And I’ve heard a radio program about how they, in this case the Swedish colony, is very much looked down upon by the locals as they prefer to live in their own ghetto not wanting to learn the language and mingle with the society in general.
More specifically, Norway and Spain both signed the Schengen Agreement, which is an open-borders agreement between most of the EU and most of the EEA.
I should point out that most Norwegians stay put, some of them rather stubbornly so - but for those with certain conditions such as arthritis, a warmer, dryer climate is a godsend.
Not looked down upon (after all, in many of those areas they are a big part of the local economy, and have houses the locals wouldn’t be able to afford in a million years), but people don’t get it. After spending some time being befuddled, most people simply decide there is no need to get it, no more than there is a need for those retirees to understand some of our own funky customs.
A few buy a high horse whose side reads “if you want to live here, learn the language!”, but many of those are either talking about poor immigrants (nobody gives a flying fuck whether the Saud family speaks Español) or have some other sort of political agenda (I hear it from Catalans, many of whom are talking about other Spaniards rather than about foreign immigrants, or from people who’d like to ban using “regional languages” outside the house - that is, from two sides of the same idiocy).
The parents of a friend of mine have been living in SE Spain for over a decade. They went there having previously visited the area, they retired and moved there in their late 50s, they wanted to learn Spanish… but they met many other British retirees with similar backgrounds, similar hobbies (not shared by the locals), similar tastes. Add that there is more and more entertainment available in their own language: once you have a satellite dish hooked in, there’s more channels in English or German than in Spanish. Add a perfectionism problem I’ve often encountered about second languages: many people want to be able to speak a second language after maybe one or two years as well as they speak their first (which it took them decades to learn). They’re integrated within their community, but their community happens to be “British retirees”.
I have heard an Irish barman being chastised for not being able to speak Swedish after ten years in the country. His response was “Why should I? People here speak perfect English.”
Yup. That whole Bournemouth-Eastbourne stretch of the coast is know as ‘God’s waiting room.’ 
But Southern Spain is commoner now, at least among the retirees I know - though typically they’re Snowbirds, like in Florida, only going there for part of the year. And actually some of them go to Florida too.
What’s really ironic is that the same ghetto dwellers often vocal very strong opinions on the necessity of (usually brown-skinned) immigrants to said ghetto dwellers’ home country to learn the language and adopt the customs of the country they move to :dubious: :smack:
There are quite a few Western Europeans on the Black Sea coast in Bulgaria. They aren’t looked down upon, but there is some resentment, because they tend to treat the locals like servants. I’ve heard horror stories about English people getting on buses and refusing to pay, treating waitstaff like shit, screaming at them because they don’t speak English, etc. “Ugly foreigner” sort of stuff.
I think family is probably a major factor in why this is such a US specific phenomenon- we have a very mobile labor force and weak generational ties. In plenty of (perhaps even most) countries, moving far away from your parents would be unusual, especially as they got older. In much of China, for example, it’s absolutely routine for elderly parents to live with their children.
Just a nitpick, but actually I think it’s the EEA treaty regarding the freedom of movement that matters in this case, not the Schengen Agreement. For example, the UK is not part of the Schengen Agreement, which means that there are passport checks at the border, but EEA freedom of movement still applies to the UK.
Like, waaaah!
And Queensland’s Florida is the Gold Coast. Where there is actually a beach called…Florida.
For the Irish and English, it’s Spain. Or it was until the recession hit.
Daffodils and redbuds are all kinds of out now.
Zsofia, South Carolina, bitches.
I just saw that you guys got 25 cm of snow - my response was HA HA!
I think there is a combination of family-culture (what we call “roots” in Spain) and size. Europe has it, but it’s both more likely to happen in those Northern countries where families have less of a “strong matriarch” tradition (patriarchal legal structures be damned, I’m talking about who organizes the table) and something which happens at a multi-country level simply because the countries here are smaller. The kind of Briton who in the US would have enough money to retire to Florida is the kind of Briton who retires to Spain; irish folk are less likely to do it on account of either “Mom would have a fit” or “but when will I see my grandchildren then?”, even if they happen to have the money for it.
I know several Spanish oldsters who spend winters in a warmer place than the one they call home, but this “winter location” is not a retirement home, or a place they own: it’s the home of a son or daughter, and usually one where there is no daughter-in-law to trigger a civil war in the hive.