10 Things I've Learned About America Since Moving Here

hi are you planning to move to the United States of America if you are stay tuned because I have a video right here for you I am a person but obviously who has lived in the United States now for 10 years and over that time I have made some observations about this very place that I very succinctly want to share with you so here are 10 things I've learned after 10 years in America the immigration process is very thorough we had to send in all manner of paperwork you know photos affidavits from people we hardly knew and hardly knew us and I'm kidding was family members and and and all that and on top of that you know you don't just put in all this paperwork and then wait the nine months in which time you could have a baby if you wanted which would mess up the immigration process in many ways and so we didn't do that but it costs a lot at the end of it all I think we were talking over $1,000 just to get the initial two-year work and residency stay and all of that and then after that I had to extend it again by another ten years and put in a lot of documentation and all of that so it's a bureaucratic process but it's worth it in the end well this was something that you know I came to find just because I ended up living in Indiana which technically is not the middle of the country it's in the Midwest which is a misleading name because it's closer much closer to the East Coast than it is to the West but all that to say it's it's a little cheaper living inland in Indiana you know we had numerous apartments all over the state actually where we were paying you know about five hundred something dollars for a reason for reasonably sized apartments when we lived in Anderson in fact we had a two floor apartment and it was I don't know how many square feet 1200 I think and we were paying five hundred and thirty dollars if you go out to Boston or San Francisco or even up in Chicago which technically is in the middle but it's its own entity it's its own country in many ways population wise you are looking at paying a hefty sum of money in those places and in fact of course a lot of immigrants do move to the major cities but if you're looking to pay a lot less than avoid the coasts you know go inland and and see what they have to offer so the national unemployment rate here just like anywhere in the world I suppose can fluctuate quite drastically over ten years specifically though the ten years that I've been here if I'm being truly honest I moved here in November 2008 of course that's when the recession was really kicking off at that point and so we were left with an unemployment rate that was considerable and that was you know it peaked I think in 2010 and then obviously slowly came down to a point that it is now a very nice-looking unemployment rate but I think the reason I put this one in is because we think of America don't we as quite a prosperous nation we think of it as you know that the bastion of capitalism but it's like any other country in the world does see a fluctuation in the job market and of course by extension in the economy at large and that's something that really hit home I think after moving here because we were living in recession hit Anderson Indiana then gradually we progressed into professions that took us further afield Indianapolis and of course Chicago now and we've seen that difference and the what it does to a country speaking of fluctuations the weather in the Midwest is insane at times okay so in the summer 8 it's sweltering you know it can get up to a hundred degrees Fahrenheit which is mental but then conversely and I've spoken about this a lot of times on my channel the winters are like hell they are freezing in fact on average in Chicago you're looking at about 7 degrees C lower than you would see in the north of England on average in December and that's that's an average so imagine the sort of the lows we go sometimes way below zero I think I've known it since I've been living in the United States to go something along the lines of 15 to 20 degrees C below zero which is frightening ly cold and not entirely fit for humans accents accents yes so just as Americans are often portrayed as only knowing two British accents you know the Queen's English and cockney we're not that good at knowing American accent so at least I can speak for myself in that regard before I moved to the United States I I think I knew of just sort of basic southern English general Nightly News a kind of New York accent and possibly valley girl right that's for but no America is replete with far far far far far far far far far far far far how many times can you say far one-sentence far more accents than that if you could just look at the south I said a moment ago that I I knew you know vaguely of a general southern accent but it has plenty of nuances all around the south but just up here in the Great Lakes region right where you've got sort of Chicago or illinois in general you've got Wisconsin you got Minnesota nearby those were influenced quite heavily by Scandinavian immigrants that came in hundreds of years ago and there's a variances to two accents and dialects up in this region with which I was not familiar anybody that's seen perhaps Fargo you know might get a sort of broad understanding of style of speech but it is it's not sort of well-known to us in Britain you know I could and I will and I have done you know videos on American accents and can speak to it more broadly outside of the context of this list but it's it's fascinating and I absolutely love it you might need a vehicle you know not everywhere has public transit that there's not trains that get you from any city to any city just like there are in Britain you will sometimes have to rely on a vehicle certainly in Anderson when I lived there where you know buses were about as easy to find as jobs during the recession it might have changed now it was just difficult and they you know didn't exactly as a town specialized in sidewalks now that got better when I moved to Indianapolis and Fort Wayne it was quite pedestrianised so great you could walk around