Expats of reddit, how has living abroad changed your opinion of your home country? [Serious]

From the Netherlands, expat to the USA.

  1. Tips aren’t tips, they’re baseline salaries for people who are just doing their job. If I don’t tip, they chase me down for some reason as if I’ve insulted them;
  2. I’m still eating and they present me with the bill. All the time. Uh, maybe I’d like to see the desert card? Maybe I’d like a coffee? Maybe I’d like to just sit and relax for a bit?
  3. Small apartment in San Francisco paid for by my employer. They were paying about 2000 USD a WEEK. They expected me to find my own place after half a year. Nothing nearby is affordable at all. Colleagues in their early 30s were living together as roommates. Fuck that;
  4. Grocery store: only sells snacks. You want fresh food? You’d need to be a billionaire to make that worth your while. So eating out every day is cheaper;
  5. Turns out, eating out wherever is unhealthy as fuck. Shitloads of sugar and salt everywhere;
  6. You US guys don’t know what bread is. Seriously, even fresh bread had soft crusts and tasted like generic crap. Most even tasted sweet for some reason;
  7. Tap water tastes horrible. Might be safe, still horrible. Having to buy bottled water is mindblowingly stupid and expensive;
  8. You pretty much need a car to get anywhere. Traffic jams get in the way of that idea. Bicycles are popular and fun and all, but mostly incredibly expensive and… SF is full of hills. I hate hills;
  9. I reserved a table for 5 at 9pm. I’m at the restaurant and I want to sit down. I am there at 8.55pm. They don’t allow me to sit down until everybody is there. What the actual fuck? When my friends arrived at 9.10pm the tables were given away and we had to wait until 10pm to get seated. The “tips before all” mindset is fucking over customers…
  10. Back home I worked from 9am till 5pm. That meant “come in somewhere around 9-ish, leave whenever you want after 5.” In the USA that meant: “You’re here at 9.01? Let’s have a chat.” And: “It’s 6pm, why are you leaving? Everyone else is staying to finish some work.” Fuck that, my job is a means to an end. Life goes first. I’ve got things to do. Besides, nobody is paying me for overtime anyway. So stick it up your ass.
  11. “Stick it up your ass” isn’t something you should say, not even with a smile on your face. It turns out, they expect you to work 10-hour shifts every day because for some reason you need to show people that you care. I didn’t care;
  12. “I’ll need some time off next week Wednesday because I want to—“ never gonna happen. Time off? You mean unpaid time off somewhere 4 months from now? That might be arranged.

When I couldn’t find a place to live after 6 months and after having worked 60 hour weeks at work during that time, having seen nothing of the USA and experienced nothing but stress and awful corporate drones, I went back home.

None of the problems above apply anymore. I’m having a social life, I eat healthy food, I live in an amazing apartment in Amsterdam, I’ve got a kick-ass job, I’m working with bleeding-edge tech, eating out is an enjoyable experience, I don’t need a car, the fresh foods are everywhere, I cook my dinner myself every day, tap water is indistinguishable from bottled water, and I get 30 paid days off a year to spend however the hell I want it by law.

/r/AskReddit Thread