View of America from an Aussie tourist. Right?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Hi All,

Let me start by saying that I’m putting this up, not to have a shot at the USA, but to get some opinion from the locals whether this perception is right or not.

A woman who works for me just got home from a 5 week USA holiday with her husband and 3 young daughters, She did LA, Las Vegas, New York, Washington and Hawaii.

While she really enjoyed the holiday, she had a few comments about the USA in general that made her very happy to be home.

  1. She said the food was horrible (her words). She likes to eat healthy but found it very difficult to get what she considered healthy food. There were hamburger joints on every 2nd corner and the other one had a different fast food joint. Trying to get some simple food like fish or salad involved having to go to an expensive restaurant.

Her opinion was that almost everything was greasy and the orange cheese was just damn weird.

  1. There were homeless people everywhere in public parks and on beaches, having built temporary shelters out of trolleys and cardboard, begging for money

  2. The roads all seemed to be full of holes and are as bumpy as fuck.

Overall, her opinion as someone who had never been to the US before but having grown up watching US TV programs and movies, was that the USA seemed to be a place that had peaked several years ago and now was in decline. She was happy to be home.

Granted that most people in the USA have no real knowledge of Australia so can’t compare, and her only prior knowledge of the USA was TV and Movies.

So my question to the good citizens of the US are:

Are her observations fair?
Would you agree or disagree?
Did she just cop the narrow view from doing the tourist beat or is what she saw consistent with the rest of the country?

I’m intending to visit sometime in the not so distant future, so I’m interested to see how the inside view compares with that from outside.

2

Yes, fast food is ubiquitous in the US.

You can get her “simple food” like fish or salad at an inexpensive restaurant, but those are often tucked unobtrusively into the landscape and don’t heavily advertise, so they can be hard for someone from out of town to find. The easy to find restaurants are either the fast food places or the expensive places because they’re the ones with the advertising budgets and money for huge, lit signs.

I’ve lived in the US all my life. Where I live I know where to go to get inexpensive and good restaurant food, but when I travel to another city I have the same problem as your friend in finding healthy restaurant food.

As a general rule, ask for “family diner”, “Greek restaurant”, or “ethnic restaurant” if you want a place to eat with modest prices and a range of selections. I’m mostly familiar with Chicago as a big city, and Chicago magazine publishes a restaurant guide listing hundreds of restaurants in and around the city describing cuisine and price ranges. Here is their on line guide. I’d be shocked if other big cities don’t have the same. It lets you search by different criteria, from ethnicity to price to location.

Sorry about the orange cheese - can we say something about Vegemite in return?

You get that when there is a lack of a decent social safety net and housing costs are squeezing the poor. The beggars hang out where the tourists are because that’s where they can get their money. They’re not everywhere, but I’m sure it’s shocking when you encounter them for the first time.

Be aware that some of them aren’t actually homeless - there are scam artists posing as the needy.

Yes, road maintenance is an issue in many places.

US TV shows an idealized view of America. As just one example, homes in US fictional media are almost always MUCH larger than actual homes in the socio-economic strata depicted. The US is also mythologized as the land of plenty or as wealthier than other nations (perhaps overall, but we do have pockets of grinding poverty) and our media does little to dispel that notion, so when you arrive here the reality is never as pretty as in the movies and TV.

There are many wonderful things about the US, and many things to see and do. We also have flaws. If you come here, likely you will see both.

3

We have some odd views on cheese. Americans claim to like it, but eat “processed cheese food”.
Homelessness varies by location. LA and Vegas are nice and warm.

Road work happens all the time- we have more roads than anywhere.
We might have more roads than everywhere else put together. So patching them takes time and money.

It’s not as hopeless here as people make it sound, though that certainly varies by location.

4

Hey Broomstick, thanks for a straight response, appreciate it and I can see exactly where you’re coming from. It can be hard to find the low key eating joints when you’re only in town for 3 days at a time. All places have good and bad, nowhere is perfect.

One other thing she mentioned was about rubbish collection. Apparently in New York, people put rubbish out on the footpath without using bins and it sits there for days until collection, stinking up the place in the sun.

is that common? Why no bins?

ps, feel free to bag Vegemite, almost everyone except Aussies do. It’s an acquired taste.

5

The orange color in cheese is just a harmless coloring, usually annato (achiote). It’s sort of traditional in certain varieties of cheese here.

Roads, well, as noted maintenance can vary, an it depends on the area as to why. I’m renting in a well-to-do suburb that has huge property taxes (which normally fund the roads) but crappy roads. That usually seems to be due to a combination of house construction trucks, having to tear up the roads (replacing water/sewer pipes) frequently and just patching over the area, and maybe misplaced budget priorities.

Homeless: You generally see more homeless people in warmer cities, as noted. I’ve lived around and worked in Chicago for well over a decade, but visiting San Francisco just blew my mind in that respect.

6

This rings huge bells with me. We do indeed get the impression that US homes are vast, open plan affairs, so I was quite surprised when visiting relatives of friends who lived in a very nice suburb of Chicago that their house was entirely normal in size (to my British experience). They were average middle class folks, probably similar in wealth to my own parents, and my parents actually have a bigger house.

