Pros and Cons of Living in Elf Land - part II

TEN CONS:

• It’s small. I’m not sure why exactly that’s a bad thing, but it is, believe me.
  
• The weather can be so boring, in particular the wind and the rain that sometimes limit one’s enthousiasm for outdoor activities.
  
• The object of my affection is far and away, and not likely to make this location his place of choice for a while.
  
• It’s expensive: so many things are way more expensive than they need or should be. In particular traveling, ... and groceries, more precisely fruits and vegetables.
  
• It’s isolated, meaning that I can’t exactly take my car and drive into the adventure to meet new lands and new cultures.
  
• The job opportunities are limited. There are only so many companies around and then they will always be of limited size with limited resources and limited opportunities.
  
• We don’t honestly get a real summer here. Bright nights, yes, but warm summer nights when you can put on a light summer dress and sandals, no!
  
• There is a certain lack of privacy here. Not because it’s so crowded but on the contrary we are so few. Everybody knows everybody, or almost. You don’t need to be a celebrity for people to think they can form themselves an opinion on you without even having met you.
  
• Up here we kind of lack the perspective of a person that may think he/she understands ‘the big world’. We have a very naive view of the state of the world, of politics and history. One might be able to argument that in order to gain this ‘understanding of the big world’ it might be necessary to experience living abroad.
  
• Having wine with dinner here is a luxury: First of all, you can only buy it in the State’s Monopoly liquor stores that have restricted distribution and opening hours. Secondly, a bottle of wine is outrageously expensive, the cheapest wines cost probably around ten times as much as they do in France. Not to speak of restaurants where prices are ridiculous.