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

I've done it, and it was one of the best decisions of my life.

WHERE: I'm Australian, moved to LA when I was 18 and lived there for 15 years. Then, I moved from Los Angeles to Germany (Duesseldorf), and then to Vienna, Austria.

WHAT SACRIFICE: No more In 'n Out Burger, no more decent Mexican/TexMex food, no more LA food trucks. These are literally the only things I miss about the USA. Literally every other aspect of life has improved massively by leaving the USA - healthcare, food, social life. For the first 4 years I walked to work, ffs. Now I ride a bicycle in combination with the best public transportation options in the world (Austria, Vienna).

GAINED: I've completely lost the brain-dead nationalist mentality that had infected me in my earlier life, I've gained Immense amounts of respect for humanity, I've learned German, I've experienced professional software and hardware development away from Silicon Valley standard practices, and I get to see the USA from outside the decadent, rose-colored bubble from which it is usually experienced. I honestly wish I'd left sooner - every time I go back I'm reminded just how much of a shithole the USA really is ..

Plus, living and loving in Europe is just great. There is no greater joy than a trip through the Balkans for a week adventure, or maybe a jaunt to Spain or southern France. Just being able to travel an hour in any direction and being immersed in absolutely foreign culture is a joy like no other. Definitely a great way to ground oneself.

EDIT: The weather was pretty good in LA. But, still: Americans.

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.

> 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 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.