Also, the first class tickets for the train were totally worth it.
Still remember your post months ago asking for advice for moving. I’m happy it worked out for you and your family squid! Hope you guys can settle down soon (I’m sure there’s tons of paper work and other bullshit) and relax!
Hasn’t quite worked out yet. I still need to find a job (but I have interviews lined up) We came over a little early because we were worried that when the deportation start, everyone who can grab the first plane they came out of the US. We might never get out otherwise.
You’ve done right by your daughter. Good luck on the job search!
Thanks!
Wish I could help, but I’m not in UK. Nevertheless, I believe in you and keeping my fingers crossed that you find a job quickly.
I am optimistic. Thanks.
good to see you didn’t wait to find out, the Berlin wall went up overnight after all.
worried that when the deportation start, everyone who can grab the first plane they came out of the US
The logic is sound. Flights will be snapped up like pandemic loo roll.
That is definitely what I am expecting. Like everything else I am expecting in the next four years, I just hope I’m wrong.
The Nazi salute and the pardoning of all of those January 6th terrorists doesn’t give me much hope.
Hey, I’m in the same job hunting boat, but I’m in Norway! Good luck on your job quest 😊❤️
Good luck to you as well!
You’ve joined a time-honored tradition of fleeing fascist governments. o7
You did it!! Good on ya.
Your human deflated
And she rarely has any punctures.
that’s a good quality in offspring
On the other hand, piercings are cool. But she’s cool in other ways.
Good luck to you and your family, Squid. You took action!
Good luck, mate.
I wish you all the best. Be sure to stock up on tea when you’re settled.
The UK just gained several precious people. Good for them!
Lemmy will be okay if you don’t keep posting as much as you’ve been. Do whatever you need to do to set your family up there.
I didn’t know if England was the best choice, but right now I think Neptune is probably better than here.
It was my only choice. I have citizenship here. (Technically I am a “British passport holder” until I go to a citizenship ceremony and say God Save the King and I’m not a spy or something, but whatever.)
Better to pledge loyalty to a king who’s a figurehead than one with actual power like we have here.
Grats on finally making the move! I hope everything works out for you and that you found a beautiful place to live.
Nice now flee to Netherlands. Yes you have to learn Dutch but you can use English in shops or so. Small price to pay to be part of a civilized country
If you decide to do so please bring your own house, we don’t have many available at the moment
I have a British passport, not an EU one unfortunately. Also, I barely made it through high school French, so I’m guessing I won’t be able to learn Dutch.
In my personal experience, learning Dutch as foreigner can only happen by a method akin to being pushed into the deep end of a wimming pool and learning to swim - in other words, you have to be in a situation were your only option is to know how to speak Dutch - and I say this as somebody who can speak 7 languages (though 2 of them are at a “just getting away with it” level).
That said, most Dutch speak excellent English and even the State (not the local but the central one) and the Banks will communicate with you in English if you want, so people can live in The Netherlands for decades without speaking Dutch (some of my Brit colleagues when I lived over there were like that).
The Netherlands is certainly a far safer place for a lesbian teenager than Britain and will remain so simply because seeing an sexual orientations as absolutely normal happens at the level of Dutch Society itself, to the point that their first large Far Right party was led by a guy who from the start openly admitted to being a homosexual.
Having also lived in Britain I would say they’re “complicated” when it comes to tolerance because unlike the Dutch, Brits are big on appearances and judging people, so tolerance its not a natural part of the social posture over there IMHO, whilst gedogen is something the Dutch are actually proud of.
That said, most Dutch speak excellent English
That’s not true, not excellent English. Many speak enough to get by, except the elderly and the young, and some of them speak it well, fewer still excellently. Over four years, I’ve met probably a handful at most who could express their deepest thoughts and desires while pronouncing “th” correctly and their As not as Es.
Many banks won’t take you in if you don’t speak Dutch and it’s harder to find a job (this was in the news just recently, as it happens: nearly all international students are struggling in the job market because they generally don’t learn Dutch, despite there being so many vacancies). You can definitely get by with English, and I’ve heard of many people living here decades without learning Dutch too, but if you want to live well, that’s another thing altogether.
