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 lived in Tokyo for 14 years, Singapore for 2, and Surabaya for 1.
I’ve never lived in my own country, and moving to rural Italy from Singapore was my entry into Europe. It felt completely different, but largely because it was the first time I hadn’t lived in a city in my life.
Adjusting to the very different speed of life was a bit weird, as well as the absolutely catastrophic state of Italian rural public transport, but otherwise relatively unchallenging.
Subsequently moving to Scotland was very interesting - once again I was in a city, but the sheer quantity of street crimes in Scotland was staggering - Friday nights (Fight night? wtf) were dangerous, and if you stood on a main street in any Scottish city between 12 and 3am you could see like police getting assaulted, massive fights, stabbings and so on.
As a young teenager I used to freely walk around tokyo all night without seeing anything similar, and even when I returned as an adult and did much more ‘night life’ type stuff I never saw anything similar.
Add to that things like regular house break-ins, people vandalising stuff in a way that they don’t in Singapore and Japan, car theft, and so on, it was pretty wild.
The only major upside was the huge quantity of readily available party drugs in Scotland - something which I love, but which carried death penalties in all 3 of the Asian countries I’ve lived in.