While I’ve never lived there permanently, I have vacationed for long stretches and lived life like a “normal” person (in an apartment, not hotel, grocery shopped, cooked, etc). I think the biggest difference compared to living elsewhere is that everything is a planned process. You don’t just buy a sofa and be done with it, oh no, buying the sofa is the easiest part of a process. You have to get that sofa out of the shop, down the canal, oh let’s see where can I dock, then get the thing over to the apartment (not every apartment is aside a dock), then up the narrow stairs of a centuries old building, and then figure out what to do with the old sofa (ie the whole process in reverse). Of course you can pay someone to do all of that (the furniture vendor may even arrange it all), but the fact is someone has to go through that whole process, and it will cost you. You will spend “x” at IKEA and then spend that much getting the thing into your flat and the old one hauled off.

This level of overhead surrounds much more than you’d think. Buying a washing machine, a mattress, furniture, …and most of all, any form of construction. Imagine tearing apart a bathroom 4 storeys up, hauling away the construction waste a bucket at a time, a small boatload at a time, then bringing in the new tiles and mixing plaster and all the rest of it…the simplest renovation will take weeks longer than in a “normal” city.

A positive I do find out of all of this is that there’s an emphasis on quality. If you’re going to go through all of that process, you want a sofa or a bathroom reno that will last a lifetime.

Finally, the biggest problem is that the city’s infrastructure is collapsing, turning into a Disney world that people commute into from elsewhere (the mainland) to make a living (serve tourists) and then leave. A family truly trying to live there faces a very high cost of living, fewer school choices, fewer sports teams for kids, movie theatres in decline (tourists don’t watch movies), even medical services in rapid decline (they’ll fix bumps and bruises but serious chronic ailments? Sorry, go to the mainland). All of the social infrastructure making a city function for its residents is absent in a Disneyland, as tourists don’t need any of that.