If you could afford to live anywhere in the world, where would you live and why?

[merockstar]

Pls buy this house ...

kinda wanna go to greece for no other reason than this house.

[cass]

yeah i like your pictures liondani! It's not so far from germany ... mabye to come over for a holiday visit! Pls buy this house ...

[merockstar]

how long have you lived in greece liondani?

how is the recovery from the recession coming along?

what is the best part about living in greece?

[liondani]

Lion, are those pictures all from Greece? Looks amazing

I might choose Australia, I was in Brisbane for Christmas and it was a really beautiful place.

My home country Norway and adopted country France are good choices as well. Norway has some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, and a high standard of living combined with a focus on family life.

As for China, I went there last year and actually really liked it. The south of China, while poor, has a really laid back atmosphere that really appealed to me.

Yep, Santorini Greece...
Come to Greece only one time and then decide... 

[liondani]

I would guess that those must be from Santorini island

Yep all pictures from Island Santorini in Greece 

[mf-tzo]

I would guess that those must be from Santorini island

[svk]

Lion, are those pictures all from Greece? Looks amazing

I might choose Australia, I was in Brisbane for Christmas and it was a really beautiful place.

My home country Norway and adopted country France are good choices as well. Norway has some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, and a high standard of living combined with a focus on family life.

As for China, I went there last year and actually really liked it. The south of China, while poor, has a really laid back atmosphere that really appealed to me.

[mf-tzo]

Liondani you are killing me...Greece moving into Euro was the best decision ever . I remember the days when we could go there for $50 a day and now it is $1,000 per day...

[liondani]

[merockstar]

i'm in beijing(china).i like European scenery good place

Do you like China?
Disregarding the need to be near friends and loved ones, would you leave if you could?

EDIT: Rereading this, I sure you hope you don't take this the wrong way. Nothing against China, I just could see myself emigrating from my own country someday, so I'm wondering how other people feel about their own homelands.

[gyhy]

i'm in beijing(china).i like European scenery good place

[Empirical1]

Empirical, how much poker did you have to play online to get THAT good? any good resources you would recommend for somebody interested in going that route? I play on sealwithclubs sometimes and usually get my ass handed to me, which I find strange because I wasn't that bad for a beginner when I used to play for money on PokerStars (before the U.S. banned financial institutions from making deposits for gambling sites)

thanks for feeding my daydreams guys. lol!

Um I played a lot for about a year and a half before I went full time and even when I did go full time it was probably too early.
I wouldn't recommend it, it's quite challenging, very few players make a consistent profit, the hours are also unsociable, because you tend to play at night and weekends when weaker recreational players are online.

I only started playing in about 2007/8 which was after the US passed that law. Apparently the games were incredibly easy back then. Right now they are slowly passing new legislation and PokerStars is trying to get into California. If they do that will be great!! (Regards making money before  the ban, the games were easier then and also as a casual player your sample size was probably very small and the variance in poker is quite big. I think you would probably need to log 50 000 hands +, which is a lot, to get any idea of your win-rate or skill level at a particular stake.)

If you were going to look into it more I would just google TAG strategy (Which is tight aggressive) and learn the basics of that.
After that I would join a forum where you can ask questions etc & maybe try watch some free tutorial videos on the web.

After that, the next step would be to download poker tracking software like Holdem Manager 2, I think they do a 30 day free trial after that the low stakes version is $60.  (It will be a necessity if you want to make any money, so you can analyse your play, they also come with a HUD, which means the basic stats of the players at you table will pop up as an overlay)

But yeah essentially poker is about making money from people that are worse than you plus enough to cover the rake.
So as long as you make the effort to find and sit with position on really bad players (the simplest stat is if they play more than 40% of their hands at 6max they're definitely bad) & you just play a basic tightish aggressive strategy then you're likely to be able to make a profit.

[merockstar]

If I could afford to live anywhere, I could also afford to live no where!
I'd pay off the rest of my mortgage and use it as a homebase (storage facility) and use my riches to travel around the world living in different places for a span of months and move to the next place. 

I'd love to checkout New Zealand, Thailand, Greece, Malta, Holland,... everywhere really

I hear that! but I think I could only travel for six months or so at a time just long enough to get a decent grasp on a language before I'd need to go back to homebase for some stability and consistency, and to see friends and stuff.

