Living in the Czech Republic for about 12 years. Native Texan.
I met a czech girl while living in amsterdam and ended up moving here together. The immigration process for couples is pretty simple. 🙂
Pros:
- No (or well, few) guns
- Basically no crime at all
- Basically no poverty at all
- Very cheap health care ( have full everything for like $90/mo)
- Europe at my fingertips
- Cheap
- Free college for my kids
- Free and very good public schools
- Amazing public transport
- No insane conservative people
- No insane religious people
- Very lax drug laws (leads to very little crime)
- Great social safety net
- Lots of vacay time
- Lots of maternity leave (like, up to 3 years LOL)
Cons:
- The people, well, kind of suck (very unfriendly, very cold, quite rude, and couldn’t care less about you, zero feeling of community in my experience)
- Literally about 50 years behind the US in terms of real gender equality
- Very little diversity (Whitey McWhitetown)
- Food blows (local food is meat and potatoes basically, grocery quality is shit)
- Extreme homogeneity in society. There are basically no outliers here in any regard.
- The culture is pretty dull. People are introverted and not generally very creative or interesting.
- People drive like pieces of shit.
- Quite racist (not in the lynch mob way, more in the saying “n*gger” without knowing better way)
- Very small minded culturally. The world outside the czech borders basically seems irrelevant to most people (fucking LOL).
- The language is extremely hard to learn, spoken by almost no one on the planet, and the deeper you go into it, just a little bit crappy. So many borrowed words are, not to put too fine a point on it, just incorrectly used. Everything just gets mashed into the language without any real regard for what the word actually means. It’s like if you were adding words to your language but had never actually heard the word, or seen it used, and just sort of guessed at what it means. That’s how czech integrates foreign words. It kind or makes czech feel like it was created by a bunch of sheep farmers. It probably was.
- No open space or any way to escape other people at all. Even in the “country side” there is no such thing as a house without neighbors. I hate that.
- The geography is really really dull.
For those that moved away, can you include how difficult it was to do so legally and the application/immigration process?!
Pros
Amazing food, kind people and no covid.
Cons
Can’t complain. Pollution is bad in the bigger cities.
Though I really do love Vietnam.
Pro- You get a well-rounded education, learn many languages,. The list goes on.
Con- They all think you’re those hardcore rednecks, Trump supporter or a Karen.
(Please note: I have no opinion if you’re a Trump supporter or not. I’m stating from what I’ve seen, a lot of people where I live are not pro-Trump)
I’m surprised at how easy it is for Americans to immigrate elsewhere, yet so hard to do it the other way around.
I really want to go back one day, but being 25 and with my student status ending soon I doubt it’s gonna be easy.