Moving out of London

Interesting to read about long winters in Toronto...

It's less about the length, more about the absolute savagery. Here you can do the same things all year round, like ride a bike, swim in an outdoor pool, go for a run in just a t-shirt...only under exceptional circumstances do those things get ruled out by the winter.

In Toronto that's not the case - the weather changes what you can do.

Also Ice Storms are fun until people start dying from using their BBQs indoors to warm their houses.

Both Toronto and New York strike me as 'other Londons' but with more bonkers weather and less green space. Get to the West coast for something completely different.

Summer is doable, although obvs hot the US have aircon sorted. Winter was a real shock though - much more debilitating than I ever expected. It was fucking long this year too and there's fuck all to do compared to the rest of the year. One thing people don't mention though is that it's warm through most of Oct - I was out in the evening in shorts and a long shirt. So by UK standards your summer goes on for ages.

I'd say the biggest shocks for me were cost, culture and ropeyness. People by enlarge are astoundingly selfish and rude by English standards, this becomes even more evident when you come back from other US cities/states. The rundown/backwards nature of the City, but the country in general still surprises me. Maybe it was growing up with an image of the US being rich and developed, but sometimes it seems more like the late '90s here and has more in common with a developing country than Europe.

I've been in New York when it's been -20 and 35 degrees. At least in the winter it doesn't smell as bad as it does in the summer.