The good news is Dutch is easy if your mother tongue’s English or German but there is indeed a problem in the Randstad of it being hard to convince anyone to let you speak it with them, in part because they often overestimate how well they speak it. There’s a relatively famous quote from colonial Indonesia about how the Dutch colonisers would rather speak bad Indonesian than Dutch, which the Indonesians spoke fluently. I think it’s like a feedback effect with the reputation they have for knowing second languages.
Anyway, details details.
I lived in The Netherlands for 8 and a half years between the late 90s and the late 00s.
My experience whilst living in The Netherlands was that most people spoke pretty good English in terms of vocabulary, accent aside (which, as I myself am not a native English speaker, was not high on my list of priorities). Certain it qualified as “excellent” compared to people in my homeland (Portugal) back at the time. Then again I mostly knew people who had a higher education qualification so probably more likely to use English at work and follow English-language media. (Note that in my metric, “excellent” is bellow having “fully mastered the language” - basically I meant it as can easilly hold a conversation on common topics. I’m probably falling into the habits I caught when living in Britain and using the word “excellent” to mean what people in other countries think of as “good”)
As for the banks dealing with you in English, I still have a bank account with a Dutch bank and they always send me documents in English and still do, even though I don’t actually need it anymore. Maybe other banks won’t do it by the big ones do.
As for the impact of not knowing Dutch, for job seekers in The Netherlands, in my area - Software Development, which when I moved to The Netherlands I only had 2 years professional experience of doing - that was only a problem for me in the 2 years immediatelly after the Tech bubble crashed in the year 2000, whilst not for the rest of the time I lived there (and as I worked as a freelancer - specifically a contractor - for half of my time in The Netherlands I did change jobs much more often than normal so had quite a lot of experience with it). Can’t really speak for how things are now, for areas with less demand for professionals or for people in that hard period of one’s career which is trying to get into the work market as a recent graduate with no professional experience.
Also, speaking very good English (as in, better than what I meant by “excellent” in my previous post), I never felt that it helped me in learning Dutch. Agree with the rest that the Dutch tend to reply back in English if they think the other person can understand it, which for me as a Portuguese was seldom a problem whilst for my friends and colleagues from English speaking countries that was commonly a problem (I suspect the difference is because Dutch people couldn’t just tell from my accent that I could speak English). My advice for any foreigner stuck in this situation there, is to persist in speaking Dutch even if the other person switches to English.
PS: By the way, my point that being a native English-speaker does not help with learning Dutch is consistent with what I saw with my immigrant work colleagues and friends, were the native English speakers would take longer and not get as far when learning Dutch than those who were not native English speakers. Maybe the Dutch-English works fine but I did not see that happenning the other way around, plus even in my mind my language knowledge has somehow ended up with Dutch and German in the same bucket, English in a totally different bucket, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian in yet another bucket and French also in its own bucket (kinda, as some things are the same as in other Romance languages) - might just be the product of my language learning experience though.
I imagine a lot has changed in that regard anyway, especially with the way mainstream politics has gone in the intervening years, but it does indeed sound like you lived in a bit of a bubble at the time too!
I’m probably falling into the habits I caught when living in Britain and using the word “excellent” to mean what people in other countries think of as “good”
I’m British, and I know the British tendency is to understate rather than overstate, so I don’t know how you’ve landed there!
for areas with less demand…
That’s why I expressly mentioned that it was because they don’t learn Dutch: so you don’t have to wonder if there were any confounding factors at play.
Dutch is easy (a relative term, admittedly) if your mother tongue’s English because they’re so closely related. Many basic words are either very similar or spelt the same but pronounced differently. Bit like what Spanish is to Portuguese. I think it’s quite obvious that native speakers don’t learn Dutch quickly, if at all, because they have no one to practise with, and perhaps the idea of switching languages being rude plays a part too. I’ve met a couple of people who think it’s not worth it to learn and none of them were from the Anglosphere.
