Ask HN: What is your story of immigrating to another country?

In practical terms, Germany is so far ahead it's not comparable. The quality of life here is better making minimum wage here than it is if you're on a decent wage in the UK. A lot of the difference is housing - in the UK, you're usually paying a lot of money to live in a shithole. Also, as other commentators have noted, everything is falling apart in the UK, so even if you have money, you can look forward to taking trains that break all the time, driving on roads that have holes in them, etc.

In mainstream cultural terms, a lot of germans don't like foreigners, and are pretty rude if they pick up that you're not german, although a lot of that is modulated by where you're from. That extends to germans who work for the state - the auslanderbehoerde is pretty famous for being generally miserable to deal with. The state's basic policy is 'assimilation', so you're basically expected to leave your culture at the door and become 'German', and the state has a pretty narrow definition of what that means (Oktoberfest, christian religious holidays, slightly dubious history etc), and depending on where you're from, you'll have to do courses on this stuff, which can be pretty depressing.

If you're black, there's a certain level of racially-motivated violence in some places, although I think the basic level of violent street crime compares favourably to the UK - it compares extremely favourably if you're white. Still, because of the aforementioned rudeness thing, friends I've had who migrated from Africa generally have a pretty bad time living here.

Culturally, in the broader sense, Germany is great. The music scene is great here, the art scene, classical music, the food and youth culture etc are all really good, and very welcoming to foreigners. You meet people with a very broad range of views and lifestyles, there are parks and galleries and playgrounds and all sorts of stuff that makes you feel like you're actually living in a 'culture' worth engaging in, not just a bunch of people decompressing after a work-week.

The thing I like most about living in Germany is it's a pretty reasonable country. If you deal with institutions, they'll generally talk to you as a rational human. If you live in a city, the city will generally maintain parks and public spaces because they'll see that as important to the community. Money is set aside for cultural life, youth recreation, sports, etc.

Low salaries, high taxes, high prices around Paris area, heavy administration (I don’t wish anyone going to a prefecture!), hard to find information about services, hard and expensive to find apartment or relocate, congested public transport, mono-lingual static culture, hard to make friend with French, public litter and lack of cleanliness, periodic strikes, small apartments (in EU in general), complexity of system, no-skin-in-the-game nature of public system produces a lot of dysfunction everywhere, etc.

I for one gave up!

1. The one line you are harping on is half way down a list of things, not at the top. 2. It's obviously just a literary indulgence to add some local color 3. I've spent 2.5 years traveling rough and solo through the Global South which I hope counts for something. I'm gonna guess you consider any kind of pleasure travel to be privilege though.

USA: best opportunities for smart people to engage in big-impact work. People are too crazy about work. Depending on the city, can also be unsafe. Switzerland: extremely high financial compensation but also high cost of living despite low taxation. People love nature but many are too materialistic. UK: Was the most interesting country to live in up to 2016, no sadly going isolationist. Germany: good quality of life but a bit boring apart from a few hip cities like Berlin or Cologne.

Although the weather there sucks, living in Edinburgh, Scotland, has been fantastic experience, and it tops all other places. The only disadvantage is that due to Brexit (most Scots were and are against it) it is (now) outside of the EU.

The fact that all EU citizens have complete freedom of movement is priceless (to me).