I also think I'd need to keep a house in Ohio though, but I'd spend most of my time in Uruguay (if I had to pick now, surmising based on online pictures and what i read on the internet). I don't fit in here but I would miss my family quite a bit. In spite of how fucked the culture is (in my mind- some folks love it here-- maybe I'm just biased from growing up here) it is gorgeous in certain places. I tried to pick you guys out a few pictures that are quintessentially ohio:

http://karenchandler.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/old_shedweb.jpg - this place is littered with old barns that look alot like this. there was one right behind the house i grew up in, in the middle of a village (the one pictured seems to be more country than that) that recently got torn down and I had no idea how much it made an impression on me until it disappeared.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LH9ZK8yRQdM/THBdnUM8arI/AAAAAAAABEI/e8QTzGtGkAo/s1600/IMG_2389.JPG - most of the state looks like this, with the exception of cities and few hilly, heavily wooded areas here and there

http://www.nal.usda.gov/ric/images/fscases3.jpg - I don't know if this is ohio or not but its close enough to remind of the wooded areas we have around here. the northeast and western part of the state is unbelievably flat. but east-southeastern ohio/amish country is hilly as hell! this doesn't even quite capture that.

its also especially gorgeous here in the fall: http://www.davidroyko.com/photos/undefined/Autumn-Ohio-Fairmount.JPG

I wish I could go take my own pictures for you guys but I have no ride at the moment. I know some really great places for looking at.

Bulgaria looks beautiful! Seems very mountainous, and it looks like it might rain in some of those pictures. Ohio doesn't really have any true mountains so that's something I have yet to really experience much of. I like the way that town at the bottom of the mountain looks architecturally as well. What's Bulgarian culture like? I had one of those spontaneous week long friendships with a dude from Bulgaria before he moved on, can't even remember his name now but we got on pretty good. He always talked about it like it seemed a place worth visiting, so now I think of that guy every-time somebody mentions Bulgaria. I know a greek dude that I can't help but think about everytime somebody mentions greece as well.

I noticed several votes for Thailand. It looks very pretty but I don't know if I would do very well in a more conservative asian culture, I've never been too talented at tact, and I do love my weed. Seems like it might be a nice place for me to visit though. Why does Thailand stand out for you guys?

Empirical, how much poker did you have to play online to get THAT good? any good resources you would recommend for somebody interested in going that route? I play on sealwithclubs sometimes and usually get my ass handed to me, which I find strange because I wasn't that bad for a beginner when I used to play for money on PokerStars (before the U.S. banned financial institutions from making deposits for gambling sites)

thanks for feeding my daydreams guys. lol!

[kirilkr]

I live in Bulgaria too, so I'm adding some more photos from here which I took.

Some mountains:
https://scontent-a-vie.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc3/t1.0-9/p480x480/1016591_10200477523553993_1635563367_n.jpg
https://scontent-a-vie.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc1/t31.0-8/1048871_10200471654167262_711391557_o.jpg

Some lakes:
https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-frc3/t1.0-9/p480x480/535396_4184626847331_965440983_n.jpg
https://scontent-a-vie.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xaf1/t1.0-9/s720x720/315882_4266052082911_652455134_n.jpg

Some cityscapes:
https://fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-frc3/t1.0-9/p480x480/251303_4057177381174_1406357609_n.jpg
https://scontent-a-vie.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc1/t1.0-9/s720x720/316494_4057150340498_839810203_n.jpg
https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpa1/t1.0-9/546049_3934260348325_1473135982_n.jpg

Some wildlife:
http://500px.com/photo/62313409/wild-black-swan-couple-by-kiril-krastev?from=user_library
http://500px.com/photo/62303849/a-black-swan-in-vacha-reservoir-by-kiril-krastev?from=user_library

Some see:
https://scontent-a-vie.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xaf1/v/t1.0-9/s720x720/426754_3859207792058_2127391400_n.jpg?oh=b8b615724d728f04e8c759d2bf8e1961&oe=542CB4FF
https://scontent-a-vie.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xaf1/t1.0-9/p480x480/427281_3859174271220_148158364_n.jpg

[yellowecho]

If I could afford to live anywhere, I could also afford to live no where!
I'd pay off the rest of my mortgage and use it as a homebase (storage facility) and use my riches to travel around the world living in different places for a span of months and move to the next place. 

I'd love to checkout New Zealand, Thailand, Greece, Malta, Holland,... everywhere really