I find it hard to believe you’ve spent time in Sydney and Melbourne based on those statements.
Damn. Just had a long reply disappear on me. Too frustrated to try and replicate it. So I’ll just hit on one point.
Lets take the roads in the NY area. The population of the NYC metro area is equal to the entire population of Australia. That’s a lot of infrastructure. Northeast winters beat the hell out of roads. A road can be smooth in October and a minefield in April. When the economy slowed budgets for maintenance got smaller. But there is always construction going on. Roads are constantly being fixed. But there is always more to do. Winters are milder in Australia. There are fewer roads. There are fewer people using those roads. Its really hard to compare the two.
Good call. Catch a train in the Melbourne suburbs to go to the city and you have an art gallery full of graffiti rolling past. There’s also beggars and litter but I have no frame of reference to compare, and our homeless are no where near as overt as she described. They’re usually hiding in condemned buildings or stumped up at the Salvos during the day.
I think the thing is when you visit someplace new, you’re mostly going to be seeing the surface of the place - and surfaces tend to be the cheap glitter of a society. You have to settle in and live somewhere for a while before you start seeing its real substance.
When we moved from Chicago to NY, the garbage thing put us off as well. It’s just the result of a lot of people living in a city with very few alleys for dumpsters, but it’s pretty gross, especially in the summer.
You can easily find bad food everywhere in the world, but with a little looking you can find amazing food as well. I travel a lot for work, and smartphone apps such as TripAdvisor can be very helpful in finding local gems. Asking the front desk at your hotel can be good as well, but in my experience it’s a bit more hit and miss.
Homelessness is a real problem here, but the three places with the most homelessness I’ve ever seen are Hawaii, Las Vegas, and LA (especially near Santa Monica). In fact, Hawaii is trying to implement a program to buy airline tickets to fly many of them home. It’s looking unlikely to ever happen, but it’s an indicator of the scope of the issue.
As far as the roads, I’d wager that they weren’t as bad in LA (besides the traffic), Vegas, or Hawaii. Washington DC and NYC have pavement which is exposed to significant freeze/thaw cycles and plenty of road salt, which combine to quickly degrade asphalt. It’s a big job to keep them in driveable condition. If you head to Dallas, Orlando, Phoenix, or LA, the roads are in MUCH better shape, and roads here in Chicago are just as bad as they are in NY, DC, Detroit, Boston, etc. That said, the few northern European cities I’ve been to don’t seem to have the same issues…
I find it hard to believe she couldn’t find a salad.
I don’t know the visitor’s definition of “expensive” but finding a ‘fast food’ salad should be simple. In a city like LA, Vegas, NY, etc (esp. in the tourist parts) I can’t believe there’s not a Panera or similar joint trying to sell her a chicken and cranberry salad on spinach or some other salad concoction that’s not iceberg lettuce and ranch dressing.
I don’t blame the visitor for not knowing the menu of every place she passed but it doesn’t sound as though she tried super hard either if all she could find were burger joints and fine dining.
The problem with the food was probably because she couldn’t find any place that put beetroot on everything! 
I’d say it’s more warm-weather areas with homeless-friendly policies. You don’t see nearly so many homeless here in Dallas or Houston as you do in Austin, and it’s totally due to the policies, since the climate is essentially the same between all 3 cities.
I do know that the Dallas and Houston cops shoo the homeless/beggars away from public areas and keep them from setting up shanties on the side of the road, etc… They don’t always succeed at keeping them from begging at freeway intersections, but that’s about the only place that I see them with any frequency in either city.
Roads are generally in decent shape around here, although the economic downturn of 2008 has caused them to deteriorate a little more/be repaired a little less often than usual.
I’ll say this; graffiti isn’t that common around here; I’m always stunned by the amount of graffiti everywhere in Europe (and based on Tellyworth’s comments, I’m assuming Australia as well). I don’t know if it doesn’t happen as often, or if we clean it up more often or what, but you don’t see nearly the constant profusion of graffiti all over anything that’s not mobile like you do elsewhere.
