New Yorkers are far, far more attractive: It’s true beyond question, at the very least for women.
New York: four seasons, including a real summer and a romantic, if freezy, winter.
London: one season, which is shit.
It’s a classist place with little “bootstrap” sensibility. Aspiring artists can’t make money waiting tables or tending bar because nobody tips; they have to temp or enjoy independent wealth.
The Tube is expensive, shuts down early, and runs so deeply underground that riders often end up with black snot.
Drunk men try punching you, for no reason.
Non-white people get yelled at by drunk white people.
Utilities don’t work. No sinks in most bathrooms; showers electrocute you.
Everything’s badly organized: Heathrow worst of all.
Emily Bobrow polls her friends and colleagues on lovely old clichés about London that are no longer true, if they ever were.
People wear tweed: Fashion in London is either aggressively contemporary (asymmetrical hair, $250 denim) or super-uptight (posh suits, cuff links, square-toe Euro shoes).
The kiddies can recite Shakespeare: London has its own elementary-education woes.
The tastes are more sophisticated: Ugh. A walk down any “High Street” will prove otherwise.
All those cute red double-deckers and phone booths: The old Routemaster bus has mostly been retired (there are still double-decker buses, but not the old kind with a perch in back that riders can hop on and off from). Transit officials prefer superlong “Bendy Buses,” and phone booths are lined with postcards advertising sex services.
The police go unarmed: In fact, it’s now common to see cops carrying assault rifles.