Okay, this is a really cool town. If I had the money, and no residency considerations, I’d choose this over nyc in a heartbeat. NYC is the only remotely comparable town I can think of. But london has better architecture, better city design, and better public transportation. Plus I like the accent. On the other hand, everything is incredibly expensive, and this city sleeps. Or at least the part I’m in does. <\/p>\n
London is compact, liberally dotted with parks, and sometimes more than dotted. There are large statues and monuments all over. Buildings that you’d think are monuments, but serve more mundane purposes. There seems to be a 4 story minimum building height, with no real upper limit in site. Public transit goes everywhere. The suburbs are still banal. The boundary between urban growth and pastoral areas is shockingly abrupt to my US experience. I haven’t seen a single story house anywhere. At all. Lots of litttle side streets. And contruction, reconstruction, or deconstruction everywhere. You see buildings that have to be hundreds of years old next to one that was clearly built sometime in the last 20. Often times sharing walls. That parts a little chaotic. Some of the streets are paved in brick, others with asphalt, slate, whatever. Ditto for the sidewalks. I have nearly been killed at least 10 times by my aggressive pedestrian reflexes combined with traffic coming from a direction I don’t expect traffic to come from. Getting used to this hasn’t been entirely good for me, because it’s screwed up even my sense of east v west, and furthermore, if this were to still be in place when I got to the US, I’d risk being roadkill again. Though, I have to say London drivers are the most aggressive drivers I’ve seen so far.<\/p>\n
The food has been pretty good, despite the expectations I’ve been given. I’ve been selective. Veganism is easier here than in chicago, harder than sf or minneapolis. But really, it all depends on your planning, forethought, etc, etc. I could use more of that. =) <\/p>\n
The locals are, on the whole, polite, and very non-intrusive, but friendly once conversation is initiated. Yeah, I think I’d enjoy living here. But that sure ain’t in the cards. =)<\/p>\n
If I ever have mone money than I know what to do with, I might come back here. But more likely, I’d go looking for an equally cool place with a better exchange rate. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Okay, this is a really cool town. If I had the money, and no residency considerations, I’d choose this over nyc in a heartbeat. NYC is the only remotely comparable town I can think of. But london has better architecture, better city design, and better public transportation. Plus I like the accent. On the other … Continue reading “London: My observations”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}