I’m also surprised that “healthy eating choices” were hard to find. There’s a huge segment of the restaurant industry called “fast casual” that’s a step up from fast food, but not much more expensive, and literally every one of these restaurants has multiple kinds of salads, grilled chicken dishes, and frequently grilled or baked fish of some sort. Places like Chili’s, Corner Bakery, Panera, TGI Friday’s and Boston Market are all examples of this kind of restaurant. They all have some fairly unhealthy choices, but they all usually have healthy ones as well, unlike most strictly fast food restaurants.
As for the actual fine-dining cuisine, a lot of it is just that there isn’t really an “American” cuisine as such. There are regional ones- stuff like the traditional New England foods, Southern/Soul Food, Creole/Cajun, Tex-Mex, SW/California style, etc… and don’t get us started about barbecue; there are multiple warring regional styles of it.
I’d stick with those rather than get some chef’s individual spin on traditional French cuisine or Italian cuisine. Plus, you get to have actual American food, not some funky fusion or hybrid.
I’ll say this; graffiti isn’t prevalent around here at all. If it’s noticeable, it’s because it’s very obvious and out of place. About the only place I regularly see graffiti is on rail cars that I see passing through or parked on a siding. Contrast this with Europe, where it seems that every surface is covered with lots of very colorful and ubiquitous graffiti (or dirt).
That was quite a tour. Her views are similar to mine when I’ve visited some places in Europe. We couldn’t find a salad other than shredded iceberg lettice anywhere in Spain. We were doing something wrong I’m sure. My In-laws visited Australia and the one thig that stuck out for them is that you all eat your chicken raw!? Surely that can’t be the case but that is how they remember it.
I can speak for Washington (assuming you mean DC.) Yes, there are homeless people everywhere - in the city. The tourists and business people are their source of income. I’ve seen the same thing in many other cities so I don’t think DC is unique.
If you only visit the major tourists sights I can see how you might think there are no salads. There are no businesses at all on the Mall, only food trucks to serve the tourists - hot dogs and hamburgers. There are a few restaurants in the museums that are OK. A lot of the restaurants right around the mall serve lobbiest on expense accounts and can be very expensive.
And yes, the roads suck in DC. Worst in the country I think.
Australia is a very big place but its population is very concentrated along the coast. America is much less densely populated. This means that supply chains for food are much longer and the food is consequently less fresh and less tasty. The large amounts of farmland in America mean that the food is cheap and the high standards of living mean that labor is expensive. Thus a very large portion of the price of a meal is the labor to transport and cook the food and not the food itself. Thus the portions of bigger than most of the rest of the world. Australia’s cities are all along the coast so seafood is a much bigger part of Australian diet than America’s.
The roads are more used, and have to deal with colder weather and that is why the roads are worse.
The homeless congregate in large cities and warm places. This is where your friend visited so she saw them there. Most of the country is not like that.
Garbage in bags and not dumpsters is a Manhattan thing because of there is not alot of room for dumpsters and just kind of tradition.
America is a very diverse and unequal place. People from asian countries and more homogenous countries are not used to the extremes of America and those stick out.
Broomstick covered it. I quibble on her view of Vegemite, though. I like it.
About the food: Yes, there are a lot of fast-food places, and a lot of greasy food. But a fast-food place like Subway has non-greasy sandwiches and salads. Salads can also be had at ‘family restaurants’. These are most ubiquitous as franchises; Denny’s, for example. These are not expensive restaurants.
Fish is more problematic. We don’t have many chippies, so you have to at least go to a family restaurant to get fish’n’chips. Non-fried fish is harder to find. When I moved to the Pacific Northwest, I imagined fresh, non-fried seafood on every corner. I was disappointed to find that most places have breaded-and-fried fish and shellfish – ‘brown food’. If you want good, non-fried fish, it’s more prevalent at the more expensive places. At least you can get a salad anywhere – even at many fast-food places.
Road conditions depend on where you are. When I lived in L.A. there was road construction/repair all the time. Pretty rough. On the rare occasions I’d go to the east side, the ruts in the 5 (the Santa Ana Freeway) must have been a foot deep from all of the semis that use it. On the other hand, a couple of times I was driving in Utah and they had signs on the freeway warning about ‘rough roads’. The freeway was much better than many or most ones in Southern California.
