Questions, Questions

Some from the More Questions post. These are from Peg.

A. What other country would you willingly move to tomorrow, all things being equal?

This is the kind of thing I almost never think about. I've never been much of a world traveler and so therefore have very little comparison to make. Am I guaranteed a comparable standard of living? Up until I had been there I might have said Jamaica. But after seeing how most of the Jamaicans live I'm not sure I would answer the same now.

I think were it a real possibility, with family and my professional life, I would move to Hawaii. But then that's not another country. I guess what I am looking for here is a tropical climate with an American standard of living without being in the US. Is that possible?

Ever since high school I have had some kind of unfounded fascination with New Zealand. I think I might take a flier and move there. It was featured pretty prevalently in the book Friday, by Robert Heinlein (that's a good link because it has the old cover art). I guess that's where the idea started. They make good movies there now, who knows.

Really I think weather, for me, would be second to English. I've never been adept at learning languages. I think moving someplace where the expectation was that I would have another language available to me would make me very uncomfortable (I may be out of luck here, as I gather parts of the US are already like this).

The other day Marisa was talking about Germany and its 100 public funded Opera companies. So I gather there might be better economies and administrations for the kind of work we do. Technical Director in German is Technischer Leiter which is I guess not that bad considering what some of the other German words I've seen look like in print. Marisa would be a Beleuchtungsmeister although I bet there's something gender specific in that "Chief Electrician" title. Maybe I could learn to speak German.

Like I said, this is a hard question for me. Where ever I wound up, I think no matter how long I would be there, that I would always be a baseball, hotdogs, and Mom's Apple Pie American - embarrassing as that might turn out to be.