Igor and Frank talk about the differences between City Life and Country Life – LA, with 18 million inhabitants and Cleebourg, with 700. Where?
Transcript
Frank And we are live.
So just a little bit by introduction, welcome to Opportunity Exchange Part 2, where we foster the exchange of ideas and practical solutions with the focus of empowering those who don’t have the opportunities that others have through a dialogue and a collaboration.
And back in round two, we have Igor who, as far as I’m aware, Igor, you still live in LA, you still work in LA, you still have fun in LA. Nothing’s changed?
Igor Well, maybe what’s changed, and it was a good change is now we have a car. So our experience has changed quite a bit.
Frank Ah, so that’s the sedge way to the last episode. So the Honda Civic has moved in, has it?
Igor Has moved in and it’s survived 300 miles, I don’t know, like a long trip last holiday. So we are very happy with it.
Frank So and how old is it? It’s a 2013.
Igor 2012.
Frank How many miles on the clock?
Igor It has 150,000, yeah, 150,000 miles.
Frank And it’s a gasoline or a diesel?
Igor It’s gasoline.
Frank Okay.
Igor Which is interesting, by the way, because when we talk to our friends in Brazil, they get really surprised because 150,000 miles is a lot for a car in Brazil. But here in the United States, it’s quite regular. I think people drive so much and there are so much highway driving that you over like 10 miles in a blink of an eye.
So here it’s regular to buy a car, of course, a second hand car with 150,000 miles. But in Brazil, everyone gets surprised.
Frank I mean, that’s 220,000 kilometers and over here in Europe, you would probably back away from that kind of car because it’s nearing the end of its life, life cycle.
Igor Here, we have seen lots of cars with this mileage being sold.But also talking to people, we figure out that’s kind of regular. Of course, you want to have a car with less mileage, but it’s fine. It will do its job of moving us in the next years.
Frank Great. I mean, I think the potential of a car was made, I saw it in Morocco about, I think it was 2012 or 2013. And they have these taxi systems. They have the petite taxis where it’s a little Peugeot 205 runabout. And it just stays within the city limits of wherever that is. And we were in Fez in Northern Morocco, and we were in this really, really rundown red Peugeot 205. And I was sitting in the front, and I leaned over to the driver to have a look at the odometer. And if I remember rightly, it had something like over 700,000 kilometers on it. And it was still going. So I think there’s a lesson in that.
Igor I think it all depends on the kind of mileage, right? I don’t know anything about cars, but that’s my perception that if you drive cars, let’s say you have to drive your car on dirty roads, maybe 100 kilometres is a lot, right? But if you have to drive in highway, and also sometimes I think about that sometimes I see very old cars around. And you can see that they’re not collection cars. They are cars that people like the person is actually using it for his life. And I ask myself, if this car is running, why wouldn’t a Honda Civic 2012 run?
Frank So how has this changed apart from this sort of leads to our topic? How is this going to impact you? Does Mari now take the car to university? Or does she still walk? I mean, you sort of I think within reasonable distance, or does it sit in front of the house for five days a week and then gets wheeled out, brushed down and taken for a run on the weekends?
Igor Yeah, it sits on our garage here for workdays. We don’t usually use it on workdays because we’d like to bike a lot. So, Mari goes biking to the university, I go to the jiu jitsu, biking. So that’s our lifestyle. But it’s changed in the sense that now when we do plans, we kind of don’t have this filter of public transportation.
Because before every plan we would do, we would check how to get there by public transportation. And 90% of the time we would give up because we thought would be very complex, would take too long. So it’s not more in the equation. So now we use all the criteria to choose where we want to go, spend time. That’s the main advantage. So now we just try to figure out what we want to do, where we want to go, and we don’t have to figure out the public transportation part.
That’s the main thing. Life has become a little bit easier, at least on the weekend.
Frank Which sort of brings us to the topic of urban life versus city life versus country life, So you live in a town, just a little town on the California Pacific coast. No one really knows about it. It’s only got how many? About 8 million people, something like that.
Igor 17.
Frank 17. It’s a drop the ocean. Nothing really happens in LA. It’s a pretty boring place. And I live in a tiny, tiny village directly on the German French border, about 10 kilometers away from that. And we have a population of around 700 people, plus minus. No shops, no post office, no facilities, no nothing.