One thing I found about the food - aside from huge portion sizes - was that it was tricky in many cases to find food which wasn’t ‘over the top’. Not sure how to explain that, but I remember even in nice restaurants (in Boston, Portland Maine and Provincetown, my last trip), the chefs seemed to be trying sooo hard to show off their skills that good food was ruined by complex and mismatched ingredients. Eg a beautiful piece of cod which had a cheese crust, and a spicey sauce, and an odd garnish, and on and on. Then there was the eggs benedict which the chef decided would be improved by the addition of orange juice to the hollandaise sauce (it wasn’t). Stop messing with the food, people!

7

I don’t know about New York, but most places require bins or at least that you bag your garbage. Around my area you can be ticketed if you don’t dispose of your garbage properly and bins are required. When I lived in the Detroit suburbs you put your garbage on the curb in a plastic bag, but only the night before and that was a long time ago.

The US is a very big place and there are a lot of regional differences.

8

Aussie here, been to the US a number of times. I’ve found that the food varies, roads vary, houses vary, cleanliness of cities and number and prominence of homeless people vary. Just like at home. I’ve had some excellent meals there, often cheaper than Oz.

When you go to another country, the familiar little things you take for granted are all a bit different, and your filters for avoiding bad areas and bad food and bad situations don’t quite work. So the good things all seem wild and exotic, but you tend to step in more crap than you’re used to.

And before you mock American cheese, take a look at the ubiquitous 1kg blocks of “Tasty” in supermarkets at home.

9

Hopefully someone who knows better can chime in: It’s been a long time since I visited New York City, but I did see piles of garbage bags back then. I was under the impression that large parts of the city didn’t have alleys (where you’d normally store a dumpster) and putting however many trash cans it’d take to service a giant apartment building on the sidewalk would be near-impossible (plus who’d want to bring one downstairs however many flights and then back up). So people just brought out their trash the night before/morning of trash day and piled it for collection.

10

The fast food thing is a travel problem anywhere.

11

Our cuisine is in its awkward teenage years right now. We just discovered our fascination with food in the last couple decades, and now anyone who watches the food network thinks they know how to cook. We are saturated with creativity and experimentation in the culinary world. I don’t think it’s really a bad thing, but it will take some time to refine.

But don’t blame us for the orange juice hollandaise (Sauce Maltaise), the french came up with that one.

12

As other responses have stated, the OP’s friend’s observations are largely true, but only part of the truth.

Homelessness and panhandling is widely visible usually only in big cities, and is particularly acute in warm-weather areas.

New York: I have also noticed that the garbage bags are out on the sidewalk constantly. I suspect what’s going on is that there is staggered garbage collection so on any given day, some blocks will have their garbage out on the sidewalk. As to why they don’t use bins, I don’t know. In the parts of the country I live, the garbage collection service itself will provide you one large bin that you can roll out to the curb. However, if you have more than fits in the bin, it’s okay to stack the bags out next to it.

13

I think this is probably right except that individual residents in large apartment buildings don’t individually take their trash out. They deposit the trash in a trash room and a janitor or custodian takes it out to the curb.

14

Oh, did they? The chef at the place I was staying told us it was his own special twist. It was horrible.

15

To be fair, it’s easy as pie to find great food in New York, and I went to some great places in Boston. But there did seem to be a lot of excessive experimentation going on in many places, with a lot of misses amongst the hits.

In contrast to this, over the last decade in the UK there’s been a real focus on ‘going back to our roots’ with many many chefs serving ‘modern British’, moving away of the disastrous post war cuisine we are so famous for and concentrating on local, quality ingredients which we have in abundance and bringing back traditional recipes with a certain modern sensibility. It’s been a great revival.

Oops, hijack, SORRY!

16

She is right. Her comparison is correct. I spent a year in Australia, in Sydney and Melbourne. The streets are clean, no litter, graffiti, beggars, homeless in lean-to shelters in parks. They have National Health Care. We don’t. Our government doesn’t care. Only for corporate profit-care.We see the result of this extreme capitalist corruption as she does, due to the Do Nothing Congress of Mitch-erable McCon-well his Republi-conned lackeys to vote against themselves, against Obamacare and everything else :Obama" and -for- the special-selfish- interests of the medical, pharmaceutical and insurance cartel CEO profiteers and their sycophantic stock-share investors. That’s what our Wall Street Government cares about. Conversely, the government of Australia seems to be more concerned more about care for its people. What a concept!

17

Go away, edmund.

18

I’ve noticed that as well, so I had to document it.

19

One thing to note is that since 2008 a lot of local and municipal governments – particularly in California and other western states – have had to heavily slash their budgets and things like cleaning and maintenance of roads have been affected. A relative of mine said that he noticed a marked difference on the cleanliness of Los Angeles, for example, between his 2003 trip to the United States and his more recent visit.

20

I’m surprised by the comments about the poor state of the roads. That’s what my British SO says about the roads here in Australia. I guess here, like there, they vary between regions.