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

I grew up in an American colony; the Canal Zone. We had our own schools and were taught U.S. curriculum and about the U.S. I was a rabid nationalist. I had never lived in the U.S. until I went to college but had visited it. Ever since coming to the U.S. I slowly became more and more liberal and less and less nationalistic. The myths I was taught about the U.S. did not withstand my experience of the country.

Everything is so spread out and car centric. Our towns and cities are concrete jungles with massive amounts of parking lots that are rarely used. It’s very hard to live where you can walk to a grocery store. We are a nation of building dwellers using giant vehicles to take us from one building to another one. And the food; massive amounts of added sugar and fruit that is tasteless. Addicted to crappy fast food, lonely, and under exercised. Major changes are desperately needed.

Isn't that the plot of Jack Reacher?

> It’s very hard to live where you can walk to a grocery store.

Very hard seems like an exaggeration. More expensive, maybe, but millions of low-income people also do it.

I didn't have a car for most of my twenties, and the majority of my social group didn't either. Living in a more spread out area of the US is a choice-- one that comes with benefits, but still a choice.

I think you’re getting a bit too caught up with wether it’s possible to walk to the grocery store for most Americans.

I think you can agree that in most places, if you are walking to get groceries, you are either living in a well to do area, or you are forced to because you can’t afford a car, and it isn’t a pleasant experience.

I’ve lived in Florida, Kansas, Minnesota, and Indiana and visited over 40 states. Except in a few places my experience is that most people don’t live within walking distance of a car. Well, let me be more precise. Those who do live within walking distance to a grocery store tend to not have a pleasant enough or safe enough route to walk there to do so on a regular basis. Traversing a giant parking lot with a bunch of car drivers unaccustomed to pedestrians is unpleasant.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2015/august/most-us-hou...

"Hard to walk to the grocery store where you live" isn't the same thing as "hard to live where you can walk to the grocery store".

If you count entire cities as "well to do areas" then I suppose I agree.

Yeah my comment only really applies if you can choose the region of the country you live in. I don't really know what it's like in e.g. Indiana, so I trust your judgement on it.

The number of cities where that is the case are a distinct minority.

And no it isn’t the same thing, but that was what parent comment was communicating. If people assume you are poor because you aren’t driving then you live in a place where you can’t walk to get groceries, in a practical sense, because clearly for any normal person the trade offs are prohibitive.

I've lived in three different US cities and in each, walking to get groceries was normal and not challenging.

I made my reply assuming the parent comment meant literally what they said. If you are reading another meaning into it, that's fine and I don't disagree. But they also don't contradict my comment, so why frame it like an argument?

They didn’t technically contradict your comment but I also didn’t feel like you were giving it a charitable reading either.

I find it odd that you’re asking why I’m framing it as an argument as though an argument wasn’t already framed.

I do love living in New Orleans, either this or Brooklyn are the only real cities for me here. I need to be able to walk to a grocery store. I'm privileged to have lived here for 6 years, and the only reason I recently got an old truck, was to evacuate in case of a hurricane, and we didn't even evacuate during ida. The sidewalks are torn to shit, the streets are full of holes. I'm quite certain that the streets are never fixed because they wouldn't have enough cops to keep people from driving drunk. The city hall sign has been broken for 4 years, the lights don't work in some of the letters and it just reads "ity all" at night. It's illegal to be fully nude in SF these days, but NOLA still has a fully naked bike ride. This place can feel like burning man or joshua tree, but with toilets and electricity. Except for during hurricanes, then its exactly like burning man. I went to the bar next door during ida to find a couple fucking at the bar and open bottles of lube softly lit up with a dark orange glow from the 3 candles that dimly lit my favorite bartenders face as he asked about whether my house got badly damaged or not. The architecture is very old and very unique, actually its very european and feels quite distinct from the architecture in boston/nyc. I don't know a single person in tech here, everyone has some sort of creative endeavor and makes money through a hodge podge of sources. I live next to a 24 hour gay bar, and across the street from a supermarket, next to a vet, and caddy corner from a pharmacy. I never have a reason to leave my block, and this neighborhood boasts the most dense concentration of trans/queer people I've ever encountered.

The city boasts a strong spiritual history, which I sense, causes people to come here to either flourish, or get spit out. There's not much in the way of hiking/mountains around here, and the most beautiful natural environments are in the swamp amongst the gators and pelicans dancing through the soft and grassy patches of muddy land dotting the waters edge. There are no other cities I really like visiting within an hour. It's a bright blue dot in a fire-red state. Car-jackings are up 550% over last year, and the particular circumstances by which someone killed someone with a machete at the gas-station down the street from my house, I'm sorry to say, were unsurprising.

Having said that, I can't live the rest of my life not having *lived* outside of the US. I'll be moving to Berlin at some point, because that's the closest city that felt like it feels here. The food is cheaper, you can find Indian food, and there are more languages spoken. The government there doesn't feel like some morally corrupted festering cesspool of civil indifference and political myopia. Despite everything I love about this place, and that I'm quite certain I'll retire here, I'm eager to GTFO while I still feel young, to experience what its like to feel young in a place more free than the farce I've been raised to believe. I have friends in Berlin, and though German is pretty hard to speak well, I'm up for the challenge.

Okay, fair-- I guess I just think it's important to be clear that although most Americans choose to live in sprawling places, if you're newly arriving at the US, it's not strictly necessary. Many, many immigrants choose walkable places, since getting a drivers license, car, etc. are expensive and inconvenient startup costs.

I don't at all disagree that most of the US is not walkable. Both these things can be true at the same time, but I felt the literal statement of the parent comment was incorrect, so I corrected it.

Yeah that’s something I can definitely agree with.

And I really should apologize, I think some of my own frustration was taken out on you there. I personally would really rather not own a car, but outside of the northeast, it’s very impractical to do so.

New Orleans is a wonderful city. Berlin does seem like a great option to live for a couple years-- the biggest problem being that it's arguably too appealing to expats. I'd also recommend Valparaíso, Chile as a good Berlin alternative if you want to try Latin American life for a while.

I lived in Kreuzburg when it began gentrifying. I lived near the Kotti. I liked the area and have a love/hate relationship with Berlin. May Day in Kreuzburg was interesting. I got an appointment to see a dermatologist in Berlin in one day. I had no German health insurance or travel insurance. The whole thing, including medication, cost me around 30 euros. Their health system is much more sane than ours. In summer go to the lakes in the eastern part of the city. You’ll see whole families stripping in front of everyone and going for a swim. Definitely a different experience. Good luck!

Yeah the nude sunbathing grannies and grandpas in city public parks are certainly a trip, but the Germans are so much more practical and grown up about these things.

I could also see myself in Mexico City since I already speak Spanish pretty fluently, and have far more friends who expatriated there, but I really wanted to learn Russian and Berlin has much better resources for foreign language instruction.

Wow, thank you for the warning to never go near New Orleans