Igor Wow.
Frank And it’s paradise.
Igor Is it? Like, do you miss, because it’s hard to find the advantage of living in a big city nowadays, because you can work remote, buy stuff, you don’t have to go shopping, you can buy online. But one thing that I still see as an advantage of living in a big city is having things to do, having things to explore, people to meet, events. That’s the only advantage I can think of. So don’t you miss doing different stuff? Because I imagine the place you live, it’s like you don’t have, like if you want to do something on the weekend, you don’t have this planet of options, right?
Frank You’d actually be surprised, because I think the mentality, I suppose you’ve got to try and put this whole thing into context. So if anyone wants to look at a map, we live in the top northeastern corner of France, where it sort of pokes into Germany.
And the mentality here is also not French. So we live in an area called Alsace, which historically has belonged partly to Germany, has belonged to France, it’s sort of been pushed back and forth as politics got in the way of ordinary life.
And that has created a mentality over here, where people become very independent and resilient and self-sufficient. And the village that I live in, there are, let’s put it this way, my neighbour told me
many years ago, he said, I’ve got 30 family members here in the village, I don’t need outside people.
And he used to be, before he retired, he used to be the director of the wine cooperative, which sort of provides the financial support of this village. So if you’re looking for distraction of doing things and getting out and doing things, then compared to a big city, no, we don’t have that.
But it is accessible. And here, families tend to play an important role. Grandmothers are the backbone of child-minding, where we are. And everything is centred around families, which the downside of it is if you’re an outsider like Mary and I are, it’s not that easy to integrate.
Because you have maybe three or four or five huge families, they all have the same surname. And they don’t get out much, so their vision is sort of, their mentality is quite closed. If you come along with our background, which is sort of fairly international, then I cannot speak to my neighbour one house up, because we have absolutely nothing in common. We sort of greet each other and we talk about the weather, and then the conversation fizzles out because there’s nothing wrong with it.
But he came from another village a couple of kilometres away, and he’s a self-sufficient tenant farmer, and that’s what his life is, doesn’t need the conversation.
Igor But you and Mary, I’m trying to imagine your life in a weekend, because workdays you work,of course. But on weekends, what do you guys do when you guys are not working and there is no any compromise to be in, like what do you guys do usually? Just stay at home, you guys, what’s the plan usually?
Frank We would, we tend to stay at home a lot, yeah, because we appreciate the beauty of where we live, yeah, and we have a beautiful house, and we have sort of a nice area to sort of sit outside. We stay at home, Saturdays we tend to go shopping, just sort of basic grocery stuff, and Sundays quite happily sit at home, read, what, take on a movie, something like that, you know, something on a video that we have, or sorry, a DVD that we have or something like that, and just chill.
We have this, especially in the summer, we have this tradition of what we call drinks on the deck, so around six o’clock we will down tools and we will sit outside and have a couple of glasses of wine and some nibbles and just, you know, watch the sun go down if we’re sort of hanging around long enough. So, it’s really very relaxed and quiet and peaceful.
Igor And do you miss or mary, miss doing other things or you guys are totally happy with this lifestyle?
Frank I sometimes get an itch and then I sort of want to go south, so to put this into perspective, 65 kilometres further south is the city of Strasbourg and it’s got a population of about 300,000 people. It’s a fairly important city in European politics, it’s one of the homes of the European Parliament, the Council of Europe sits there.
Igor How far is it?
Frank 65 kilometres. So I can be there.
Igor It’s quite close. Yeah, I can be there in 45 minutes, yeah. And it’s a court of human rights, so for European politics it’s actually really important. So we can do that and go down there and just sort of meander down and, you know, breathe in.
Paris, we can be in Paris in two and a half, three hours and we are like 500 kilometres away from Paris, yeah. So we would drive down to Strasbourg and then hop on a TGV and we could be in Paris in just over 90 minutes, spend the day there and then come back in the evening. So take one of the first trains in, take one of the last trains back and spend the day in Paris.
Igor I feel like that’s the best format, like live in a small town which is far enough from a huge city to be calm and peaceful but close enough so you can get there within two hours. That’s my dream place to live, you know.
