Hey guys
I do speak fluent Chinese (in four different dialects no less), I can also speak pretty good German and French (since I was educated in Switzerland from 1st grade to 7th grade). In any case, because many of today's organizations are very international, English is the default language, even if the company is located in Germany, Japan, France or even Finland. In the company I am going to work for, only about 1/3 of the people are French (or capable of speaking French), the rest are from countries like Finland, Norway, Japan, India, HK, China, Taiwan and Korea. Most of my co-workers are educated in US (some of them are even my research group mates), so almost everyone can speak English. Daily life wise, my French is good enough that I should be able get around, if not, my wife's French is even better than me, so we can have her do the talking
7th is a rather expensive area, but comparing to US, no one buys a 3000 sq ft house sitting on a 6000 sqft lot, so the total price is not as high as one might think. We are going to get a modest two-bed room apartment that is around 300k Euro. Because of our pay is substantially higher than US (for me, it amounts to a increase about 3x, and for my wife, about 2.7x), so affording this apartment is almost nothing. a 6-bd room apartment with 3 parking space can be had for about 1mil Euro.
The interesting part will be if we want to maintain an apartment in Shanghai. We already rented out our family house to an American car company for the next three years so I will have to get a separate place. in Shanghai, a nice apartment runs about 400k USD to 600k USD,
