Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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I like the nature here, and walks by myself. There are a huge number of foxes in central London. You see them pretty often, but you hear them howling every night. There are parks and greenery and trees everywhere, more so than any comparable European or American city that I have visited, squirrels so docile or unwittingly domesticated that you could pet them, friendly giant pelicans that waddle around the park and take pictures with tourists, and a very large number of swans. There is also the opportunity to regularly watch nature’s less savory interactions, especially between pigeons and seagulls, since we have great numbers of both. I once watched a seagull rip a pigeon out of the sky and dismember it, and sometimes you do find a brutalized pigeon corpse laying in the middle of the street or on the sidewalk; what at first glance could be the work of a car reveals itself pretty quickly to be that of a seagull.
Like you, I feel lucky to live in a place with little obvious squalor and crime, although certainly more of both than in Japan. There is a long-standing minor epidemic of phone snatching by men on mopeds (with no or removable plates, wearing balaclavas, thus presumably challenging London’s vaunted system of mass surveillance), but there are signs everywhere not to take your phone out on the street, and I find an Apple Watch is good enough to check texts and change music. These thieves do not seem to snatch the ten thousand dollar handbags I see even frail and elderly women around here carrying, interestingly, perhaps because their fencing pipeline is less developed or more easily penetrated by the police. We have some homeless, but they’re largely friendly-enough native military vets with a drinking problem or, Kurdish or Roma migrants who come as families, and who unroll their sleeping bags at night under the awnings of the department stores. They’re friendly enough, and the terrifying and dangerous schizophrenic tweakers one sees in American cities are completely absent. At least where I live, you can walk around at any time of day and night and deal with minimal real risk of interpersonal violence.
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