PFVA wrote:Out of curiosity you have over 400 thousand Portuguese living in the UK, official data.
400 thousand The country only has 10 million people, that's equivalent to 5% of the population.
Those 400K living there include all kinds of professions from business owners, to cleaning people, from scientific investigators to bus drivers, policemen, lots of nurses, and anything else you can think about including one banker (Durão Barroso working for Merryl Lynch in London). A big % of them moved there less than 5 years ago due to the crisis here.
Some are talking of leaving with Brexit, some of staying, and some waiting to see how things go.
On this side we have 65 thousand British living in Portugal, oficial data too. Some of them, specially those owning businesses here are applying for dual citizenship, others are just waiting to see how things go but not talking of leaving.
Ahem .. if Wikipedia is correct ..
In 2016, the Italian embassy in London estimated that 600,000 Italians were resident in the UK
I did not know there were so many, probably lot more if you count all the students/tourists/etc. coming here just temporary for various reasons.
I think probably what "most" attracts(ed) people from other countries in UK is that UK was looking "stable" and "decent" as in "if you can find a job you can find a good job that pays reasonably well" and "they treat people reasonably well".
I mean you work, you do your job, people are nice, things are nice ( or so they should ) at least in theory and even in quite some practice "people do well and things are designed to work well".
I mean if you compare that let's say to Italy where "to find job is hell", "when you find one things are ALWAYS WEIRD", "the pay is normally quite shit borderline to legal when it's not illegal" "everything is a mess/confusion/nothing ever works the way it would be supposed to work", "you go to work is not a work is a soap opera with drama and politics all the time", "everything is a soap opera, a
gossip newspaper, a fashion commentary", "it's not so much important what you work or how you work but how you look while you
kinda do the work you are supposed to that often is not even clear what should be as long as you dress 'correctly' and you look as
the last fashion canon dictates".
"Scams everywhere, if there's not one yet let's invent one, gossip is everywhere, people talking behind your back all time, workplace can
be a minefield", "watch your back all the time from everywhere and everyone cause you'll never know what could come next out of the blue".
But yes the food is better, the climate is better, the coffee is real and those are the only things that work that's why we are SO protective of them
Don't touch the coffee because if you touch it there's one thing less that works and we are left with only 2 !
In UK there's some politics people talks about, in Italy there's some politics you can NOT talk about because there's nothing to understand there, it makes no sense whatsoever even when they momentary stop bitching with each other or taking out one scandal someone did or the other or the huge amount of money X stolen from Y that stolen from Z that robbed from W .
But must be said even UK has "its own part" of "looking weird" no doubt about it.
I still don't really understand "what went wrong with EU" but at this point "well let's see what happens".
