Do you have ambition to live or retire abroad? (49 Viewers)

[guidomerkinsrules]

Naples.

AH
fwiw, the rest of Italy talks mad **** about Napoli
any time I was 'discuss' traffic/driving in any other city, the reply was always 'you should see Napoli

 

[CapitalCitySaint]

ok this is weird
Florence is my favorite and maybe top 5 city worldwide
(like Barcelona, I felt the complete synthesis of architecture as living art)
Rome, otoh, I found just ok

other than Florence, Lucca and Bologna - also Taormina, Sicily were standouts
Torino & Milan (industrial North) were least favorite
and clearly we hit Loano at wrong time bc I was very excited by the idea of Italian Rivera (the crushing amount of Germans tempered that excitement quickly)

I loved Rome!

For someone who hates Texas & Dallas, I am surprised that you like Florence.

 

[CapitalCitySaint]

AH
fwiw, the rest of Italy talks mad **** about Napoli
any time I was 'discuss' traffic/driving in any other city, the reply was always 'you should see Napoli

I had just said that in my last post. When I was figuring out itinerary for Italy, my friend had sent me hers from when they went the year prior & that was the one place they said to skip and not even bother with.

 

[Consigliere]

For someone who hates Texas & Dallas, I am surprised that you like Florence.

LOL? It would be hard to find two cities more different. The kind of person who likes one would not like the other.

 

[guidomerkinsrules]

I still have so much to explore there. Want to check out Portofino, Dolomites, Sicily. Sardinia, Puglia, Bari. I suppose I’ll go to Venice just to say I’ve gone but not expecting too much other than a tourist trap. Also have to to got Turin where my grandfather comes from.

I’ve heard Naples is dirty & sucks.

had a great time in Venice - I was visiting a friend who was shooting a commercial and the hotel where he was staying had just finished some big party. there were tables filled with opened but untouched vino tinto, we each grabbed two bottles and went and sat in a mostly empty Piazza San Marco and just bsed the night away -
but yeah, it was a museum city and I couldn't get any sort of vibe from the city itself

standing on the ruins of a Greek amphitheatre in Taormina was almost a religious experience for me

 

[guidomerkinsrules]

I loved Rome!

For someone who hates Texas & Dallas, I am surprised that you like Florence.

it's something I noticed about Amsterdam - I was there three different times
We had a 6 week tour of Holland, but stayed in Amsterdam and just drove to every city
Then when my then GF was teaching in Den Haag, I visited and we stayed in Amsterdam 2 other times
In essence I realized that I had visited 3 different cities - it would be like visiting NYC and going to Upper West Side, then Midtown then Lower East Side
3 completely different places
so you and I might have been in different Florences (we were also very well treated there and I was hanging out with the star of the Italian Olympic volleyball team, so that might have influenced me)

Rome I loved individual things (esp riding Vespas through that nuts traffic and then seeing the aqueduct on the way down the Appia Antica ), I just didn't vibe with the whole thing (and food we ate was just meh)

 

[guidomerkinsrules]

LOL? It would be hard to find two cities more different. The kind of person who likes one would not like the other.

yeah Milan is the only Italian place i'd been that had a whiff of Dallas
actually the most Dallas city i'd seen in Europe was Rotterdam - but it had the excuse of being nearly leveled in WW2 and not enough money to worry about aesthetics when it rebuilt

 

[Bayouboy]

Just curious. If you lived abroad or had an extended stay (say a couple months minimum), how would health care work? Is it just pay out of pocket stuff? Would a foreigner get coverage?

Those prices bclemms mentioned are crazy. I'm hoping to retire with $8000/month. I could be a king! lol

 

[guidomerkinsrules]

Just curious. If you lived abroad or had an extended stay (say a couple months minimum), how would health care work? Is it just pay out of pocket stuff? Would a foreigner get coverage?

Those prices bclemms mentioned are crazy. I'm hoping to retire with $8000/month. I could be a king! lol

Can’t remember what thread it was, but at least 3-4 posters related stories of visiting a euro city and needing a doctor and it being a much easier process than they’d gone through her

otoh I had a student on an Italy tour who caught a stomach bug and she and her mom described the process as a nightmare

And I should add that with all my love of Italy, it’s probably the last place I’d want to get Hospital sick in

 

[saintmdterps]

ok boomer
the youngs invented something called bullet points
you might give it a whirl

Good god, next you’ll suggest we write in outline form

 

[t_rav_82]

This thread has me very intrigued. A stateside move has been on my horizon for a while now but there really isn’t any reason why I can’t broaden that search.

