My experience is of course anecdotal and completely subjective. I have spent the major part of my Belgian life in Brussels and the main differences I am noticing are, in no particular order:

• I feel a lot more secure regarding public safety.
• Traffic and road infrastructure is a mess (and therefore traffic safety is a mess also). Pedestrians are still at the bottom of the hierarchy in the collective mind, nothing yields when you need to cross a road), although the law states the contrary. This is like Belgium in the 70s. This makes driving problematic because If I drive like I would in Belgium I become unpredictable to the other drivers here.
• For every car on the road, there are at least 10 scooters buzzing around. And they overtake on the right side.
• In Belgium we close the doors to keep the cold outside, here we close the doors to keep the heat and humidity out.
• I cannot imagine summer without Air Conditioning: moving around without a car is a problem if I need to keep a decent look at my destination: I have an approximate range of 1 km walking outside before I start liquefying from sweat (800m if it is sunny).
• Cold can hurt physically when under-equipped but you can keep adding layers. Against heat and humidity there is a point when you cannot remove layers anymore.
• There are convenience stores everywhere. They are open 24h/7d and you can almost buy anything there (they have AC also :) )
• Dealing with the banking system here is hell. Especially as a non-citizen.
• Service is way faster here, as an example (but I think this is exceptional) my modem was down yesterday and the telecom company dispatched an engineer to my apartment 2 hours later (after asking if it was ok for me).

Regarding the geopolitical situation, I personally do not feel scared because I am convinced that China does not have the military means to take over Taiwan without having to pay a (too) heavy toll. I am angry at their contant disinformation though. Taiwan has never been a full part of China, yet they try to gaslight the world in thinking so. There is no reunification. It would actually be an annexation.

Well, as usual the situation is way more complex and subtle than what people are usually led to believe.

Anyway, I love it here.

Yeah I was surprised he knew about it. Then again it was picked up by mainstream media (shows how Reddit mis calculated this )

French speaking Belgian, so a bit of both I guess :D

Yesterday they were upgrading the server so I figure the delays were because of that. I am honestly curious about how all of it is running because I feel like I could perhaps be helpful. Though on the other hand, too many people in the kitchen doesn’t help anyone.

That one person angrily hitting the downvote arrow.

Thank you for the link. I read it and it was helpful. Now understand that I can read, post and subscribe to communities on other instances while staying connected only to Lemmy.world.

Haha, I was just browsing local and thought this was a [email protected] post, sorry for intruding!