A decade ago, Bradley Krae left the United States to teach English in Shenzhen, China. He spends less money and says the has found his own version of the American Dream there.
Also tap water may not be drinkable but thats more of a nuisance since you can filter/boil it.
When I visited the U.S. the tap water there wasn’t really drinkable. People said it was fine, but my friend bought bottled water, which I paid for during my stay because the tap stuff smelled evil. Tried the tap water at a restaurant and I physically couldn’t swallow it. Supposedly Massachusetts has pretty good water, too.
China is not a magical land where everything is perfect and futuristic. It’s a big country with a lot of people in many, many big cities that operates on totally different cultural systems.
I like this take. You often hear places hyped up in media because that garners clicks, but everywhere has its pros and cons. Living in Sweden, I’ve heard absolutely bananas claims about my country. I’m comfortable here, but not everyone will be, and it’s certainly not the utopia some people believe it to be.
China has some good things going for it. I’m not a fan of the lack of privacy there, but simultaneously Europe is taking a leaf out of that playbook. They seem to have decent healthcare, and the infrastructure is seeing some major work that a lot of places here in Europe sorely needs.
The working culture in China is off-putting to me, though I feel similarly for a lot of other places here in Europe as well. Germany for example has a really rough work culture, which always makes it funny when American immigrants sing its praises.
Germany has a rough working culture? Where do you get this from? In some unions full-time equates to only 35 hours a week, and we commonly have 30 days of vacation.
And our working culture is nothing at all like in the US. We have very good employee protection rights and unlimited sick days.
And currently I am working in the public sector, where I can choose to work only 4 days a week (with 80% of the pay, ofc). It is really great.
Think it depends on where you are. I’ve three close friends who all have had really rough working experiences.
One person was studying at business school and had an intern position at a company. There were legal limits to how much my friend should’ve been allowed to work, but the company didn’t give a fuck. This ended up being a detriment to their studies, which was the whole point of working to begin with. They were tasked with way too much responsibility, and neither authorities or union really gave a fuck.
Another friend works in tech. They had a similar situation during their studies, and have since taken on a “hard work is good” mindset which I find revolting, because hard work isn’t intrinsically good, it’s rewarded with more work, and you get exploited until you burn out.
Further, the fairly strict social hierarchy Germany has is really off-putting to me, and it’s reflected in the working culture. Work meetings I had in Germany were always awfully stiff and weird.
Again, this is from a personal preferences perspective. Some people love the rigours. I do not. Most of the Nordics have been influenced in some manner by Janteloven, and it’s reflected here. I cannot stand social hierarchies where someone is supposedly your better for some arbitrary reason.
The former friend moved here, and experienced our working culture. I remember one day they talked to me about how shocking it was to have the CEO of their company bat for them, and talk to them like an equal. They said it would’ve been unthinkable at their previous workplaces.
I can tell you, your experiences can’t be generalized. The work environment can really differ from company to company, and also depends in which industry you are working. I am working in IT, and in my department my colleagues and I can talk to each other in a very casual, non-formal way.
Tap water is just dependent on the area you live in. You’re use to the tap water where you live and in similar regions. Whether you drink it or not you’re exposed to it every day. It’s normal.
When you travel. You’ll always have this reaction if you’re not use to it. It’s not unique the US and the tap water here is perfectly fine.
People in the US say the same thing about Europe. But I traveled all over Europe and the tap water is fine. It’s “weird” definitely but for the same reasons you think American tap is weird.
Having said that. Lake Tahoe in California is the top tier of tap water in America.
Rome and it’s public water fountains were my favorite in Europe. Really refreshing and cool water on ancient water infrastructure. Top tier for Europe.
europe generally doesn’t chlorinate its water as hard as north america. every bathroom and kitchen ive been in in the us smells like chlorine, and trying to drink the water makes my throat physically swell shut. in europe i only have that reaction if i get pool water in my mouth, which is how i figured out i’m allergic to it.
Interesting. Had to look this up. Apparently a lot of Europe uses small amounts of chlorine too in similar levels to America. But some countries like the Netherlands and Germany have alternatives that use Ozone. I could definitely understand this taste difference if you live in a country that doesn’t use it. Thanks for expanding my tap water knowledge.