Rubbish – or as we call it, ‘trash’ – varies as well. Many places have ordinances forbidding leaving trash/bins out except for pick-up. Some places require bins be kept behind a fence when they’re not at the curb. My neighbourhood does not have a homeowners association, nor is there a law to keep bins off the street. Still, the practice is to put the bins out the night before pick-up, and bring them in after the trash and recycling have been collected. This has been the practice wherever I’ve lived. I’ve seen places where it wasn’t. NYC seems to be infamous for their garbage collection strikes. Also, cities generate a lot of trash. Downtown Seattle has gotten rid of most of the dumpsters in the alleys, and they use bags. Collection is more frequent there than it is here. (In my neighbourhood, collection is up to once per week. My subscription is for every other week, and that’s enough for my single bin and my recycling bins.)
I cant speak on behalf of New York (never been). But regarding Vegas and US in general:
Las Vegas has a lot of panhandlers and buskers. The strip gets a ton of foot traffic, there are tons of tourists and drunk people, people who won big, got married, or lost their shirts in the same area. Dunno if it changed, but I had heard Vegas, and Nevada in general have a shortage of decent paying jobs and comparitavely high living expenses, which makes the homeless problem worse. I met many Australian tourists last time I was in Vegas. All the families were quite polite and friendly.
I 'm surprised your friend couldnt find any healthy food. Most restaurants have “healthy” options, and its not hard to order a garden salad in most places. But maybe because I live in the Bay Area, where there is a ton of variety (Californians sometimes get stereotyped as being more health-conscious/hippie than other states).
I never knew orange cheese was wierd. Generally its either American (cheap, quasai-cheese like substance only fit for cheap hamburgers) or Cheddar. Cheddar without the orange color is called “white cheddar”.
The trash must be a New York think. Where I live, recycling is a big thing, everything is in bins. In my neighborhood, you get fined by the city if you leave trash bags/bins on the curb more than a day before/after is gets collected. So its pretty clean and nice smelling here.
Broken roads exist for many reasons depending on location. The US has more miles of road than any other country, so maintenance is an issue. Lots of road, lots of cars, never enough budget to pay for all of it, people hate paying more taxes because they think its waste because they cant fix the roads :rolleyes:
I’m from the UK and I’ve generally found the roads in Australia to be in very good condition - much better than at home, for the most part. Obviously I mean the tarred roads in built-up areas, not the gravel roads out in the bush, but even the latter seemed generally well maintained. I’d take a well graded gravel road over a totally neglected tarmac road any day.
Her perceptions are her perceptions. If I had to guess, some of it might have been because she was not used to big cities and some of it came from not knowing how to find the kind of places she would like to eat at in a foreign country.
I dont’ disagree that America is in decline though, but that’s probably another thread.
American here.
Great, but that’s not the whole America. She missed an enormous amount of what makes the US the US. Rural Appalachia (e.g. most of West Virginia, some parts of Virginia, Kentucky, and a few other states) is a whole other world. Hillbillies do exist, and they do drive old pickup trucks with gun racks and gas (i.e. petrol) stations sell guns.
This is true, but nothing new.
I’ve lived here for most of my life, and don’t really see this as true. There are certainly areas of the US that have been in decline lately. cough Detroit cough, but the crime rate in New York City and Washington, DC has plummeted since the 1990’s. In 1995, there were areas in DC that you just didn’t go to. Nowadays, they are areas where you need to exercise basic street smarts (e.g. don’t go in dark alleys at night alone), but they aren’t daytime war zones and open-air crack markets anymore.
I haven’t been to Australia, but I’ve been to Canada and found that English-speaking Canada was more or less a mirror of the US with only minor differences. The roads weren’t any better, and there were still beggars on the street.
The roads situation varies by state/region. Once you get out of the big cities you will see far fewer potholes and very few homeless. If she comes back have her try something like rural New England, the lakes of Michigan, Yellowstone National Park, or the Appalachian mountains.
Take your political rants either to the Pit or to GD, but don’t try to hijack this topic again with a post like this.
As an explanation of why roads might not be maintained very well this doesn’t make any sense - the USA is not compelled to have the same road maintenance budget as a smaller country with fewer roads.
I’d also like to see your working for “we might have more roads than everywhere else put together”. Ever looked at a map of the much more heavily populated continent of Europe?
I think the observations in the OP–things one would see/experience on a 5-week visit to the USA–are pretty much right on the money. On my extended road trips across the country, I’ve thought the same things myself.