If you could pack up and move your whole life, where would you go?

Ten years ago I would have said, money and 'fucking the planet up' permitting, houses for different parts of the year and moving, moving: New Zealand, Reykjavik and, maybe eastern Malaysia. Now I'd happily settle in the south island of NZ. Probably Nelson but west coast would be lovely as well.

no matter where you go, there you are

It's a slogan I know but I basically believe it -- nothing much about your existence is going to change as a result of changing your physical location

You live alone in a town called your skull

I had a chance to hang out with some successful professional artists (painters ) about 3 years ago at a social event in Bethnal Green … It was an under-populated event with generous sponsorship and much free alcohol. It was was eye-opening to me just how hard-nosed and cynical artists are. They talked shop: including swapping details of summer teaching events, which was best paid and most prestigious. And also gossiping about a mutual acquaintance: “It’s tragic. He’s got divorced and he’s got a new girlfriend, a flat at the Barbican and a sports car. He’s so tight that he invited me over to sort out his stereo - and it was unbelievable : his vinyl records were ancient heavy metal”.

In short: would not want to hang with painters.

Somewhere in the south of France. Nice would be nice, or maybe Montpelier. I might actually do this in a few year's time, once my son's through school.

i moved around a fair bit in my twenties. it was cool, and even though i still lived alone in my skull, for a while i was able to say 'wow, i'm in alaska!' and that actually went a fair way

but i also had friends in the places i'd moved, and worked in situations with a lot of people my age (bookstores!)

it's pretty hard to make friends as a middle-aged person, so if you move someplace new where you don't know anyone, i think you have to have a plan to be really outgoing and ready to throw yourself into strange situations. and if you're not ready to do that, you're better off being someplace where you already have friends

that said, i would totally move to canada (well, maybe not saskatchewan) if i could navigate the job/immigration thing

I have dreams of living on a remote Scottish island, writing next to a fire as storms whip up the sea. But I don't have any money or skills, can't drive, and lack of accessible amenities would screw me over majorly. I also can't speak any other languages well enough to move to anywhere that isn't English-speaking (I had a similar dream about moving to an isolated fjord in Norway).

I moved to be where I am, so I'm happy with the city I live in, but rural Italy has its appeals, or maybe the Amalfi coast. Assuming money/work is no object in this vision.

New Zealand

been saying that for the last five years

Probably would move to Amsterdam or Brussels - places that have established and long-standing culture, but also where you feel more easily connected to the rest of Europe.

The trouble with London/England is that it feels too disconnected from anywhere else and its depressing and cynical political culture seems overbearing and inescapable.

There are a number of places in Europe I could happily move to tomorrow, if it were feasible for the family. Planning to leave the UK as soon as I can, even if that's 15 years, too scared of gun violence/ healthcare system to ever consider moving to the US, Asia was good to me but even after a decade it wasn't home.

My primary criteria would be climate (cool but no brutal winters), on the coast, lots of green.

New Zealand, Ireland, parts of France and Italy would probably top the list. Don't really care about Major Cities but being relatively close to a city would be nice.

Foggy cliffs would be good, I could spend a lot of quality time staring out into the misty void.

New Orleans or Italy

I’d fuck w NOLA but I bet it’s changing way too fast for me

...it feels too disconnected from anywhere else and its depressing and cynical political culture seems overbearing and inescapable.

― Luna Schlosser

New board description.

I used to think Joshua Tree would be nice (I don't mind the heat) but I was there in November a few years ago and it was cold! And I figured if it's this cold in November this place must have at least 4 months of this cold. Also windy there, which would bug me after a while, I think. I'm in the LA area now, but a smaller city that fairly self-contained (Pasadena) and I really like it.

And before JT I thought the San Luis Obispo area would be great to settle down in, weather and culture-wise, but it's as expensive as LA now.

everywhere desirable in California is expensive now

what if your main goal was to live in an inspiring place to paint, to be around painters, and to spend as little money as possible?

