Vibes of a place or culture and resonance

[Kalinago]

Wow,@Lucas88 ,I have the exact same energetic resonance as you do in regards to the southeast of england vs the north,and also The Catholic Ireland vs the british northern ireland!

and same with colombia and mexico vs uruguay and argentina!

I think Brazil has a overall great vibe,though!

I really like the vibe of indonesia within eastasia.

though not as much as Latin america!

Miami has the greatest vibe of all places I've been to!

[Kalinago]

Lisbon,portugal has a great vibe too!Alexandria has a better vibe than cairo,but alexandria and egypt in general is spooky,something dark there.

Germany has a better vibe than Holland,atleast when I went there.

[Kalinago]

Strasbourg has a wierd vibe as does paris!I think because of all the leftism and immigrants there!

Paris was different when I went in the 90s vs 2008 for the last time!

So a place can change it's vibe too,it's not set in stone!

As much as we are against the kabbalists(Well Atleast me,I am not anti-semitic just against the occult system of kabbalah,I also love sefardic jewish women hehehe),Tel Aviv also has a great vibe and my sister went there,actually many israelis are quiet chill and nice people.

[publicduende]

I've read all of your detailed responses and taken into account all of the wisdom that you've distilled from your rich experiences of life in various radically different cultures but I think that I myself am a very peculiar case - I'm only suited to certain type of culture while being extremely unsuited to most others, including my own native culture.

I don't think that I could ever learn to live comfortably in the UK (or any other similar Northern European culture, for that matter). The place is just too incongruent with my inner nature. Sure, the UK offers opportunities for a decent income and material comfort and that's the reason why many people are here, but I personally am completely incapable of socializing in this culture. For some reason I just don't vibe with British people at all. It's as though I'm an alien in their midst. I'm a complete social misfit here. Moreover, I don't know how to talk to girls in the UK for the life of me (the British style of communication is just bizarre and unfathomable for me) and, quite frankly, I find the vast majority of British girls disgusting anyway, as though they were a completely different species and one that were poisonous. In the UK, due to my own inadaptability, I tend to become socially withdrawn and live in the digital fantasy world of computer screens.

Life in Spain has been completely different for me. Ever since I began studying Spanish and spending a lot of time in the country, I've always been able to socialize with Spaniards and Latinos just fine, have normal conversations with people, and establish fruitful and long-lasting friendships. I can even talk to girls. In fact, I met my Peruvian ex-girlfriend in Valencia and was in a relationship within two months of being there. I tend to make friends easily in Spain and especially among the Latinos who live there. People find me interesting, charming and intelligent and sometimes tell me that they're amazed by how a native Anglophone can speak Spanish so well. In Spain I feel like a normal person. The difference between Spain and the UK really is night and day. And it's not because they're "being nice to the tourist" or they just want something from me. I don't go to touristic parts of Spain and I always live among Spaniards and Latinos. The truth is that Spaniards and Latinos are fundamentally different from Anglos and I am able to relate to them infinitely more.

Also, at this point, I'm of the view that the British are simply an extremely strange outlier people that is considerably different to most other European nationalities. They have all kinds of bizarre cultural oddities. You either get them or you don't. It's that kind of deal.

In light of my experiences, like Winston, I also believe that everybody has their own inner nature and therefore naturally vibes with certain cultures and people groups but not with others. People like myself, @Tsar and @Natural_Born_Cynic are extreme cases; we are utterly incapable of adapting to certain cultures that are so radically opposed to our own inner nature.

Don't get me wrong mate, I can't be happier for you because you found your natural social environment, one where you can feel relaxed and in tune with your true personality. Being able to find such a place, within one's lifetime, is in itself a rare achievement.

I myself spent way too many years in the UK, after my good years as a student. When solitude, pressure to conform and hard work at the banks set in, all I had left was the hope that that effort would be somehow repaid by a decent career, good money and a more relaxed lifestyle down the line. More than a decade of that life later, I realised that nothing was going to change: in fact, with my ex-wife stepping out of the picture, my horizon would just be more hard work to pay the bills, the same grayness, the same unfriendly colleagues and walking-on-eggshells conversations, etc. As I said on previous posts, London's grandiose backdrops simply wasn't enough anymore to motivate me.

So I left for the Philippines, convinced that that was my natural social environment. I felt great for a couple of years continuously living here, then the usual doubts and reality set in to spoil the honeymoon.

All I am trying to say is that, while it's great to enter a social environment and a lifestyle that is closer to one's own personality and preferences, there is always a caveat emptor (buyer beware), the risk of over-romanticising that environment and seeing it as devoid of problems and negatives.

I will give you one recent example. A few months ago I was contacted by a former colleague of mine, whom I used to work with at a hedge fund. He had become some sort of outsourcing manager at another large hedge fund and they were recruiting software developers with exactly my skills, to work from Valencia. The proposition was that Valencia was a great sunny city, green and clean, with an excellent beach, nice restaurants and the kind of relaxed lifestyle that a developer from the UK might only dream of.