Frank Where the infrastructure works, yeah. And we were talking at the beginning about you in Los Angeles need a car and you’ve got 18 million people around you for the simple reason that the infrastructure, the public transport infrastructure doesn’t exist, yeah.
The nearest shop for us is seven kilometres away and I have walked from home to the town where all these shops are, it takes me an hour, yeah.
Igor Yeah, well, yeah, of course you want a structure but like if you live in a small town you don’t need the structure, you need like electricity basically and water. Water electricity. And internet, yeah.
Frank Yeah, and that is key. So I have fibre optic internet connection here.
Igor That’s amazing you have that in such a small town, like in Brazil it wouldn’t be possible, like choice small town have this optOC fibre.
Frank And that’s my lifeline and here we are, look, you know, I’m sitting here in my, I work from home as you know, I work from home, I’m sitting in my little cubby hole and I’m speaking to you in Los Angeles and this is normal for me and I speak with people around the world all the time, yeah.
And I don’t actually have to travel.
And the interesting thing is that the motivation to travel is decreasing slightly, I’m sort of beginning to wonder, you know, why should I do this because I value the conversation. Maybe I’ll get across to LA in the next couple of years, maybe I won’t, yeah. Will it enhance my life? Yes it will. Do I really need to go? I don’t know. As long as I have good, the quality of the conversation for me is key, yeah.
Igor Yeah, that’s an important consideration and sometimes talking online, it’s more, you can get deeper than in person. It’s weird to think about that but online, like you are in your environment, I am in my environment, so we are kind of relaxed and talking. Sometimes meeting person, for some people, I’m not like that, but for some people it’s not comfortable so the conversation won’t be so flowy as it usually is. But I agree with you, I think that’s a sign we are getting old.
Because yesterday, just to say an example, yesterday there is this huge jiu-jitsu competition, which is called the ADCC, it’s like the Olympics of jiu-jitsu which happens in Las Vegas. And I had on my calendar to buy tickets to the ADCC which will happen in August of 2024. And then I went to the website, and I was like almost buying the tickets and I just thought like why?
Like if I can watch here at my home in my computer, high quality, probably I watch more things than I would watch live because I would be sitting far away from where the fights are happening. Like what’s the point? So I just didn’t buy it.
Frank Yeah and I mean we have the same thing. I went to Rome a couple of years ago and it was a really horrible experience because there were like armies of tourists marching through the cities. The queue to visit the Vatican was I think two hours long. So I sort of said okay, not important because I knew that if I went online and had a look at a couple of videos, I would get a more detailed view of the beauty of the Vatican and the artworks in there than sort of craning my neck and being pushed forward by the masses behind me.
Igor Exactly. Did you ever watch the documentary? I think it’s on YouTube. It’s called The Art of Travel by Alain de Bouton.
Frank I’ve read the book.
Igor Oh, I didn’t know that he had a book about that, but that’s a good one.
Frank And the opening, it’s a really good book because it is all about expectations of traveling and managing. And in the first chapter, he tells the story of a person who had been sort of at home in his own castle or brand house or something for an enormous amount of years. And he ventures out to go traveling somewhere and it doesn’t get very far because he just doesn’t like it anymore. And he goes back home and stays at home and does not set foot outside of small radius around his house.
And I’m becoming more and more like that, but then I know that as a kid, I travelled an awful lot. So I saw the world as a kid. So it doesn’t actually really make me that curious.
And the beauty of it is what has also changed is that Mary in her youth didn’t do any traveling, whereas I did all the traveling and that’s completely flipped. She does all the traveling professionally. She has been to 65, 66 countries in the last 10 or 12 years, but, but, and this is, this is the, this is sort of the story that I tell to, to show what it’s really like.
Mary had to inspect hotels in our hotel in Cairo, just around literally around the corner from the pyramids. And I said to her, look, find the time somehow scrape out the time to somehow get to the pyramids and have a look at them. People are paying you to travel to Cairo to do some work.
So find a possibility. She couldn’t because the hotel was such a disaster debrief, the debrief took longer than anticipated. The GM had a lot of questions, and she had a taxi to get to the airport to catch her flight to, I don’t know where she was. So she actually, she was so close and yet she couldn’t actually get to these.
