As a tourist Vienna might be a little on the expensive side in terms of hotels etc, but it is certainly a nice city!

Totally not surprised that Libya/Egypt etc have hit the drain.

Aaay, I live in Metro Vancouver! Number 5! I honestly prefer my smaller hometown though. Big cities tend to produce too many douche bags and bad drivers for my liking.

i'm from germany and i would have put munich top places in the world as well. same with duesseldorf. but for both cities you should have money. if you don't have money i think it's better to live in berlin or so because these cities are expensive.

same with all other top spot cities. to live in vienna for example can cost you more rental than some people earn, just for a small apartment.

i think i have been in ~35 countries in my life and without the “wow how sick is that“ which you always have on vacation and just thinking which is the best to live they are right with countries like new zealand, germany, austria and australia.

personally i think sweden is fantastic as well and not only stockholm.

Gnah, Vienna isn't that nice... Its probably the best +1 mio. City, but still there are a lot of Cities in Austria where you can live comfier, solely the fact that nearly every store closes at 18:00 in Vienna at Saturdays makes it worse than other cities in Austria (usually Stores are open until 19:30 - and I am still used to that so I regularly stand before closed stores at 18:15 in Vienna T.T)

Oh, rents in Vienna are pretty low, if you don't have much money you can go live in a "Sozialbau" where you pay the third of a normal rent and you pay around 10€ per m² if you have enough money to afford a living, also, if you can't afford a "Sozialbau" you still can go to a homeless shelter (I asume they aren't that bad since my father enjoyed living in them for a while ;P).

With the lowest salaries (minimum wage - except waste disposal industry) for a full time job in Austria starting at 1000 € monthly (14000€ a year) (Data of 2009) you have a monthly after tax value of 849,30 available and two times 859,30 summing to 11.910,20 € a year, so you could afford arround 30m² without serious issues - i pay for ~27 m² about 280 € a little too much, but come around with ~480 € a month with food and everything. So in my eyes living costs arent that high in Austria...

EDIT: if you wonder what you would have left of your salary (netto) in Austria type in here what your total salary is (brutto);

Also I want to say, since I am a student I only get something called Familienbeihilfe (211,1 € per Month) and 280 € from my Mom, so 480 is pretty much everything I have ;P

lol sry but living in a sozialbau isn't what i meant. i was talking about a normal life and 10€ per squaremeter for the lowest art to live is expensive as well.

for example here in my small city you have to pay like 7-8€ for a nice place which isn't a “sozialbau“. there you live only with one other family in a stand alone house or so.

what i said if you earn enough you can live great in cities especially in this expensive cities but if not you can't afford a nice 120 squaremeters apartement.

and to your point that there are better places in austria sure but they only have big cities in this. for me for example a nice small town is always better than a million+ city. but the point that the shops close 1.5 hours earlier on saturdays is really not so important lol. and for people who work in those shops it's better to close earlier so they have a better life then^^

wtf now i read you said “30 squaremeters“ withoud issues are you serious? i didn't talj about living in the bathroom...

and sry for my bad fails i can't edit! i write with my smartphone.

I concur. GSA cities are the best in terms of quality of life.

Except Berlin of course, which sucks big time.

Yep, bathroom about 4-5 m² and toilet about 1m² kitchen about 4-5m² and a living/work/bedroom with ~3m x ~7m, the bathroom and the kitchen are a little small, but I don't have to put 3 people in there,  about my living/work/bedroom - its like 1/2 bedroom 1/4 livingroom 1/4 workroom, and believe me, I was living alone! in a 4 room apt (you can do that if your family owns a house ;P) before I moved to Vienna which had about 60m², but the living area looked much smaller since the rooms where smaller, okay I had a 20m² kitchen (which is really huge and it had a bar), but the other (3) rooms where due to also having a bigger bathroom, so all the rooms where like 3m x 4m, okay I had a seperate dining and seperate bedroom, though the diningroom was pretty much unused since I always spent my time in the livingroom or the kitchen during the day (I even ate in the livingroom)...

So the simple absence of walls makes this smaller apt (if you can call it that) seem a bit bigger.

Also is it true that in most american cities you can't drink tap water? (not only in america but I want to know about american Cities specifically)