For reference. The levels of chlorine added to tap in Europe (UK and others) or America are around 0.5 ppm. A swimming pool with chlorine would have 5.0 ppm. 10x seems actually lower than I would have thought. Especially given how much a swimming pool smells of it.
I lived a month in the Netherlands and never noticed a difference in taste personally. Drank tap a lot of the time.
I’d wonder if you’re from the Netherlands or Germany (or maybe a country that doesn’t add chlorine that I didn’t see listed).
Or maybe it’s used less for cleaning in Europe and your sensitivity to it is due to that. I’d be curious to know where you’re from.
i’m swedish. we generally don’t treat our water at all, it just goes straight from well to tap. the exception is large cities like stockholm that need to use surface water instead of groundwater, and they use artificial infiltration systems followed by uv-disinfection (or ozone, don’t remember which). the water in stockholm also tastes weird to me, but it’s completely drinkable. every time i visit family in north america and forget about the chlorine thing i get a shock.
Interesting. Definitely rings true with my hypothesis on this stuff though. I guess I’d say the taste difference is real. But, having traveled a lot I’d also say that if you “give it a shot” for a couple days your tastes adjust pretty quickly. It’s been my stubborn choice to not buy bottled water that taught me this.
Not to say that some countries may have worse regulations or focus on “more natural” taste priorities. That’s definitely true. But I wouldn’t let the worry of the water being “unsafe” exaggerate those natural feelings.
I’d be more concerned about some small city in America (Flint Michigan being our obvious newsworthy one) than any major city. Though Flint was unrelated to filtration standards and literally just a refusal to remove ancient lead pipe infrastructure.
Though I definitely do trust European standards and regulations more than an American. For the time being, our major cities are still running on proven standards for health and filtration though.
i’ve definitely experienced the “getting used to it” thing in other countries, but unfortunately the throat swelling is a physical reaction to chlorine. i also can’t go in swimming pools without goggles or i get covered in blisters. on the skin it’s fine but if it touches a mucous membrane i’m fucked. also forgot about that when i first took a shower after landing in bc a few years ago, which was a fun time.
I’ve traveled most of the US coast to coast. Never had water like that. It varies dramatically region to region and I taste a difference. I’ve traveled to a couple of counties in Europe as well and the water is similar
Also that bathroom smell isn’t the water. People use chlorinated bleach to clean
When I visited the U.S. the tap water there wasn’t really drinkable. People said it was fine, but my friend bought bottled water, which I paid for during my stay because the tap stuff smelled evil.
What else did you think about your visit to Florida?
They said Massachusetts lol. I get that everyone has different taste but I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else that described the water there as impossible to swallow. But I believe them, I thought the water in Poland tasted bad and I’m sure that was largely just because of what I was used to.
Yeah I will never get over how people will just lie to throw shade at people and things they don’t like. America pisses me off constantly, I’m from there and I have a lot of rage for it. But lying about how the country’s drinking water isn’t safe to drink in general is a weird thing to do and it’s misinformation which is just gross.
it’s the chlorination. makes it smell foul and impossible to swallow, at least for me. last time i had to buy one of one of those bottles with a built-in filter, because otherwise i would just instinctually not drink water.
So long as you want to drink from lead pipes. That’s safe, right? Obama drank from the water in Flint and said it was fine so I guess he’s immune to lead poisoning.
That’s not true everywhere and besides that’s moving the goalposts. OP was claiming the water was clearly so nasty you could tell by taste and smell which would not be related to lead pipes in any way. America has more problems with drinking water than it should by far but it’s actually just a lie to pretend it can be considered unsafe to drink as a blanket statement.
I’d say that our international reputation is kind of undeserved.
For example, we’ve previously been kind of prideful of our status as “neutral” in conflicts, but I don’t think we ever really were. During WWII we were doing the same eugenics stuff that Germany was interested in, we severely maltreated our native population, and ultimately while we didn’t exactly ally ourselves with Germany, we also didn’t stand against them. We let the nazis use our railway network to attack Norway for example.
Segue: the most recent eugenics law we got rid of, to my knowledge, was in 2013, when we abolished the requirement for trans people to get sterilised. Obviously, the nazi party was against this.
I wrote about a kind of pivotal event here, which ended up shaping how our labour system functions. However, the Social Democrats of old are not the same as those we have today. They’ve been catering more and more to the right, and the perspective I see the most nowadays is that they kind of just go with the flow. They don’t have any significant values, and haven’t for a long time.