I’m not worried about appearance. She dresses punky like a lot of kids here do. And she’s not trans, just a lesbian, so she will be much safer here than the U.S.
The concept of “appearences” I’m talking about is much broader than just how people look, and definitelly covers how people talk and behave.
We’re talking about a country were rich people have their very own accent, which is not regional - something which I so far have yet to see anywhere else.
If over there you mix with people who are English middle class or above, you’ll see what I mean soon enough.
If over there you mix with people who are English middle class or above
Only if not by choice.
Well, if you end up working in an office environment most people you will come across consider themselves middle class because they’re white collar workers rather than blue collar workers even if (like most other places, it seems) most of the British middle class tend to live paycheck to paycheck same as the working class.
Also who you’ll meet in social situations will depend a lot on where you live, since last I checked most city centers in England had become way too expensive for even young white collar workers to live in, much less blue collar ones.
Anyways, in my own experience going to live in other countries, whatever happens will be a good learning experience.
You’re not all too far from Hebden Bridge if you settle up them ways anyway. She’ll be sound. Best of luck to yous.
They do speak English in the Netherlands. Not very good but enough
Isn’t dutch harder as german to learn?
Duno
A civilized country that voted the party of “Trump from Wish.com” into office. The Netherlands is also run by far right fuck nuts, the next four years are going to be very interesting down here below sea level to say the least. Better stay in the UK while labour is in charge.
Also unless you getting that nice expat salary it will be really difficult to find housing in the Netherlands as a fresh of the boat immigrant and you can forget about social housing.
Welcome! Do you have a football team already or are you going to support Bastard Rovers?
I support whatever local football team will not get me beaten up. Otherwise, sport is not my thing.
That would be Blackburn Rovers but that’ll get you beaten up by ME!
In all seriousness you’ll be fine either way. I do recommend a match, it’s a different experience to American sports and it’ll be a useful small talk opportunity. Otherwise you’ll have to talk about the weather all the time.
Welcome! Hopefully once you’re settled you’ll be able to find a local pub that does a good sunday roast
The closest pub here is called, I kid you not, The Spread Eagle. I haven’t been yet but how can I not?
Holy shit please go and post your thoughts xD
The Spread Eagle
There’s at least 3 of them in the UK, we’re funny that way.
France has one called The Queens Legs, because of the old joke… “can’t wait until it opens so I can get a drink!”
Also, the first class tickets for the train were totally worth it…
Damn you yanks be rich!
Welcome to our cold rainy island.
Isn’t the UK Distopian in other bad ways? Like insane government surveillance and monitoring
You know what it doesn’t have? People in power wanting to put queer people in conversion therapy or oppress them in other ways. Which is the main reason we moved.
My daughter isn’t trans, she’s a lesbian, but they won’t stop with trans people. They want to erase queerness in America.
This is true. And right now, at least for the next two years, they have every bit of conceivable power there is. The President, the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court. There are no checks and balances of Donald Trump.
We have our problems, but we haven’t just voted a literal fascist into power so we’ve got that going for us
True that
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
[Edit] Most countries have pretty bad surveillance. America is unique in projecting bad things on other countries without having any self reflection.
https://aithority.com/news/top-10-countries-and-cities-by-number-of-cctv-cameras/
https://archive.is/2wN7a (Archived copy)
The UK isn’t great, but its not really an outlier compared to anywhere else.
China has at least 200 million cameras installed in the country. … other countries such as the United States and Germany have 50 million and 5.2 million CCTV Cameras each. The list goes on with other countries with more than 1 million cameras. The United Kingdom has 5 million CCTV cameras installed
In fact
The United States has 15.28 CCTV cameras every 100 individuals, followed by China with 14.36 and the United Kingdom with 7.5.
Welcome to Europe! I moved to Germany almost 20 years ago, and holy batflaps am I happy about that choice.
Me, a German, hoping that comment won’t age like milk…
So am I.
I hope I will be as happy. Thanks!