Igor That’s a good story to illustrate that it’s not like traveling. It’s not necessarily exploring and seeing that in the, in these documentaries, there’s one point that I find very interesting. I always think about that, that Alain de Botton, he is on a cruise ship and they stopped somewhere. Maybe it’s wrong.I don’t know. They stopped somewhere in Europe. And then he decides not to go out, he decides to stay in the ship. So he can, and the way he says, it’s beautiful, he says, if you first show keep the idea of the city that he had in his mind, then seeing the actual experience because he knew it would be totally different.
And that’s exactly the point about traveling. I think there is the expectation, which is made of, I think at least as humans, we wouldn’t have this kind of expectations to travel as crazy if it wasn’t a market. I have this feeling because if you think, if your reason about that, it’s a lot of work is expensive. You don’t really see that many things. If you go to a very tourist place, you get tired. It’s not a good experience.
But we are expected to do that if you want to be perceived as interesting people.
Frank And that’s, I think one of these cliches. My English teacher in Sydney, Australia, when I was a kid doing my high school certificate, which is a piece of paper that you work towards to get to university. He once said something really interesting. He said, we will travel to the other end of the world and we will not know our own backyard. And this was really brought home to me when Mary was in the hospital. It was a 20 minute drive door to door. And it took me through breathtakingly beautiful valley. So I had to, it was like two valleys further on. So I had to go up a mountain on a hill of about 400 meters, go down on the other side and then meander along a beautiful, beautiful valley, and then turn left and then go to the hospital.
And I did this trip, I think for six weeks every day. And I never got tired of the view and every day it looked different. And you sort of ask yourself, you don’t really appreciate the beauty of your own environment because you’re constantly trying to see what’s on the other side of the planet. And it’s probably not much different than home.
Igor That’s very interesting.Well, I don’t think I ever told you that, but when I came back from my road trip in Europe, hitchhiking, I would say in Europe, one of the reasons I wanted to stop, likeI was traveling for six months, seven months, and I decided to go back to Brazil becauseI had to build something, like I was just being around, but not actually building anything,not building relationships, professional things.
So I wanted to go back to Brazil and when I got back to Brazil, I wrote a blog post for a very popular magazine in Brazil about like 12 truths about traveling, something like that.
I don’t remember the exact title. And I got so many hating in the comments because people were very frustrated because that was my take. I was telling that traveling, sometimes it’s not good, you’ll get sick, it’s terrible. You will always be seen as a tourist. You want to really experience the culture of the place and blah, blah, blah. And people got really mad. It’s still on, it’s in Portuguese, I’ll send you the link if you want to read with translation.
But the comments, they are hardcore because people, I felt like I touched something very deep in people. They want to travel. They have this expectation and there’s this guy telling them that this is not true. So they got it personal.
Frank I think there is, you might have heard of them, there’s an airline in Europe, an Irish airline called Ryanair and they really revolutionized, I think along with Southwest in the States, they really revolutionized air travel. And basically you pay for everything that you want extra. So the base airfare is extremely cheap, but then they build in add-ons with all the luggage scenarios and the check-in scenarios and at the end of the day, what looks to be very cheap is actually quite expensive in comparison.
That said, it’s really attractive for young people because you could, not anymore, but you could in its day, you could fly to another European capital for less than the price of a restaurant meal.
Igor That’s crazy Europe.
Frank Or a Big Mac and a couple of drinks at McDonald’s or something like that. It was dirt cheap. Bottom line of this is that Ryanair actually did more for European unification and uplifting the European Union values because they gave everybody the opportunity to move. So that was a good thing.
Igor That’s a good point. I never thought about that.
Frank So the politics, that was good, but you just had to put up with a lot of stuff there. Speaking about traveling and so on, when you were beginning to explore Los Angeles, you and Mari, you commented fairly often on seeing people with mental health issues on public transport.
And now you’re comparing big city with a rural environment. And I would say that where I live, in the whole vicinity, mental health is probably not an issue.
So how do you deal with seeing people who suffer from mental health issues? How do you cope with it?
Igor So I have the good guy response and the official response and then the real life response. So the good guy, of course, you feel sorry and you think on what you could do to help. In the first month here, it was really hard because since we were using public transportation a lot, we would see all the time and we had this sense that that’s a problem that won’t be fixed ever.
