When moving to England a French expatriate lands on a different planet.

The healthcare system seems to lack the reassuring security we have back home, holidays and Bank Holidays are almost non-existent, RTT sound like a joke. You always end up shortening your education because honestly, the Classes Prepa and the whole University/School divide is way to complicated to even start with. The Tube has the speed of a drowsy turtle (when it’s not closed for engineering work) and is damn expensive. And don’t even get me started on the whole TV schedule. Why are the movies starting at 6 or at 10pm and end up being cut by the news? What happened to the sacro-saint 8pm news? Did they drowned in the Thames on the way to the BBC?

However over here, shops and restaurants don’t take you for granted and you actually win back your rights as a consumer. You don’t get abused by angry and moody waiters. And it’s not too hard to find food on a Sunday. The lack of administrative queues is a real revolution as well. Here you don’t have to wait anywhere. You don’t have endless hours of forms and duplicates to fill in. You call, take a rendez-vous or do it online and it works. Even the post-office is great: can you imagine that the collecting point for packages and the general post-office are at different place as to avoid queues? Sounds genius eh? Taxes are done straight at the source, it’s great because honestly I tend to be lazy and I don’t want to ever have to fill in French taxes form.

Then there is the whole Voting System.

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