This shows, because we have some very American problems in society now. Widening gaps between the normal people and the ultra rich. Significant parts of our welfare has been sold off and privatised. We have nazis sitting in parliament.
One example I think is particularly striking is our drug policy. It’s the one thing pretty much all parties are in unison on; drugs are and should remain banned, and people that use drugs need to be punished. The stats for drug related deaths here are scary, and the scientists are saying that the policies need revisions because the current draconic approach isn’t really working.
Where in MA? Around Boston it’s all high quality, but outside the metro area it varies.
Except Cambridge. Despite being right there with everything else, they refuse to use the same system and instead use the local pond which is all highway runoff.
Tried it in Haverhill at a friends place, Lowell at another friend, and the restaurant was in Salem.
The restaurant kicked ass in general though. Flying Saucer Pizzeria. I am not a big fan of pizza but man, I want those pizzas again. Truly top tier.
I did visit a restaurant in Cambridge actually. It became kind of a highlight of my trip because of another cultural thing I struggled with. See, the toilets I’d bumped into so far in my trip all felt really foreign to me. They were kind of low, and very large. So when I visited the bathroom at this restaurant I was really surprised to see a standard toilet, the kind I had at home.
Generally they’re not, provided they can keep it low key.
And since within the PRC it’s quite easy to fire people, and courts and settlement is about how much 面子 you can make the company lose without pissing off local authorities vs. the 关系 and pressure they can bring to bear to have you drop it there’s not much to be done.
“ask” that people do overtime, and then fire them for not being a team player, or downmote them into a stressful deadend if they don’t take the voluntary overtime.
When I visited the U.S. the tap water there wasn’t really drinkable. People said it was fine, but my friend bought bottled water, which I paid for during my stay because the tap stuff smelled evil. Tried the tap water at a restaurant and I physically couldn’t swallow it. Supposedly Massachusetts has pretty good water, too.
I like this take. You often hear places hyped up in media because that garners clicks, but everywhere has its pros and cons. Living in Sweden, I’ve heard absolutely bananas claims about my country. I’m comfortable here, but not everyone will be, and it’s certainly not the utopia some people believe it to be.
China has some good things going for it. I’m not a fan of the lack of privacy there, but simultaneously Europe is taking a leaf out of that playbook. They seem to have decent healthcare, and the infrastructure is seeing some major work that a lot of places here in Europe sorely needs.
The working culture in China is off-putting to me, though I feel similarly for a lot of other places here in Europe as well. Germany for example has a really rough work culture, which always makes it funny when American immigrants sing its praises.
The world is complex.
Germany has a rough working culture? Where do you get this from? In some unions full-time equates to only 35 hours a week, and we commonly have 30 days of vacation. And our working culture is nothing at all like in the US. We have very good employee protection rights and unlimited sick days. And currently I am working in the public sector, where I can choose to work only 4 days a week (with 80% of the pay, ofc). It is really great.
Think it depends on where you are. I’ve three close friends who all have had really rough working experiences.
One person was studying at business school and had an intern position at a company. There were legal limits to how much my friend should’ve been allowed to work, but the company didn’t give a fuck. This ended up being a detriment to their studies, which was the whole point of working to begin with. They were tasked with way too much responsibility, and neither authorities or union really gave a fuck.
Another friend works in tech. They had a similar situation during their studies, and have since taken on a “hard work is good” mindset which I find revolting, because hard work isn’t intrinsically good, it’s rewarded with more work, and you get exploited until you burn out.
Further, the fairly strict social hierarchy Germany has is really off-putting to me, and it’s reflected in the working culture. Work meetings I had in Germany were always awfully stiff and weird.
Again, this is from a personal preferences perspective. Some people love the rigours. I do not. Most of the Nordics have been influenced in some manner by Janteloven, and it’s reflected here. I cannot stand social hierarchies where someone is supposedly your better for some arbitrary reason.
The former friend moved here, and experienced our working culture. I remember one day they talked to me about how shocking it was to have the CEO of their company bat for them, and talk to them like an equal. They said it would’ve been unthinkable at their previous workplaces.
I can tell you, your experiences can’t be generalized. The work environment can really differ from company to company, and also depends in which industry you are working. I am working in IT, and in my department my colleagues and I can talk to each other in a very casual, non-formal way.
