I'll try to post a photo of my villa overlooking the Sea of Marmara to make you all dead jealous like.
There are more people sleeping rough on the streets of Los Angeles every single night than there are in the entirety of the UK. It's not even close, around 3 times as many. Absolute paradise that like. The streets aren't paved with gold, they're paved with poor people you need to step over. They don't show that on the brochures or tv shows though. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-49687478 https://www.crisis.org.uk/ending-ho...MI3fLVyP3p7wIVkr7tCh2qhwBGEAAYAyAAEgLdZvD_BwE
I'd still rather book a trip there than a trip to the sundrenched working class city of Newcastle upon Tyne. I accept there's good and bad parts everywhere and I'm proud of heritage although I'm not sure all that's a good thing really because it's worthless and completely meaningless really. North East England and most of Britain just isn't appealing and that's why most of us can't wait to GTFO.
I can agree for the purposes of a holiday as you spend money to only see the good parts but you did title the thread "better" and I don't think it's better to be honest. When you tie in the health-care issues (ffs do not be working class and have a routine condition like diabetes there, even standard professions get shafted) I honestly can say i'd prefer to live where i am thanks. There's always an element of "grass is greener" with blithely comparing to other countries - like when someone watches a period drama and talks of how nice it was back then. The assumption being they'd be in the small percentage who have it all and not the large percentage who are out back shovelling sh!t.
Having spoken last week to an Italian woman who is married to a Colombian, and having seen a BBC documentary about Covid in various cities around the world, I can confirm Bogota should be off everyone's "must-see" places. An awful lot of residents there live "hand-to-mouth". No thank you.
Bogota is a fantastic city. Amazing views all round, great nightlife, good food and spectacular women. Loads of interesting places to visit nearby as well. Like all big cities in South America it has it's fair share of poverty on show but for me that doesn't really detract from what a great city it is. Maybe I am more used to living in/visiting cities with big disparities in wealth as my work tends to take me to places like that. If you don't travel too much to these places you maybe don't appreciate how high a percentage of the world population live hand-to-mouth and how lucky we are in the UK to have a system that leads to a more equal distribution of wealth, with a social net to catch those in trouble, than happens in many other countries, particularly in the developing world. So Bogota stays on my list, along with Buenos Aires, Rio. Might even include La Paz in there although it's so far up in the mountains I never had the energy to see it properly when I was there. I loved my year living in Newcastle back in the early 80's. Think the city centre then was actually better than it is now but the thing that made it was the people. Obviously though I didn't know Chippy then.
Don't disagree with most of that but I disagree with the thread title then. They might be more fun to visit or great to live in if you have money but I cannot agree they are "better places" overall. I'd argue that objectively they are very much worse.
If you use how equally wealth is distributed in the country in which the city is located as a criteria then the best cities to live are all going to be located in developed countries and according the Economist they are. Its interesting to compare the best cities to live and best cities to visit list. https://www.travelandleisure.com/trip-ideas/most-livable-cities-on-earth https://www.travelandleisure.com/worlds-best/cities There are no cities that feature in the top 10 of both. Think though we are losing sight of the fact that Chaos just started the thread as one of his usual attempts to try and wind-up people who lived in Newcastle.