As If I needed More Reasons To Want To Leave London!

Now that I actually leave the house and take the tube to work on a regular basis, I have adopted the London way of catching up with the news....I read the Metro in the morning on my way to work and The London Paper and the London Lite in the evening on the way home. Most of the time none of the news really catch my eye, they are mostly a shooting here, a stabbing there, so and so wants their £28 million back, etc. However, yesterday The London Paper had an article about the most expensive cities in the world to live in. I knew London was very expensive, but it never occurred to me that it's gotten to the point where it is even more expensive than Tokyo.... for the first time ever. It has been ranked 4th in the world with Oslo, Paris and Copenhagen as 1st, 2nd and 3rd respectively. Previously, London ranked 7th.

"The capital shot up the league of the world's most expensive cities, topping Tokyo for the first time, and costing 25 percent more than New York City" That's pretty outrageous, specially considering what most people get paid here. I always have a hard time comprehending how some people can afford to live in London when I hear what their salary is. According to the survey, a pint of beer in London costs £3, a loaf of bread costs £1.09 and a pint of milk 50p. The same items costs 58p, 50p, and 40p in Mumbai, one of the 3 cheapest cities. Manchester prices were a quarter lower than London's. No other UK city was on the list. In comparison, Atlanta is now the cheapest city in the USA with prices below the average in Casablanca, Morocco.

This evening's headline was equally disconcerting, if not more so. It read "London is 'capital of sex slave trade' " Apparently, thousands of young girls are brought to London with promises of work but once here, are forced to prostitute themselves, forced into sweat shops, etc. Some of these girls are as young as 14 and are coming from Eastern Europe, China, and West Africa. While it's mostly men that run these human trafficking operations, oftentimes it is other women who lure these girls out of their homes. How a woman can do that to another woman is beyond me.

Scotland Yard "also fears that children are being brought here from Africa to take part in religious sacrifices"

As you can see, London is a less than ideal place to live. That is just scratching the surface, not a day goes by that the newspapers don't have some shooting, stabbing, or other violent crime news. Tube beatings, muggings, rapes, you name it. Despite this, a significant amount of Londoners swear crime in London is much less than crime in any given US city because of the "lack" of access to guns, etc. I guess the Nile is not just a river in Egypt.