All good until I asked him if the salary was at least commensurate with the craft and responsibility to work for a hedge fund. On my previous hedge fund job, in 2011, I was making $250,000 a year. I asked if at least $150,000 would be on the table, adjusting for the lower cost of living in Valencia. He laughed it off. "Not even close" he said. While he didn't make the exact figure, he let me understand that they were planning to pay people with 10+ years of experience, working for a hedge fund that rakes in tens of millions of dollars of profit every year, maybe 4 or 5,000 Euros a month.

Now, we know that that is still a very comfortable salary for a young guy wanting to "work hard play, hard" in a lovely coastal city. What I did not like was the idea that someone used to the UK life (and cash) would want to leave everything and be on less than a third of what he makes in the UK. Is the "Valencia factor" worth the change?

The cat left the bag soon after in the conversation, as the guy admitted that they were billing the hedge fund much more than $150,000 a year and the difference was the outsourcing company profit. And it's a 250/300% profit we're talking about, here, not peanuts.

I also spoke to another LinkedIn acquaintance who took the job and moved to Valencia from Bogota, Colombia. As a citizen of a South American emerging economy, he jumped at the idea of getting a company-sponsored Schengen visa and working from a nice part of Spain. However, as he confessed me, he was making more money in Bogota, working as a software engineering manager, than in Valencia. Perhaps the opportunity to get a European visa weighed more than the prospect of making less in a city that probably costs a bit more than Bogota.

Of course this episode does not denote a problem with Valencia, or Spanish society. The problem is with people who easily take advantage of other people who wear rose-tinted glasses about the perceived advantages in people, places, lifestyle, of a specific location. That is a risk worth avoiding, IMHO.

I always wondered about the meaning of your username. I imagined you as some kind of horny and mischievous leprechaun that goes around making love to all of the cute Filipinas in some village near Davao and belongs to them all and is therefore in a sense "public".

Haha, I always liked the figure of the duende. Despite being a Catholic country like Italy, Spain always let their imagination looser when it comes to mythological entities sharing this world with us, and related superstitions. Just think of how much attention they received from the likes of Goya, in his paintings. I was intrigued to find out some of these figures made into the folklore of the Spanish colonies, including the Philippines.

Just out of curiosity, how do you perceive Chilean culture in comparison to the rest of Latin America? In what way is it more refined?

I had a few Chilean friends, some of whom were immigrants who I met in Spain and others who were their relatives in Chile who I used to talk to via the internet. Because of this, I became interested in Chilean culture for a while. I noticed a few things. 1) A lot of Chilean are well-educated and intellectual, and 2) There seems to be a lot of interesting programs on Chilean TV about UFOs, paranormal, mysteries, secret societies, etc. I used to watch Dr. File (aka Cristián Contreras Radovic).

I haven't met a lot of Chilean people, not as many as Mexicans, Argentinians, Colombians and Venezuelans. The "going wisdom" is that Argentina and Chile are more of a bridge with the old world than the rest of the South American countries. This might be for historical reasons: the mix of migrants from Europe and even the US, their social status, last but not least the way they resisted American attempts to turn them into puppet states.

I spoke to lots of people from Mexico and Colombia who are proud to feel culturally close to the US. Mexicans don't even consider themselves "South American", but "North American".

Such thing would be a heresy, an insult, for any Argentinian or Chilean. True, they tend to feel like royalty, especially the Argentinians, culturally and morally superior to the rest of the Latino world. Let's not forget that, before the Great Depression, Argentina had the same GDP of France, it incarnated the best of European culture and ingenuity, transplanted into a land of infinite possibilities. This, before the US started to meddle.

[gsjackson]

Mexicans don't even consider themselves "South American", but "North American".

They are. Mexico and the rest of Central America are part of North America. And part of the theoretical entity known as Latin America.

[publicduende]

They are. Mexico and the rest of Central America are part of North America. And part of the theoretical entity known as Latin America.

True, nothing to object to that. I was referring more to their sense of belonging to the cause of the US, rather than that of the Latino collective. I have heard this especially from upper class Mexicans.

[gsjackson]

They are. Mexico and the rest of Central America are part of North America. And part of the theoretical entity known as Latin America.

True, nothing to object to that. I was referring more to their sense of belonging to the cause of the US, rather than that of the Latino collective. I have heard this especially from upper class Mexicans.

Stand by on that. The Biden morons are unhappy with the current Mexican regime and are talking about invading under the pretext of taking down the cartels. A Mexican color revolution?

[publicduende]

Stand by on that. The Biden morons are unhappy with the current Mexican regime and are talking about invading under the pretext of taking down the cartels. A Mexican color revolution?

Of course, love for the US is always a one-way street (that leads to nowhere)!