― Bruce Stingbean (Karl Malone),

i forgot to make my point - much more important to me than the art world is how inspiring the surrounding landscape and weather and people are

― Bruce Stingbean (Karl Malone), Sunday, May 29, 2022 12:58 PM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

(landscape very much including buildings and urban life as well as the rest)

― Bruce Stingbean (Karl Malone),

KM fwiw you remind me v much of a friend who in his middle age took up painting seriously and moved to Houston, Tx and he seems to have found exactly what you're looking for there. Currently living at Elder St. Artists' Lofts

In Houston you absolutely will need a car, or at least a bike/motorcycle.

I feel like I already live in the place I want to in the US, but I’ve fantasized about moving to Canada, Mexico, Sweden (3 friends of mine have recently moved there), Amsterdam, Barcelona, Lisbon, the south of France, and everywhere I’ve ever been in Italy

these fantasies won't come true without a spectacular effort though and I'm not willing to make that

agree with what mookieproof said: "it's pretty hard to make friends as a middle-aged person, so if you move someplace new where you don't know anyone, i think you have to have a plan to be really outgoing and ready to throw yourself into strange situations. and if you're not ready to do that, you're better off being someplace where you already have friends"

also Houston is a godforsaken malarial swamp

Anyway we discussed it years ago and this friend's answer to your question at the time following p much the same criteria was Guanajuato, Mexico

a really interesting city, also nearby are San Miguel de Allende, my favorite place in Mexico and very much an artist's town, León, and Queretéro

Querétaro, sorry

co-sign San Miguel

I went maybe 12 years ago. Lot of expats (US and Canadian, maybe Euro?). Your Spanish doesn’t have to be on point

My best friends moved to San Miguel temporarily in 2019 with their daughter, my goddaughter, so it is a special place to me. I went there just as the pandemic was getting to be big news, in Feb/March 2020, and I remember how everyone out of fear was focused on washing their hands. Little did we know. I got back the day that SF went into lockdown. It seems like a different era now

also remember experiencing The Day of the Dead in San Miguel in the early 90s, in my memory it felt like something from a Buñuel movie

candles and wax flowers (an art form that is fascinating) everywhere, children in strange costumes, parades, marching bands, church bells, paper maché heads, nighttime revelry and total chaos

I want an apartment with air conditioning and Internet access, and someone that comes in to do the cleaning that I can't get myself to do and that my husband can't do any more. I can walk places and get food so I don't have to make myself cook. I go from there to a job with steady starting and ending times where I can sit, drink tea or a soft drink and tap away on a computer. I do something on the side that people enjoy. This is pretty much it, and I doubt it will ever happen at this late date.

If I arranged air conditioning and a cleaner, you could swap lives with me right now.

Painters' circles that I would have liked to hang with:

Paris early 1900s through to 1920s
Chelsea 1920s/30s
Soho (UK) 1950s
Royal College of Art London late 1950s (Hockney, Kitaj, Boty etc)
New York 1960s
Shoreditch 1990s (also wd take opportunity to snap up a fine Spitalfields Hueguenot house to restore and live/work)

Would probably pass on New York 1950s (too much heavy drinking and less interested in the dominant abstract expressionist scene )

xp what is takayama like?

Many XPs to Karl...

When I first visited Japan I was advised to go somewhere more rural along with the big cities, it was our honeymoon and a travel agent helped arrange it and suggested we visit Takayama.

It's in Gifu prefecture which is in the centre of the country, a lot of it is alpine, gets a lot of snow, and is the heart of a lot of historical culture.

We spent two days in Takayama and I've never been so burned to leave a place in my entire life, I've never experienced that before about somewhere and still can't quite explain why, it just seemed like a perfect place to live.

