According to the results of the Time Out City Life Index 2018, Chicago is the world’s best city for “having it all.” Bangkok, unsurprisingly, was lauded for being a haven for street food.
To celebrate 50 awesome years of inspiring and enabling people to enjoy the best of what their city has to offer, 32 editions of Time Out across the world got together and conducted the group’s biggest-ever, cross-continent survey to find out which cities are thrilling locals the most and should be on everyone’s travel list. This year, 15,000 people were surveyed and each city was scored across categories like food, drinks, culture, friendliness, affordability, happiness and liveability.
The cities that scored the highest were Chicago (which won for the second year in a row), Porto, New York, Melbourne and London. Bangkok was named the world’s street food capital with more people eating on the street than anywhere else (42 times a year on average). Bangkokians are also the biggest restaurant-goers, with 94 percent eating out at least once a week.
Of all the Asian cities surveyed, Bangkok seems to have the biggest, or at the least the most open, gender-fluid community. The number of Bangkok respondents identifying themselves as neither male or female is four times more than in any other Asian country. The survey also revealed that residents of Bangkok are heavy Facebook users and big cocktail fans. They like it when the weather is cool, which is why Tokyo is their number one travel destination and why they recommend cooler months like December as the best time to come to Bangkok.
See more stats and numbers from the Time Out City Life Index 2018 on timeout.com/citylifeindex.