I didn’t move overseas to make a point. I moved because my knees wanted kinder sidewalks, my savings wanted a fighting chance, and my curiosity still had legs.
I imagined a modest apartment with a balcony just big enough for basil, mornings to write, and evenings that smelled like bread and rain.
What I didn’t expect was the slow, daily realization that America—my beloved, infuriating home—makes life harder for seniors than it has to be.
It started with a bus.
On my first week abroad, I shuffled toward a city bus with a backpack full of groceries and the sort of caution you develop after sixty—careful feet, one hand on the rail.
The driver looked in the mirror, tapped a switch, and lowered the whole bus so the curb and the floor were almost kissing. No announcement.
No show of virtue. Just a small hydraulic kneel, as if to say, “Come on, old friend.” I found a seat and stared like I’d witnessed a magic trick.
Back home, I have waited at suburban stops with no bench and a sign that lists no times, just the cosmic suggestion that a bus might pass. I’ve climbed steps as the driver rolled his eyes at the schedule.
I’ve done that little panic dance—wallet, pass, which app works for this city?—while the line behind me seethed. Aging in America trains you to apologize for existing in public. Abroad, my first transit experience made me feel…expected.
I wish I could tell you it was a one-off. It wasn’t. The more days I stacked, the more small kindnesses of design I noticed. Curbs shaved low enough that a cane doesn’t catch.
Crosswalks that give you a few generous seconds after the light flashes red. Park benches at sensible intervals, like commas in a sentence, telling you it’s fine to pause and breathe.
When you’re younger, these are invisible. In your sixties, they’re the difference between “I’ll walk there” and “I guess I won’t go.”
Healthcare without cliffhangers
The second revelation arrived in a white coat.
Where I live now, pharmacies still behave like community outposts. I brought in a bag of pills with names as long as train schedules, braced for shame about my organization system (a Ziploc labeled “morning”).
The pharmacist divided everything into neat paper envelopes, wrote the doses in black pen, and then—without appointment or fee—took my blood pressure, frowned mildly, and said, “Let’s check again after you sit for a few minutes.”
She made me a chair from an upturned crate and a folded newspaper. Ten minutes later, the numbers looked friendlier. “There,” she said, like we’d done something together.
Contrast that with the phone mazes I’ve run in the States. Medicare Part A, B, D, Medigap, Advantage—words that sound like routes through a hedge maze where the minotaur is a bill you don’t understand until it arrives.
I have stood in an American pharmacy while a clerk, kind but defeated, told me my doctor’s network didn’t speak to my plan’s network and that the coupon app du jour could solve it “if it decides to like you today.”
Growing old is complicated enough without feeling like you need a minor in health policy to pick up a generic.
Abroad, my appointments do not involve cliffhangers. I pay a clear price, see a doctor who sits like conversation is part of medicine, and leave with instructions that fit on one page.
Dental and vision aren’t treated like expensive hobbies. I don’t walk into every routine visit bracing for a financial twist ending. Peace is not just emotional; it’s administrative.
Prices that don’t play tricks
And then there’s money itself. I arrived with American thrift stitched into me like a lining—comparison sites, promo codes, that peculiar blend of pride and embarrassment we attach to coupons.
Here, prices include tax. A coffee costs what the chalkboard says it costs.
No tip screen swivels toward me demanding that I evaluate the moral weight of 18% versus 22% before I’ve had caffeine. My pension deposits into an account that charges me nothing to exist.
Cashiers round off small coins with a wave. It’s not that the place is cheap; it’s that the price is the price, and my nervous system stops running calculus just to buy bread.
Happiness in late life, I’ve learned, is often a series of tiny frictions removed. America multiplies frictions and then sells you subscriptions to sand them down. Aging turns you into a connoisseur of the difference.
Walkability grows your world
Walkability is another daily sermon. Back home, the grocery store I could afford required crossing a parking lot the size of Wyoming. Sidewalks ended without warning.
Benches, if they existed, were decorative and “anti-sleep,” which is to say anti-human. If you don’t drive—or shouldn’t—the world shrinks to whatever you can reach without breaking a hip.
Here, my world grew legs. Within twelve minutes I can reach a bakery, a greengrocer, a fishmonger, a post office, a park, and a café where the owner knows I drink my cappuccino like a scandal (after noon).
None of this is luxury. It’s layout. The difference between an errand and an outing is the number of hostile design choices between door and door.
Paper beats portals (sometimes)
I don’t want to romanticize. There are trade-offs. Paperwork exists here too; it just arrives on paper. I’ve wrestled a washing machine that speaks only in icons and humility.
I’ve stood in line at a municipal office while a clerk stamped a form with the solemnity of a priest. But even bureaucracy has a certain honesty: you can see the line, and the line moves.