I’m interested in DMing some of you, @Mr. Blue Sky, @bclemms, or any others who don’t mind letting me pick their brain. My ignorance regarding world travel is profound.

 

[guidomerkinsrules]

Good god, next you’ll suggest we write in outline form

here's the irony - kids don't know **** about how to outline
I teach speech and the 2nd speech of the semester is delivered from outline
in 5 years I have not had one kid who knew what the bleep I was talking about
so every year I have to teach outlining

 

[guidomerkinsrules]

This thread has me very intrigued. A stateside move has been on my horizon for a while now but there really isn’t any reason why I can’t broaden that search.

I’m interested in DMing some of you, @Mr. Blue Sky, @bclemms, or any others who don’t mind letting me pick their brain. My ignorance regarding world travel is profound.

I know @mjcouvi made the move also (one of two more as well, if I remember correctly)

found the thread

I'm moving to Thailand for a little while. Anyone been to Thailand?

I want to go to Phuket.Spent a few weeks in Phuket earlier this year, after i first arrived in Asia…. I have to say that , after researching the hell out of a lot of different places, i really thought Phuket would be my favorite place.. but, i was wrong.. it’s like a huge bustling city on...

saintsreport.com

 

[saintmdterps]

here's the irony - kids don't know **** about how to outline
I teach speech and the 2nd speech of the semester is delivered from outline
in 5 years I have not had one kid who knew what the bleep I was talking about
so every year I have to teach outlining

I took a research class in high school. The following steps had to occur:
1) pick topic
2) get sources
3) take notes
4) outline
5) rough draft
6) final draft
7) complete research paper 25-30 pages

You submitted each step for approval and could not move to the next step until approval was granted. I could write a mean paper when the course was done and I used my learnings to good effect in college. I didn’t need no stinkin’ internet

 

[Mr. Blue Sky]

Okay, so I wondered why you hated Filipino food so much, now I know. You have not experienced it. The Philippines is like the US and the food varies significantly where you are at. You're experience was essentially eating a basic meal in Iowa and never tasting New Orleans Cuisine. I eat Filipino food probably 1-7 times per week, depending on if my wife is cooking Filipino food, but sometimes she'll cook Thai, or pretty much anything else she has tasted and can recreate. My wife is from Angelest City, Pampanga, which famous for its cuisine to the point where people travel there to eat it. Whenever we meet other Filipinos or someone finds out my wife is from Pampanga, they say "Oh, she can cook". I have people at work constantly asking me for my wife to cook lumpia or pancit for them and most recently at my Squadron's Christmas Party, we brought a couple traditional Filipino dishes, those were the first to be cleaned out while all of the American stuff just sat there. I have not been to Cebu, but I have been to Bohol, both are Visayan islands and the same food. There was not a lot of options there and most things were seafood, so we had great food, but if you were looking for something different, it probably was not there.

English is taugh in the schools there. It's pretty much Tagalog in Kindergarten and English the rest of their school years. Tagalog is then just taught at home. Most Filipinos speak 3 languages, Tagalog, English and their dialect. The dialect in Manila is Tagalog so people from Minala may only speak 2, English and Tagalog.

FWIW, I love Thai food. I probably eat Thai food as often or close to as often as I eat Filipino food.

Point taken, and duly noted.. you are probably right, i probably havent eaten great Filipino food… BUT i would counter that even if i hadnt been in Cebu City, and if i had tried awesome Filipino food- i would not want to eat it every day, certainly not two or three meals per day.. just like in Thailand , i dont eat Thai food every day.. and that’s the difference; here in Thailand, anywhere i go i can find a great variety- Mexican , Italian, burgers, healthy, unhealthy, whatever whatever.. in the Philippines, every burger i had tasted like arse, every type of food imaginable that I tried was terrible- which is why i may have mentioend that I wound up eating every meal from a TGI Fridays and an S&R (Costco) pizza counter .