Anyway, we returned a few years later and made the town our base for a few days while we explored the surrounding area and it really one of my favourite places in the world.

lmfao at so many of you choosing somewhere inside the confirmed dystopia that is the USA

Eh, if you don't/aren't (insert qualifier here), there are plenty of places in the US where you'd probably be able to live quite pleasantly as you ride out the heat death of this great nation.

I liked Brussels a lot on a brief visit, it seemed like a very livable city, interesting and with a lot of green space and enough room even for the tourists. And I could happily drink Cantillon Kriek every day until I die of cyanide poisoning.

I have friends in Rouen, loved my time there and would love to go back, though the town itself is not particularly interesting.

I liked Bristol a lot, again on a very short visit.

Hard to argue with New Zealand, though. I've been there only once, when I was seven, so my memories are very incomplete and biased, but it really seemed like heaven.

aomewhere that was not actively facilitating the replication of the novel coronavirus

My wife and I have talked about this a lot. We're at 4 years out from both kids being out of high school, which will remove the most urgent need for us to be in East Tennessee. Don't want to move a million miles away from them either (tho obv I have no real idea where they'll end up). In the last year or so we've started talking more seriously. We travel together a lot and we always joke that we want to move to wherever was the last place we visited. But after some real consideration (Chicago -- too cold, Oaxaca -- too far), a trip to New Orleans in February settled it. It's always been one of our favorite places, my wife lived there for a few years, I have family from there and have always loved it. I agree with the above statement that there are a lot of forces at work on it, definitely not all positive, but there's still a strong New Orleans culture that's very real and ground-level. And it's just not like anywhere else in America (or anywhere — it's always seemed like a bit of a mythological port city to me). Also I feel like it's sort of eternally expecting apocalypse, and they're ahead of the rest of us in figuring out how to live with that.

So that's our current thinking. We have some time to work out the logistics.

i have a few different good friends from the old days who also made their way to new orleans and never left. i've only been a few times, but it's the american city that is the least american and will always hold a place of honor because of that

so many of you choosing somewhere inside the confirmed dystopia that is the USA

governance in the USA is very badly broken and in many visible ways we're firmly on the path of conversion to a fascist state, without many remaining exits from that path. if it ever looks like the concentration camps for the 'internal enemies of the state' were immanent, I think my refuge of choice would be Ireland, maybe Galway, Limerick or a smaller satellite town near these. but, as I said, my roots in Oregon are very deep. only a refugee situation is likely to dislodge me.

We have Canadian passports so were thinking of somewhere boring but pretty in BC, like Nelson

ha i love how many people have said nz. i would also say nz

i would also move to berlin instantly if i could, the week i spent there was one of the best of my life

there are so many places i would like to go. i would like to be able to speak the language, though, at least to a level where i can get by. i have been duolingoing spanish so hard the last few months

i have been talking about the fucking los zapatos verdes for so long it's starting to materialize in my dreams

i think one of my big unresolved desires is that i desire to move to very remote place with zero people and live in a small cabin. i already did it last year for a few weeks, it was one of the best experiences of my life. but when i did that, there was a guy who owned the place who would stop by every week or so to make sure that i hadn't died, and when the water pump broke, he was everything to me. i'm worried about moving to the middle of nowhere with nothing but an ancient time-life How to Fix your Disappointing House book, following the instructions and the thing still being broken.

so until i learn how to avoid dying from exposure and incompetence when i'm in the wilderness, i should probably stay near a supermarket

I often consider moving back home to New Orleans but I'm not quite ready. I visited over the holidays and it was a pretty grim scene, as I had a hard time distinguishing between what was post-Ida destruction and what was just standard neglect and deterioration (of the city and my family). If you're moving from somewhere rural/red then you're probably already inured to covidiocy/trumpism but otherwise it can be a very frustrating experience. I still miss the place dearly. If anyone does plan on moving there and is looking to get a handle on the city's corrupt politics I'd recommend following @skooks on twitter.

