I’ve heard from a lot of expats who reluctantly have to be relocated to Europe that it could be difficult to adapt back to life in European cities again, some told me they got ‘’spoiled’ by the feeling of safety in Seoul, Tokyo Shanghai or like Hongkong, also the convenience such as accessibility to supermarkets, convenient stores etc. There could be more but that’s all I can recall.
So did you find it difficult or challenging once you go back to live in Europe, after experiencing Asian cities for several years, if not, i would be interested to know why as well.
I spent 15 years in Tokyo and moved to a German city with around 500k inhabitants. The change definitely took a while to get used to. I still miss japanese public transport more than 10 years later and adjusting to the different safety levels wasn’t easy. However it also has its upsides: I love not having to deal with earthquakes anymore. I love actually having space to breathe on the way to work in trains. I love that as a woman I don’t have to worry as much about creeps on public transport. The adjustment was difficult in the beginning but it got easier with time, as it does everywhere I guess.
This is very interesting cause im currently still in Japan and i’m planning on going to live in Germany, more precisely Dusseldorf because a lot of my friends don’t recommend me other cities lol… what im most worried about is safety but also cleanliness that i forgot to mention in my post
Yeah the cleanliness is…subpar. But honestly after a while you realize what things are actually important to your quality of life. And to me, whether or not there is graffiti and how clean the streets are are not factors that greatly influence how I feel on a day to day basis. Shure it would be nicer if cleaner, but the dirt doesn’t hurt me. The greater issues to me are cultural: the major culture shock came from how blunt Germans are and how impolite from a Japanesw view. And I say that even though I am originally German.
German big cities are dirty and vandalized. Different story in smaller ones, those actually tend to be very neat.
The other person mentioned that it’s not a factor for them, but for me personally it affects my overall mood and I’m still not used to it.
Yes it personally affects me too, lived in Paris before and that’s one of the reasons i left that city lol. Which is way im more considering Dusseldorf now over Berlin for example… And it’s not just streets or exterior infrastructures, im also a bit worried about the interior conditions of apartments. These major europeam cities have lots of historical buildings remaining which are beautiful of course but also naturally leads to not always renovated, i dunno how much of them are the case but yeah