So from this point on, it will just get worse. So I still think like that. I don’t see it get improved. I can’t think of any solution, to be honest.
And the real-life response you do as everyone do, your brain just ignores it. That’s a survival mode. You just ignore it and keep living. Because first, there’s nothing you can do, there’s very little you can do. And second, there’s so much and you become insensitive. You just ignore it because you’ll see all the time everywhere in huge amounts. And that’s just one more thing that you ignore.
That’s the reality of Los Angeles. Maybe you would think different, but everyone who came to Los Angeles, and I talked about that, everyone who is living here, but it’s from other place, they had the same shock in the beginning.
Like, oh my God, what’s going on in this city? What the hell? Why there are so many crazy people around? Why don’t some things work? Why some streets are so dirty? Why there are people living in the streets, like they are building houses of mattress in the streets?
You have this shock, right? But then, it’s a survival mode, you have trigonoids, so you can live your life. That’s what happened in Los Angeles.But that’s, I don’t know, I have read a few articles and news about that. I used it not to believe on that, but now I am believing that every empire in the history had its decline, right?I think we are living in a decline, like United States, it’s clearly on decline. I was reading today’s morning that since 2009, there are more Mexicans leaving United States than coming in.
That’s crazy, right? So that’s an empire in decline. And I’m kind of curious because I’m believing that I can see things getting worse and worse and with no hope of being fixed, but of course, it’s very sad, right? Because people who don’t have the options to leave United States, they will be in trouble, I think, especially if they don’t have money. Alas, comment, I will stop my rant in a few minutes. But the last thing that I want, I just realized yesterday that something very crazy is going on, like very absurd, which is the following. People now leaving the streets is becoming normal stuff, right? I noticed that because people are starting to build their houses and codes in the sidewalks and they make the sidewalk like their property, not property, but the area you have in front of the house.
Frank I have the front garden, the front garden.
Igor They make, so they play stables. It’s a normal thing. And you are starting to see online like tips to live in the streets, like 15 things you should do if you are living in the streets, like best place to live in the streets in Los Angeles. So it’s becoming a thing, like a category of living. So you can live in an apartment, you can live in a house, you can live in a condominium and you can live in the streets, which is absurd, but it’s happening.
That’s what I just noticed. That’s something that’s happening right now in Los Angeles. It’s becoming normal to live in the streets because the housing crisis here is so, so huge and impossible to fix that regular people, like, for example, if I didn’t have the options to go to Brazil and I had a health issue in the United States and I had to use all my savings, I would be one of them.
Like I am closer to living in the streets, United States, than living as a rich person. That’s something absurd that’s going on.
Frank Yeah, I mean, because this sort of totally distorts the picture because everybody has this impression that the United States is this is a gigantically powerful country that can solve everybody’s problems and it probably can, but it can’t solve its own problems at home or it doesn’t want to.
Igor Yeah, that’s true.
Frank Does this mean, I mean, the reason we’re talking about this is because you spent Thanksgiving in a small town north of San Francisco, just outside of San Francisco, and it looks like a really nice place.
And you and Mari were sort of thinking that maybe this is sort of a template that we could move to, may not be that town, it may not be in California, but it’s sort of forming an idea that the future of both of you is not in a big city, but in a small town. Maybe not as small as where I live, but certainly sort of eight to 10,000 people. Does what you see every day in your normal routine emphasize this desire to leave? I mean, you’ve only been in L.A. for a couple of four or five months, but you see the ugly side of it. Does it motivate you to say we don’t want to live here?
Igor Yes, yes. And it’s not totally on Los Angeles, like before moving here, I had this kind of thought that leaving a small town is smarter now, but especially when we have kids, like we have plans of having a family, especially when we have a family, that will be even more important.
And yes, because I am a very lucky guy in terms of I work from home, I don’t have to go to grocery stores, they come to my door. So I don’t have to deal with 90% of people who work in other places and have to commute, have to deal with. So I’m very lucky in this sense. But it’s still like when I have to go out to go to Jiu Jitsu to walk with my dog. I experience things that are negative and I wouldn’t experience in a small town, so I have to be careful.
There are so many cars. People are very rushed and hostile. Not always, of course, but I would say that my heart of time that people are more towards hostile than kind.