Tap water is just dependent on the area you live in. You’re use to the tap water where you live and in similar regions. Whether you drink it or not you’re exposed to it every day. It’s normal.
When you travel. You’ll always have this reaction if you’re not use to it. It’s not unique the US and the tap water here is perfectly fine.
People in the US say the same thing about Europe. But I traveled all over Europe and the tap water is fine. It’s “weird” definitely but for the same reasons you think American tap is weird.
Having said that. Lake Tahoe in California is the top tier of tap water in America.
Rome and it’s public water fountains were my favorite in Europe. Really refreshing and cool water on ancient water infrastructure. Top tier for Europe.
europe generally doesn’t chlorinate its water as hard as north america. every bathroom and kitchen ive been in in the us smells like chlorine, and trying to drink the water makes my throat physically swell shut. in europe i only have that reaction if i get pool water in my mouth, which is how i figured out i’m allergic to it.
Interesting. Had to look this up. Apparently a lot of Europe uses small amounts of chlorine too in similar levels to America. But some countries like the Netherlands and Germany have alternatives that use Ozone. I could definitely understand this taste difference if you live in a country that doesn’t use it. Thanks for expanding my tap water knowledge.
For reference. The levels of chlorine added to tap in Europe (UK and others) or America are around 0.5 ppm. A swimming pool with chlorine would have 5.0 ppm. 10x seems actually lower than I would have thought. Especially given how much a swimming pool smells of it.
I lived a month in the Netherlands and never noticed a difference in taste personally. Drank tap a lot of the time.
I’d wonder if you’re from the Netherlands or Germany (or maybe a country that doesn’t add chlorine that I didn’t see listed).
Or maybe it’s used less for cleaning in Europe and your sensitivity to it is due to that. I’d be curious to know where you’re from.
i’m swedish. we generally don’t treat our water at all, it just goes straight from well to tap. the exception is large cities like stockholm that need to use surface water instead of groundwater, and they use artificial infiltration systems followed by uv-disinfection (or ozone, don’t remember which). the water in stockholm also tastes weird to me, but it’s completely drinkable. every time i visit family in north america and forget about the chlorine thing i get a shock.
Interesting. Definitely rings true with my hypothesis on this stuff though. I guess I’d say the taste difference is real. But, having traveled a lot I’d also say that if you “give it a shot” for a couple days your tastes adjust pretty quickly. It’s been my stubborn choice to not buy bottled water that taught me this.
Not to say that some countries may have worse regulations or focus on “more natural” taste priorities. That’s definitely true. But I wouldn’t let the worry of the water being “unsafe” exaggerate those natural feelings.
I’d be more concerned about some small city in America (Flint Michigan being our obvious newsworthy one) than any major city. Though Flint was unrelated to filtration standards and literally just a refusal to remove ancient lead pipe infrastructure.
Though I definitely do trust European standards and regulations more than an American. For the time being, our major cities are still running on proven standards for health and filtration though.
i’ve definitely experienced the “getting used to it” thing in other countries, but unfortunately the throat swelling is a physical reaction to chlorine. i also can’t go in swimming pools without goggles or i get covered in blisters. on the skin it’s fine but if it touches a mucous membrane i’m fucked. also forgot about that when i first took a shower after landing in bc a few years ago, which was a fun time.
I’ve traveled most of the US coast to coast. Never had water like that. It varies dramatically region to region and I taste a difference. I’ve traveled to a couple of counties in Europe as well and the water is similar
Also that bathroom smell isn’t the water. People use chlorinated bleach to clean
i know what bleach smells like, i clean my own bathroom. it’s not that.
In some places peroxide based bleaches are more common over chlorinated bleach. Plus percentages of chlorine vary in different bleach products.
What else did you think about your visit to Florida?
They said Massachusetts lol. I get that everyone has different taste but I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else that described the water there as impossible to swallow. But I believe them, I thought the water in Poland tasted bad and I’m sure that was largely just because of what I was used to.
If I’d gone to Florida I would’ve wanted to see gators! That would’ve been exciting.
Honestly that can apply to a majority of cities in America.
Don’t forget Texas
The water in the US is drinkable almost everywhere. Only very small outliers would exist. So you don’t inspire confidence with your take there.
