“It feels great to be in this city,” said my French interlocutor, over dinner this week in a neighborhood Hungarian restaurant. “It feels like I’m back in Europe.”
I laughed, telling him that that is the second time since I moved to Budapest that I’ve heard those words from the mouth of a visitor from France. He smiled and said, “It’s true. I feel it also in Poland.”
He’s talking about migration and crime, of course. Since moving permanently to Europe last autumn, I have put myself on a crash course to learn what life is really like in Europe, as opposed to what the American media says it’s like. One would understand from paying attention to the US media that Europe has migration problems. But one would almost never grasp the depth and breadth of the problem if one did not have the chance to talk to Europeans who are living with it, but whose views do not fit the media’s preferred liberal narrative.
