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> Europeans speak more than one language If your skillset is English, German, and French then you're good to go. Over 30 official languages on the continent pr

> Europeans speak more than one language If your skillset is English, German, and French then you're good to go. Over 30 official languages on the continent produce countless subsets though. Polish, Lithuanian, and Hungarian will not get you far even though knowing these three would be an enormous achievement. > And why go by number of cities rather than population sizes? > Cambridge (UK) I mean locations like Amsterdam, Barcelona, Balearic Islands maybe Munich and Madrid, and few more. British society is heavily class-based, not only language is important but accent as well. What chance to socialize I have in Cambridge as a foreigner not studying in or not associated with Oxbrige?

ben_w 5y ago
> What chance to socialize I have in Cambridge as a foreigner not studying in or not associated with Oxbrige? Better than you might think. While I have a middle-class South Coast accent, my degree is from Aberystwyth, my friends and acquaintances in Cambridge include a Hong Kong-Canadian dual-national, an Irish drummer, a Scottish goth, two Germans who were aqui-hired into the same startup as me, and an American-British dual-national whose degree was from Belfast. Even Cambridge, small as it is, is big enough to not be homogeneous, to support multiple different groups for assorted hobbies and special interests — furries, a maker space, game dev, bouldering, kink, LARP, revolutionary communism, music old and new, comedy, … I never fully explored it before I left for Berlin, despite being there for nearly ten years. You don’t have to be an Etonian. (That said, post-Brexit, it will be harder to even get into the U.K. than before if you’re an EU citizen…)
rcxdude 5y ago
> What chance to socialize I have in Cambridge as a foreigner not studying in or not associated with Oxbrige? Pretty good. Cambridge is far more than the university (despite being smaller than Oxford), and even the university's reputation as being full of toffs is quite overblown (not that they don't exist, but they're far from the majority). Like most UK cities there's a substantial fraction of immigrans: Brits were actually a minority at one point at the startup I work at.

ben_w 5y ago

> What chance to socialize I have in Cambridge as a foreigner not studying in or not associated with Oxbrige? Better than you might think. While I have a middle-class South Coast accent, my degree is from Aberystwyth, my friends and acquaintances in Cambridge include a Hong Kong-Canadian dual-national, an Irish drummer, a Scottish goth, two Germans who were aqui-hired into the same startup as me, and an American-British dual-national whose degree was from Belfast. Even Cambridge, small as it is, is big enough to not be homogeneous, to support multiple different groups for assorted hobbies and special interests — furries, a maker space, game dev, bouldering, kink, LARP, revolutionary communism, music old and new, comedy, … I never fully explored it before I left for Berlin, despite being there for nearly ten years. You don’t have to be an Etonian. (That said, post-Brexit, it will be harder to even get into the U.K. than before if you’re an EU citizen…)

rcxdude 5y ago

> What chance to socialize I have in Cambridge as a foreigner not studying in or not associated with Oxbrige? Pretty good. Cambridge is far more than the university (despite being smaller than Oxford), and even the university's reputation as being full of toffs is quite overblown (not that they don't exist, but they're far from the majority). Like most UK cities there's a substantial fraction of immigrans: Brits were actually a minority at one point at the startup I work at.