As in every major city I live in, I don’t know if there is a city which is different. And also, everything I get here that I value, I would get in a small town. So the only reason we live here is because we have USC. That’s where Mari is studying and working. But yeah, that’s the reason, the most rational thing to do, I think.
Frank How do you think, I mean, you said that you’re going back to Brazil for Christmas. If you’ve been in this intense LA bubble now for four months, how do you think you will react when you get out of this bubble, go back to your familiar surroundings with your respective families, and be able to make a clearer comparison between your homes, the hometowns, and this monster called LA? Do you think you might have sort of a negative culture shock in reverse?
Igor I think it might happen, but I don’t think it will, but there is a possibility. Yeah, I have good feelings about going first because now I value more things in Brazil than I would value before coming to Los Angeles. And also it’s just good to spend time, since we are visiting, we are planning to optimize our time for things we want to do and spend time with people we want to spend.
So we will not really leave the Brazilian experience as normal people who work, etc. So we are going as tourists and we know where to go, so the margin for error is very low. So I think it might happen, but it would be hard to have a bad experience.
Frank So what advice would you, if we took this opportunity exchange, a lot of people are drawn to the bright lights of a big city or the opportunities that there are. You can go to 20 different places at the drop of a hat, and then you have the reality that a lot of people also bring with them a lot of problems, and it’s expensive. So a person living in a small town wanting to go to the big city, what would you tell him?
Igor You mean like moving to a big city or just visiting?
Frank Yeah, just moving to a big city. Our friend Max, who sort of wants to go to, because he doesn’t see a perspective in the village that he lives in or she, what advice would you give Max?
Igor So something that, of course, in my case, it wasn’t possible doing costs and logistics, but something that I would do the next time I move to another city, especially if it’s a big city, is to go before, let’s say you can book Airbnb for two weeks and go before and see by yourself, just see by yourself the neighbourhood, walk around, talk to people, as I mentioned in the previous talk, talk to hairdressers, because the experience you have when you do that is totally different.
It’s not like it’s slightly different, it’s totally different from what you read online. So that’s something I advise everyone. If you have the chance, even of course, it will cost money, but I think it will be all worth it.
If it’s not something crazy, the investment will pay off, see by yourself where you want to live.
The second, it’s like commuting is the biggest pain in the ass of every big city. I’m sorry, others, sorry. I’m getting too used to English.
Frank I mean, the commute from the first floor to the ground floor where my office is, that takes me all of one minute and even that’s too long now.
Igor It’s complicated, hard life, you have a hard life. Yeah, if you talk to someone who lives in a huge city, probably, and you ask them the top 10 things they hate about the big city, probably 80% will be about commuting. So the public transport, the city is dangerous, everyone is rushed, a lot of cars. So it’s almost everything related to commuting. So try to reduce this as much as you can. That should be a priority of everyone living in a big city, especially if you have to go every day to some place to work.
That’s the number one priority. Everything else you can handle. Like if you don’t have a grocery store near you, you can handle that. I know if you can’t find the house you want exactly, you can handle that. But commuting will be your source of unhappiness in a big city.
Frank Here’s a story. As you may or may not know, this is my second life. Not the virtual reality one, but a real one. My first life, I used to work in the hotel business. And I worked in one very fine establishment, which still stands today. It’s called the London Hilton on Park Lane. It was then and still is a humongously expensive hotel and it attracted a certain clientele.
And one day, I was working at the reception desk, and one day I was checking in a person and we got into talking and he worked for an airline leasing company. So they would, they had planes and they would lease them out to the airlines. And this, and I have to say this, when you work in the hotel business, you hear stories that are totally and utterly unrealistic to normal people.
We got into talking and he told me, well, I actually live in Connecticut, but I work in London. And he flew with Concord on a Monday morning. He would fly from JFK and be in London in three hours. And on a Friday night, he would do the trip back, fly from London to JFK and then take a train up to Connecticut. And I said, you know, you’d probably be home quicker than some of us people living in England and doing a train hour. Nevermind the expense. Of course, I mean, he had airline discounts, God knows what so, and companies paid for it. So, you know, a £10,000 airfare round trip, London JFK, you know, was pocket money. But and I asked him, well, what’s it like? He said, I hate it.
