that’s clearly not what you’d expect in a developed country.

Latitude isn't everything. I grew up on a latitude that is probably relatively uninhabitable in Canada.

Are you able to make an appointment for a specific date or you actually have to call everyday to see if there are open slots?

> I think that might be overstated.

You think correctly, this is sensationalist nonsense. Maybe a group of 0.05% of the population are in a bubble thinking their riots about stuff will constitute a civil war but by no means is there any sizable group wanting to protest aggressively.

It's a pretty similar system in Germany and Sweden at least though (I haven't lived in France).

I moved from the UK to Germany right when I had to have surgery and the wait time was identical (scans were much quicker though as I lived right next to a student hospital).

The only year in which the NHS budget was cut in real terms was 97 or 98. Otherwise it has increased in real terms since 1980. Since 99, the NHS budget almost doubled.

It is increasing right now, the current plan (2018-2024) increases the budget by 3.4% in real terms every year.

> Despite its reputation, I find that Europe is far more provincial than the US when it comes to food - a lot of stuff you think of as ubiquitous in the West will be "foreign" food and harder 48 to find. (And if you like tacos, stay on that side of the pond.)

That’s because you are just outside London, and the UK bar London Zone 1 and 2 is the third world of gastronomy.

Oh for real I'd take London weather any day rather than MSP weather.

No context. Minneapolis is "hot like hell" in summer and "cold like hell" in winter.

London is mild and rainy but it's not too bad.

Indeed, peanut (or other nut) butter is nigh impossible to find across all of Europe.

I have no idea what you mean. I live in London where there's an abundance of different kinds of nut butter. I have been to many places in continental Europe, and even though the same abundance is not present everywhere, I never had an issue finding plenty.

Is it? Unless I'm reading the following wrong:

https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-...

The Netherlands may want to have a word with you :)

And honestly it is fairly common to find peanut butter in supermarket in most of Western Europe (at least), may not be good but it exists.

I think it is debatable if UK is really a European nation. US and UK are far closer in various dimensions than UK and any other European country.

It isn’t similar. As you mentioned, it’s much quicker to get a scan in Germany (or Italy or France), which is specular to saying it’s very hard to get referred for a scan in the UK.

Seeing specialists through the NHS is very hard. I’m giving you some examples from my past year:

- in the UK women deliver babies without being visited by a gynaecologist a single time, my partner had to pay for that.

- The NHS don’t provide paediatricians. We have to go to a private doctor.

- Getting a referral for an allergologist was taking ages, we had to take the baby to a private doctor.

All this cost in excess of 5000£. My insurance paid or will pay back that money, so it’s not a problem for me, but not everybody is insured here.

I would have spent 0€ in Germany or France for the same level of service.

> at least they're not on the brink of civil war here

lets see how much the Scottish want to get back into the EU

I like the NHS but it is a massive cash hole. I don't believe it could ever be fixed with more money - it's already the seventh largest employer in the world in a fairly small country. The issue is in its red-tape, middle-management inflation, and odd mix of both centralization and decentralization in regards to how the trusts are split up. I have a friend who runs a nursing ward in a major university hospital and they have something like four different data entry tools to get patients information because different GPs use different tools in and out of a specific trust. Communication runs over different tools. I once worked on a project for the NHS to do with flexible scheduling using agencies to bump admin/nursing teams when needed which consisted of a csv file, without a header or documentation, appearing in a folder that would then be consumed and with some guess work actioned. This isn't a crazy example of how the NHS works, I've seen worse, but the idea that an entire hospital functioned from this undocumented unknown csv file just made my mind blow.

I believe they release slots every morning. So it’s not possible to book for the next day. They always tell me call the next morning when I call around 9:30

>> Despite its reputation, I find that Europe is far more provincial than the US when it comes to food

> That might be an external reputation, but it wouldn't be one that Europeans would have. People forget that Europe isn't a country, but a collection of different countries, all with long histories, and long histories means a lot of regional differences even _within_ countries.

yes and no. You can absolutely notice that here in the south of Germany you simply don't get a few things that are from the north, or from the very close-by Austria, and I mean that in a way that you wouldn't believe North California is different than South California. Like.. whole restaurant chains that are virtually unknown on either side of the imaginary barrier, or stuff you can get in a supermarket or bakery. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what I can imagine the parent meant - it may just be 500km in the same country and it's completely different.

Pindakaas (Dutch for "peanut cheese", which you would call peanut butter) on the other hand is available everywhere, at least in the Netherlands. Then again, peanuts are available everywhere, just put them in a blender or use a high-speed mixer to make your own. I've been doing this for more than 20 years now since Sweden is one of those peanut butter free countries (at least here in the countryside it is). The advantage of make-your-own peanut butter is that the stuff will contain only what you put in there, nothing else.

Culturally the UK is definitely a European nation. I'm talking about the country as a whole, not about the (London) City which - like other financial centres - is part of the global financial nation no matter where it happens to be located. Politically the UK used to have a special connection to the USA (which made other Europeans sometimes refer to it as "Airstrip 1" or "the 51st state") but it is debatable whether this is still the case.

Everyone I visit in central europe/scandinavia asks me to bring Reese's cups with me.

Seattle is pretty mild compared to most of the northeast. Seattle, and heck, even Ketchikan, have milder winters than Minneapolis. My experience in Seattle is fairly similar to my experience in Lausanne, except the latter was further south and had a bit more snow.

Same for Eastern Europe. No abundance but every supermarket carries 2-3 brands including BIO peanut butter.

Thanks for the perspective. I just wanted to drop in to touch on one point...

> And if you like tacos, stay on that side of the pond.

Why are there no tacos in EU? I have noticed this in multiple places in Europe. The best I can figure, there is not a good supply of cheap chicken.

I honestly think there is an opportunity there. If someone can get a taco franchise in EU going I will pitch in for one location.