I live in the middle of a nature reserve, halfway up a small mountain.

It’s tranquil as fuck. You get woken up by birdsong in the mornings. I get to see various animals on my commute. I can walk maybe an hour from my house to be in a place where, aside from the trail I’m on there’s no sight nor sound of anything man made.

The downside? Oh look, the kitchen is full of millipedes again. Something stung me. Another power cut. No running water this week. Can’t be lazy today, I’ve gotta chop firewood before the weather gets too hot. All my friends are far away.

We’ve been there for 7 years, hope to move back to civilisation in a couple of years because we want to spend our time with friends rather than house fixing.

1. I can live car-free. Not feasible anywhere I’d ever lived before, but here I have lived without a car for a quarter of a century and never really felt the need or even desire to own one.
2. The food. The sheer VARIETY of it within a 10-minute walk of my apartment door is astonishing to me. Take that to 20 minutes and with public transit and it’s mind-boggling.
3. The technology. I haven’t carried cash in well over a decade and a half. I can find and order the weirdest, most obscure things imaginable and it will be at my door in two to three days. (Without paying for “prime” service; paying extra sometimes gets you overnight.) How weird or obscure? How about a full, live, Asian giant hornet nest? Or liquor made from sweet potatoes at a guy’s farm? Or Daoist “fulu” (magical charms, basically) blessed by a Daoist priest at a “famous” temple? Or … you get the idea.

I came here “for a year or two” in 2001 and haven’t gone back beyond three short visits since.

I love the amount of city nature my city has. There are parks built as buffers between the neighborhoods, making it possible for a lot of people to go for a walk whenever they feel like it. I personally live just a minute’s walk from a huge park that I get to cross daily to go to work.
Another thing that I like is how well everything is set up. Public busses drive almost exclusively on their own private roads, which means they’re never stuck in traffic. And bicycle paths are also separated from normal traffic as much as possible. I can get to the central train station with a 10 minute bicycle ride and never have to cycle on a main road.

People in my country like to make fun of where I live, because it’s a ‘new’ (50 year old) city without any culture or soul. But most people are genuinely surprised at how nice it actually is when they’re here :)

here are almost all the people i want to have around me. that’s really it.

A big ass lake and nothing else.

Enough humans around I don’t have to worry about things just not existing here. I need kitchen shears? Yep. I need toilet paper at 3am? Yep. But I can also just walk around the neighborhood. Although it’s not very walkable being America. We also have trees! Love trees.

Some of the best nature in the world

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