Maggie's Farm

The more McDonald's and Anerican style junk processed food in the supermarkets, the fatter the Europeans now. The English were mostly skinny in my youth, now you have the same class divisions via a vis weight as in the US. The lower class Brits dress much as you say Germans do. All the Germans I know are fit, slim, tall and have gorgeous, intelligent and better behaved kids than most of the American kids I know (I may be biased by some beloved friends?)

Good food has always been very expensive in Europe, which helps people stay thin, also living mostly in cities and walking or biking almost everywhere. Public transportation and walking or bicycling is green and trendy with idiot fit hipsters in this country and is great for the young, the childless and the non-disabled, but brutal on the elderly, young families, and crippled.

Houses aren't heated as warm, so that, plus expensive food, and lotsa walking makes people not need the insane age-denying workouts Americans injure their joints and muscles with.

There is more emphasis on lifelong sports, amateurism, passive recreation in parks and recreation programs. Walking, picnicking, family soccer games, hiking for all. Because kids get into college based on purely meritocratic academic criteria you don't have the same hyper parenting we do here with pushing kids into varsity sports so the stupid ones can get into college anyway. An adult can actually lap swim in Europe after work without being prevented by ridiculous American kiddie competitive swim teams monopolizing facilities.

People live in smaller apartments and have less crud but have richer cultural lives and more livable cities so one doesn't have to retreat to a walled suburban fortress.

It can be rather oppressive for a female that most French and Spanish and Italian women are so chic and present themselves so attractively: in America most people are so casual that one doesn't feel like dog meat by comparison.

It is disconcerting to me that most young Europeans seem so indifferent to religion. Not godless, but so disillusioned by centuries of bloodshed in the name of faith, that they don't bound up to you and invite you to their church. The latter is, IMHO , one of the glories of our country: the unabashed love of God(as of our country ) and our welcome to neighbors that one still finds in places outside the Sodom and Gommorrahs like NYC.