Readjustment to the Land of Plenty
Posted on February 15th, 2004 by aj
Readjusting to the States was a little jarring. Three dimensional faces took a moment or two to get used to, they look a little grotesque at first. The power we have to ask anyone anything and understand the answer still hasn’t sunk in. American greeting customs still baffle me.
Its dirty. All the building are grey boxes. All the cars are trucks. The trains don’t go very far. Chain stores drive things down to the lowest acceptable denominator. Everyone’s fat. People wear corporate ads on their T-shirts without irony. Xenophobic militarism. There are a lot of homeless. The income disparity here is amazing. It doesn’t look like the richest country on the planet. The only place we traveled to with comparable extremes of wealth was Bangkok.
On the plus side, there is an unequaled diversity of people and languages on the street. You can say (almost) anything you want and despite the Patriot Act you can still tell cops when to piss off. You really can’t do that anywhere else. There’s also a rumored class mobility.
To be fair, we didn’t get outside the showcase cites of Europe all that much. First time and all; gotta see the churches and castles. I hear some European cities are dealing with sprawl problems. Hugging medieval cores like we did, we only caught glimpses of it from the air. The rest of Britain is likely to be less pretty. I know France puts a lot of national money into making Paris the unearthly place that it is. Japan and Italy sure seemed nice, though.