It's a slogan I know but I basically believe it -- nothing much about your existence is going to change as a result of changing your physical location

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Sunday, May 29, 2022 12:43 PM (yesterday)

uhhhh ... I'm going to assume that this was meant in the context of Karl (a cis-white dude) wanting to move somewhere and not really a universal "your," where other people would experience significant changes related to racism, homophobia, transphobia, the right to get an abortion, general acceptance and tolerance of "otherness" ... and have moved for those reasons?

Oh yeah, I know just enough about New Orleans to expect dysfunction, poverty, racism, violence. On the other hand we hear gunshots in our Knoxville neighborhood all the time and I’m surrounded by check-cashing places and opiate addicts living by the creeks, so … I have a reasonable tolerance for urban dystopia. But New Orleans also has a lot to counter all of that.

can I do this for England?

I'm only half joking when I ask, why would you want to? With so many other options available...

appreciate the summary info about the logistics of this

if you don't want to be a citizen and you're employable there are plenty of options in europe. not necessarily easy/good options, especially if you have a family.

because the English appreciate their big bottomed birds? idk

i'm going to try to move from a red state to a blue state in the next 5 years which feels daunting enough.

apologies if discussed upthread, but many of the usual bug out locations when this topic comes up (e.g. NZ and canada) make immigration difficult to impossible for people (or families) with disabilities or other health conditions.

colorado would be a big improvement and feels approachable. i don't exactly love it but probably denver. the western slope is beautiful but overall more conservative than where i am currently, even though it's in a liberal state. it would be more difficult being out there i think, unless i want to go the recluse route.

Colorado is my pragmatic answer, but "another planet" if we're talking ideal situations.

if you don't want to be a citizen and you're employable there are plenty of options in europe. not necessarily easy/good options, especially if you have a family.

I recently read that Estonia is actively seeking expats. They have what's called a "digital nomad visa". I've seen pictures of Estonia; it's pretty. A guy I know, originally from NYC, lives on an island there now.

*immigrants

(xp) I imagine it's fine if you don't mind Putin breathing down your neck.

Southern California, at least until it runs out of water.

I like the Estonian PM.. but it's a pretty tiny country, like 1.5 million or something

I have an American born-and-raised friend with Estonian citizenship because a grand or great grandparent grew up there; her two children (also born in the US) also have it but her husband does not. They’re apparently pretty open based on family lineage due to having so few people.

This family’s lived there on sabbaticals and fullbrights for extended periods on two occasions now but he actually got deported last month due to some visa screw up. So they’re not just taking everyone and I don’t think it’s trivial for him to actually get citizenship there despite being married to one but long term residency might be easier.

I’d be a brain in a vat thinking it’s seeing Husker Du at Goofy’s Upper Deck…forever.

Was very disappointed to find out that I would have qualified for Canadian citizenship via my grandmother (native, so my dad would have been automatically eligible) if I had applied before 2009.

I'd like to say a medium-sized island in the finland archipelago but as a californian I would probably wimp out on the brutal winders, oh well

last i checked, my own best chance for eu citizenship would involve (somehow) accessing a mess of birth & marriage certs going back a century, getting them professionally translated into italiano, explaining the part about the bigamy and aliases, and accidentally dropping generous bribes on a lot of desks

It would have been cool to early gotten some nice land around Taylorsville lake area, somewhat in driving distance to Louisville for work before the money hit town. It's really nice there and will be getting completely transformed into a big money house place especially with the new Ford electric plant.

I like to think I could hang with a place with more winter, but I don't know that it is reality unless I got a snow blower.

Welcome to Portugal, the new expat haven. Californians, please go home

Just found about United States. Had no idea. Unfollowing now

— Alex Peter (@LolOverruled) July 5, 2022

xp some family friends actually packed up and moved over to that exact city in Portugal. went to visit them in February and it looked like Portugal's version of the French Riviera.

I have no idea what the Austrian immigration options are but I've really enjoyed the time I've spent in Vienna. Good walking city with lots of public transportation.

New Zealand