or you could cycle but if you wanted to go a bit further afield you know there were buses yeah sure but there are every sort of hour sometimes and you'd have to wait quite a while and the only train to speak of in the entire state really is the one that runs from Indianapolis to Chicago and vice-versa other than that you're screwed or you have to drive and get a vehicle I've since moved to Chicago and that has a comprehensive public transit system as do quite a lot of cities in the United States they really depends on where you live so you know I spoke a moment ago about accents but just language in general is quite a departure from what it is in the United Kingdom or in Britain and you know I think obviously well mostly at most of us aware of things like this the spelling of color the spelling of theater and and things of that nature you know you read them in books and you you see all these sort of differences in American films but once you live here you realize that not only are there far far far more language differences than we ever knew but the different regions of America itself are different from the other for example I was in the city of Boise in Idaho earlier this year and I discovered that the animal groundhog there is called a whistle pig okay a whistle pig what a great name that is and it's just things like that the more you go around the more you find there's actually linguistic nuance you know to the lexicon to pronunciation to spelling and all of that and it's fascinating there's a wide array of differences and and and this is the case for many different reasons and that's one of the reasons you should follow my channel so that we can go in depth together on those very things okay speaking of things that are big I think we knew it you know portion sizes they are typically greater here when I in fact visited Boston in 2004 I asked for a kid's ice cream and it was that big about the size of my face so that got big children out there in Boston um but you know since I've moved here I've found this to be the case also and one discovery that came to light and not long after I moved here is that a lot of places restaurants and the like once you get a pop a soda fizzy drink whatever you want to call it that's a another regional difference here across the United States and you get the chance to refill it for free free refills it's encouraged that actually prompted me to give up pop soda fizzy drinks altogether because I found myself succumbing rather too much to that generous offer American people get a hard time when it comes to stereotypes you know that they're loud that they are overweight and all of that and there are statistics to back up you know certainly obesity levels in this country and it's unfortunate of course not every American fits that bill nor should we demonize those that do but that's just one stereotype I think the loudness stereotype is situation-specific right I think Americans do tend to be louder in restaurants it's more of a cultural thing for chatter to be you know at volume and to happen quite readily but you know Americans are not always loud and it's it's not like you walk into a library and find it there it's not like you you would walk into a lot of situations and find it in fact you know if you go to a football game in the United Kingdom there's a lot of loud British people there right and so again it's situation-specific and and and also I would say the same thing about politeness values okay so British people you know obviously a stereotype there is that we are polite and I'm not saying that some of us aren't I think there are examples of us not being again at football matches probably right and but also in other areas of life and conversely Americans can be some of the Politis people I've ever known if in fact to take it back into the restaurants the waiters are almost to polite right they come round just to see if everything's working out for you and at times that can to a British person like myself that can be quite burdensome because you want to take that time to have a conversation with the person you're eating with not with the person serving the food so there are ups and downs to that one but I would definitely not say that all Americans are direct to the point of being impolite there is a directness here but I think that Americans tend to be among some of the Politis people I've ever met there are multiple state eleven of them in total I think ten of those are out west that are larger than the United Kingdom at least in terms of area not in terms of population in fact in the case of Wyoming it has I think a population of about 500,000 there are actually more cows there than people and yet it's roughly the same size area wise as the entire United Kingdom but it's huge the country is massive and you only really realise that I think when you are travelling around by car and then you see that sometimes it can take more than a day to get through an entire state the place is huge and I love it for that because it means that you know it's it's forever gonna be an adventure to go and visit all 50 states which is something that I've been trying to do so that's it ten observations after ten years in America I might do a Part B there's a lot more to say thank you for watching this video and if you are planning to move to the United States why don't you drop me a comment in the comments box below and if you would like to help fund this channel you can do so by going to patreon.com slash lost in the pond we're thankful to all of our patrons who you can see flashing up on your screen right there furthermore if you feel like you can't live without my videos then you better seek professional help or subscribe to my channel by punching my little face right there and alternatively if you enjoyed this video I think maybe you might enjoy this one six reasons I actually love living in the United States they're all true

Channel: Lost in the Pond

Views: 644,242

Keywords: Finding America, US Travel, Laurence Brown, America, living

Id: a9LMqk7BybM

Length: 12min 45sec (765 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 28 2018