In the States, so much of aging is invisible until it punishes you—benefits you didn’t know to claim, deadlines you weren’t told matter, websites that assume your hands love tiny buttons and your eyes never met a glare they couldn’t conquer.
It’s the digital gatekeeping that startled me most. In America, becoming “a senior” increasingly means becoming a user interface problem.
Want your lab results? Log in, two-factor authenticate, solve a CAPTCHA that wants you to know which squares contain a bicycle, even if the bicycle is mostly dream.
Want to refill a prescription? Download the app whose last update broke refill requests on Tuesdays when Mercury is in retrograde.
Lose your password? Answer a security question you set in 2012 about a pet you’re not sure you had.
Where I live now, there’s a website for those who want it, and a desk for those who don’t.
The man at the desk has a stamp and a mild joke for everyone. I’ve watched him fill a form for a woman who brought her reading glasses but forgot her pen, and rather than scold, he produced a pen tethered to the counter with string like the world’s last friendly technology.
The point isn’t nostalgia; it’s choice. Aging robs you of enough options. Systems that preserve a few shouldn’t feel revolutionary.
Everyday mercies add up
I keep discovering other small mercies. Trains label the quiet car and mean it.
Grocery delivery comes in reusable crates that go back to the store, no negotiation about the bag fee that wrong-foots everyone.
Senior discounts are simple, advertised, and applied without a scavenger hunt. Street festivals end before my bedtime and leave behind streets so clean it feels like a courtesy to your future shoes.
When businesses close on Sunday, it’s not a dare; it’s a suggestion—go sit in the park, talk to someone, read half a book.
Age as membership, not costume
The social weather matters too. Age is not a costume here; it’s membership.
Younger people stand—or at least scoot—for older ones on buses without the theater of “look at me helping.” Cashiers don’t rush your change into your hand like your slowness is a crime scene.
When I take a beat to find the right word in the local language, people meet me in the middle, nodding as if to say, “We can wait. Meaning is patient.” I have never been called “young man” with that American wink that says, “We are pretending together that you are not what you are.” I am what I am. The culture seems fine with it.
If you’re reading this and thinking I’m laying all sins at America’s feet, I’m not. As I covered in a previous post, no place has a monopoly on kindness or competence.
I still love the boisterous, improvisational cheer of home—the way a stranger will tell you their life story in a checkout line like you’re part of something together.
But retirement abroad forced me to see how many obstacles we treat as normal. “That’s just how it is,” we say, standing in a line we can’t see for a service whose price depends on luck, paperwork, and your ability not to scream.
What America could borrow (and improve)
A short inventory of imports I wish America would steal:
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Sidewalks that assume you will age, and design that helps you do it with dignity.
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Transit that kneels. Buses that list arrival times like a promise, not a rumor.
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Prices that include tax and tip, so a fixed income is actually fixed.
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Pharmacies as first-line care, and doctors who treat conversation as part of the appointment, not a billing code to outrun.
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A paper option everywhere critical decisions live.
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Benches like punctuation. Plenty of commas. The occasional ellipsis where you can linger.
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Sunday as a human day, not a backlog day.
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A cultural reflex to offer a shoulder, not a lecture, when someone moves slower than you’d like.
A softer ending
Moving was not a miracle. My knees still clear their throat most mornings. I still lose nouns like they were set down in the wrong room.
Some days the loneliness sneaks up and sits on my chest until I coax it off with tea and a phone call home. But the scaffolding of my life is lighter, and lightness compounds.
The other afternoon I stood at the open window of my little kitchen, listening to the city doing its ordinary symphony: a delivery scooter, a child insisting loudly that the orange cup tastes better than the blue cup, a mourning dove muttering like an old comedian, a neighbor’s radio leaking a Sinatra song into the courtyard.
On the counter, a bag from the market and a note from the vendor who has—somehow—learned my handwriting: “Next week, the small plums are perfect.
For your gentle cooking.” I laughed. Then I cried a little. Not because life is perfect, but because it isn’t—and the systems around me make that okay.
Retirement overseas didn’t make me un-American; it made me greedy for an America that loves its elders as much as it loves its myths.
We can build it. We can decide that aging isn’t a private sport you pay to play, but a public story we all share. We can design our streets and services like we expect to reach seventy, and we want to enjoy getting there.
Until then, I’m sending this dispatch from a small table with a basil plant and a cup that cost exactly what the chalkboard said it would. The bus will kneel again in an hour.
The pharmacist will frown kindly at my blood pressure and make me sit on the crate until the number behaves. A teenager will help me find a setting on my phone without sighing.
A stranger will steady the door while I carry the groceries that smell like sunlight.
And I’ll keep thinking about home, and how much softer it could be if we let it.