It’s really, really exhausting. And this is extreme commuting here. So and even I would drive, used to do it before I worked full time from home, I would visit clients and I would drive 4000 kilometers a month without any difficulties. It was normal.
And he sort of hated it because all you do is sit around in a car and it hurts and it’s painful and it’s boring and the traffic gets on your nerves and so on and so forth. So commuting is a pain in the butt.
However, if you live in the boonies, like I do, and I say the nearest shop is seven kilometres away, you do a lot of driving in the country, we could not live without a car, it would be physically impossible.
But I think the difference is that the countryside is beautiful. That’s more relaxed. The pace of life is slower. So maybe.
Igor Well, I don’t think there is like a magic solution for anything in life, but I think everyone should commute. That’s something that people should try to remove from their lives. That’s the number one priority for happiness. It’s hard to think on another thing that will contribute to your happiness if you remove that with such a potential, right?
So it’s very hard because everything else is very complex, but commuting is universal. No one likes to commute. I have friends who love to drive, but they don’t like to commute. Commuting is different.
Frank Driving something, commuting is another thing, right? And then I suppose if you’re commuting on the LA freeways to get to from wherever you are to downtown and you’re stuck in a six lane highway and it’s bumper to bumper.
Igor And you are dealing with what people have the worst, which like when they are in cars, they get crazy and rude people. I don’t know what happened. That’s something probably have done some research on that because it’s very curious. People get in their car and they transform themselves. They become like evils. So yeah, you are dealing with the worst of human beings.
Frank So to wrap this up, if you are thinking, I mean, this is still a long way down the road for you and Mari, but if you are thinking of moving to small town somewhere, would you take your own advice and try and sort of test live in the town or in the area for a couple of weeks to see what it’s like, even though it’s probably logistically and infrastructurally not as easy to do as in a city?
Igor Yeah, I would do that. That’s the plan. When we move next city, of course, if it’s to another country, maybe it’s more difficult, but if it’s the United States, we want to spend some time there because sometimes verysmall chains make a big difference.
For example, we like the place we live. It’s downtown, but we feel safe here. We walk with our dog. It’s a good place, right? But we live in front of an avenue, which is very noisy, right? So if we live like three blocks away, it would be quiet. But that’s the sort of thing that you can see online. So I think it’s worth it most of times. The car as well. If we spent one month in Los Angeles before moving here, probably we would choose to buy a car right in the first week here, and we wouldn’t leave a lot of negative experience we live in.
Frank And I suppose the apartment around the corner three blocks away where it’s a nice quiet street is probably twice as expensive as the one that you’ve got at the moment, yeah? Because the quiet factor just boosts up the rent.
Igor That’s a good question. I don’t know. That’s a good question because we saw houses and apartments down the block that were in this price range. Of course, we didn’t look into the details. We don’t know if they are good as this one, but I don’t know if the price changed that much, to be honest, because a lot of people value being in the avenue because you’ll go down, you have the bus stop, you have the subway, so I don’t know how the noisy really makes a difference in the pricing.
Frank Well, I guess it’s a difficult one for Max to close this off now because there are so many pros and cons of living in the country or living in the city. I think the ideal thing is to have a small town with a fantastic infrastructure so that you can have the best of both worlds, and I think that’s where… That would be my advice.
Igor Don’t live in a huge city. If you have to be, unless you have to work in a big city, of course, but if you have the option to work from home, live in a small town, maybe 100 kilometers away from a big city, you will be way more happy. And then you don’t have to commute.
Frank You don’t have to commute, yeah.
Igor If you have to commute, I’m sorry for your… Try to find the closest as possible if you are working, deal with that, but meanwhile try to find some remote work.
Frank Exactly. Well, that’s, you know, for people like us who can do it, that’s not a problem, yeah. I’m going to close this one with a joke. I have a cartoon in a cartoon book to say that the train was being…
The train from somewhere outside of London to London was delayed because the driver was working from home.
Igor That’s something.
Frank Igor, we have not come to a conclusion, but it doesn’t matter. Thanks for your time.
Igor Thank you. My pleasure.
Frank To have a look at opportunities exchange and we’ll take this one to another discussion topic in a couple of weeks.
Cool.
See you there.
See you then.
Bye bye.