It is insane you’re getting downvoted like wtf do you mean US doesn’t have drinkable tap water?
https://www.nrdc.org/resources/new-map-shows-areas-high-lead-tap-water-levels-lead-violations
Theres more issues with American drinking water than most want to think.
Lead contamination is wide spread.
Theres also many places where drinking water is contaminated with PFAS https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/
Americas tap water is not as clean or as reliable as one would hope it to be, and it would be a fair concern to want to avoid drinking it.
Yeah I will never get over how people will just lie to throw shade at people and things they don’t like. America pisses me off constantly, I’m from there and I have a lot of rage for it. But lying about how the country’s drinking water isn’t safe to drink in general is a weird thing to do and it’s misinformation which is just gross.
it’s the chlorination. makes it smell foul and impossible to swallow, at least for me. last time i had to buy one of one of those bottles with a built-in filter, because otherwise i would just instinctually not drink water.
So long as you want to drink from lead pipes. That’s safe, right? Obama drank from the water in Flint and said it was fine so I guess he’s immune to lead poisoning.
That’s not true everywhere and besides that’s moving the goalposts. OP was claiming the water was clearly so nasty you could tell by taste and smell which would not be related to lead pipes in any way. America has more problems with drinking water than it should by far but it’s actually just a lie to pretend it can be considered unsafe to drink as a blanket statement.
The tap water is absolutely drinkable. If you don’t like the taste get a filter.
What don’t you like about Sweden, if you don’t mind me asking?
I’d say that our international reputation is kind of undeserved.
For example, we’ve previously been kind of prideful of our status as “neutral” in conflicts, but I don’t think we ever really were. During WWII we were doing the same eugenics stuff that Germany was interested in, we severely maltreated our native population, and ultimately while we didn’t exactly ally ourselves with Germany, we also didn’t stand against them. We let the nazis use our railway network to attack Norway for example.
Segue: the most recent eugenics law we got rid of, to my knowledge, was in 2013, when we abolished the requirement for trans people to get sterilised. Obviously, the nazi party was against this.
I wrote about a kind of pivotal event here, which ended up shaping how our labour system functions. However, the Social Democrats of old are not the same as those we have today. They’ve been catering more and more to the right, and the perspective I see the most nowadays is that they kind of just go with the flow. They don’t have any significant values, and haven’t for a long time.
This shows, because we have some very American problems in society now. Widening gaps between the normal people and the ultra rich. Significant parts of our welfare has been sold off and privatised. We have nazis sitting in parliament.
One example I think is particularly striking is our drug policy. It’s the one thing pretty much all parties are in unison on; drugs are and should remain banned, and people that use drugs need to be punished. The stats for drug related deaths here are scary, and the scientists are saying that the policies need revisions because the current draconic approach isn’t really working.
The parties however will not budge, instead they sit in parliament and sniff cocaine, and when they’re caught it obviously doesn’t get investigated.
A social democratic politician from Sweden is also the person responsible for initiating the whole Chat Control thing.
Where in MA? Around Boston it’s all high quality, but outside the metro area it varies.
Except Cambridge. Despite being right there with everything else, they refuse to use the same system and instead use the local pond which is all highway runoff.
Tried it in Haverhill at a friends place, Lowell at another friend, and the restaurant was in Salem.
The restaurant kicked ass in general though. Flying Saucer Pizzeria. I am not a big fan of pizza but man, I want those pizzas again. Truly top tier.
I did visit a restaurant in Cambridge actually. It became kind of a highlight of my trip because of another cultural thing I struggled with. See, the toilets I’d bumped into so far in my trip all felt really foreign to me. They were kind of low, and very large. So when I visited the bathroom at this restaurant I was really surprised to see a standard toilet, the kind I had at home.
It was such a thing, I even took a photo of it.
996 is illegal and companies who do this are prosecuted, from my understanding.
Generally they’re not, provided they can keep it low key.
And since within the PRC it’s quite easy to fire people, and courts and settlement is about how much 面子 you can make the company lose without pissing off local authorities vs. the 关系 and pressure they can bring to bear to have you drop it there’s not much to be done.
“ask” that people do overtime, and then fire them for not being a team player, or downmote them into a stressful deadend if they don’t take the voluntary overtime.
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We’re taking about China.