I do realise I upset some loud, bad tempered cliquey types with my perennial 'isn't America exciting and wonderful' speech - so I figured I would extend an olive branch by listing some of the not-so-great things about moving here:

1: Job Security - I have an exciting job with good pay and great benefits - but I am painfully aware that it could vanish in an instant. If anybody remembers where I work, they'll be aware there's a possible merger going on with our only rival - which means some of us could be handed a pink slip soon. At least in England you get a month's notice.

2: Drivers are complete twats - I am terrified that either myself or my wife and going to get driven off the road by some absolute arsehole who couldn't be bothered to use his indicators or was munching a burrito instead of looking where he was going.

3: 3 million illegal immigrants enter America every year - and they're all moving onto my street. All of them. Roadsigns are going to be in Spanish soon. After going through all the proper immigration channels, this illegal immigration shit annoys the HELL out of me.

4: We can't afford to buy a house. Period. In England, buying a shitbox redbrick semi-detached at least made sense. In New Jersey, the $1200 dollar a month we rent would cost us $3000 in mortgage and $400 a month in property tax. And for what? House prices are plummeting and will continue to do so - there are a million unsold 'new houses' and 70% of Americans own their own homes. It makes NO financial sense to buy in New Jersey and that's kind of sad, since it would be nice to own your own place.

5: I never thought I'd say it, but I miss the news. The news here is SO hyped up, melodramatic and completely misleading. Bring back the biased ol' BBC.

6: It's ugly. Parts of New Jersey are just blissfully beautiful - like up in Hillsborough. I LOVE it there and really think this place REALLY is The Garden State. But Route one? With it's concrete divider and chain link fences down the middle, plus endless strip malls on the sides... It looks like Mexico city or something. And all the stupid power and phone wires. Can't they put them underground?

7: It exacerbates my wife's craziness - bless her, she's high strung and Winchester - the domestic equivilent of xanex - calmed her down. She gets paniced that the radiators will explode or our cellar will flood or indentity thieves will sign us up for a reality game show.

8: President Bush. Okay, he's better than Gordon Brown. But only by the very barest of margins (the major plus point being he's leaving in less than a year.)

9: Mild Chedder cheese, decent white wine, pork scratchings, croissants, sausages and bacon that doesn't splinter into a million pieces when you bite into it.

10: The evil, plotting, maelevolent Canada Ducks. They're outside my window, right now. Staring. Plotting. Scheming. Brrrrr.

Well for Pete's sake Roland!! I was enjoying your tirade with the bad tempered cliquey types. it was most entertaining. please revert back to your normal ginger self.

Better at what? Golf?

Probably. Did you see that golf swing he took in 'Farenheit 9/11?'

Get out of New Jersey! You couldn't pay most Americans to live there. The Midwest is great....affordable housing, great schools, no hurricanes, no landslides, no wildfires, no floods (not too many anyway), and very few tornadoes (at least not the killer kind).

My stepdad is Italian....really Italian.....and all of his relatives live in Jersey. That's probably why I think it's crap. Sorry.

His last name isn't 'Soprano' is it?

One thing the midwest DOESN'T have is a beach.

But I hear what you're saying - property tax in NJ is just silly money - like completely absurd 'what the hell are you smoking' money.

[QUOTE=Roland Hulme;5562692]His last name isn't 'Soprano' is it?

No, but it's close......D'Angina...they come from Pisa and another city that I can never remember the name of.
One thing the midwest DOESN'T have is a beach

So true, but is it really safe (hygienically) to be on a Jersey beach?

rubbish,

I have one less than 10 miles from my house

Yep, there's Edgewater Beach, Geneva State Park, Fairport Harbor, Euclid Beach, Mentor Headlands, etc... and that's just near Cleveland. And I've heard a rumour about another midwest city with beaches. A little place called Chicago. Anybody else heard of it?

Beach = Seawater.

Doesn't it?

Otherwise it's just a piddling little fishpond. Like Lake Michigan.

Or some babbling stream, like the Mississippi.

The only thing I don't like about NJ is the price of property. apart from that I think it's great. Yes it has some prominent ugly parts, but they're really only a small part of the state. It seems to me that a lot of people base their opinion on NJ from watching The Sopranos and/or the cab ride from Newark airport into Manhattan.

nope,

A beach, or strand, is a geological landform consisting of loose rock particles - such as sand, gravel, shingle, pebbles, cobble - or even shell fragments, along the shoreline of a body of water.

That sounds very convincing.

But what about the 'smell that sea air?' and the pier and the fish and chips?

I agree - New Jersey CAN be very pretty. Up in Flemington/hillsborough, where my wife's family live, it's GORGEOUS! All old trees and farms. Beautiful.

North Brunswick is not so purdy.

But if I could afford to buy in the USA, I'd take a place in Hillsborough. All American beauty, but still close to NYC.

Indiana has some nice beaches too..

Roland, if your biggest gripes about the US are the cost of property and prop. taxes, you don't have to continue living there. You've got hundreds, nay thousands, of alternatives where you get purchase nice property for a heck of a lot cheaper than NJ. Nothing wrong with living in the Midwest...as long as you can put up with a few Bible thumpers now and again.

done with that (I spent 8 years living in a Coastal town, with the sea less than a mile from the front door, it ain't all its cracked up to be)