I saw that in India in 1979. Certainly not new or unique to Haiti. Unfortunately.
Fucking hell, I saw that in San Francisco in 2009. omg it’s like a hellhole.
My boss - who has been to some really nasty places in his earlier career says Rwanda in the 90s was the worst.
Whilst I’ve not been to either I’m willing to bet Rwanda in the 90s must be fairly comparable to Somalia now, given that they’re both hell holes for similar reasons (breakdown of society/anarchy, rape, torture, violence, huge poverty etc).
Yep, I’ve seen that in New York City, too. The juxtaposition of wealth and poverty is ubiquitous.
This article about Dubai is nightmare-material for me. People forced into indefinite slavery, the Sri Lankan boy who swallowed razor-blades in prison, the happy exploitation of foreigners. The whole damn thing stinks like a pit of evil.
I was just being glib. It’s a real hick sort of town and is the considered one of the meth capitals of the country (although not anymore since a huge amount of DEA raids in the past few years).
No, Do you mean East Haven, Ct.? It was a mafia ridden area back in the 80’s. I know why The Doors wrote that song about blood in the streets of New Haven. In the 80’s there were murders daily. I would be on the bus and we would go through sections of Dixwell Ave and there were junkies staggering across the street with a needle hanging out of their arm. I saw horrible poverty, prostitution, and disgusting welfare housing not fit for a dog to live in. Babies playing on the sidewalk littered with broken glass and old needles and garbage. You had to be very careful what street you were on because of the gangs. I am white and when I first moved there I was mugged twice in two weeks for being on the wrong street.
It got better when I got a boyfriend but he turned out to have mob connections and went to jail. I hope it has gotten better but that town was a dirty cesspool back in the 80’s. I worked for the phone company and I couldn’t work alone in New Haven or Bridgeport. It was too dangerous.
I think what was worse then the crime and the poverty was the ugliness of the place contrasted with Yale University. Yale was clean and spiffy and one block over and your in the combat zone. The waterfront was gross. They were dumping medical waste from barges and the beach was awash in it and dead rats the size of cats. You could not go barefoot or swim on those beaches. They were barren beaches of filth and old tires… People didn’t care. They threw their trash on the ground and it stayed there. It was like the people had just given up and no one was happy. The weird thing is I grew up just 45 minutes from New Haven and lived a sheltered life in a small rich town and had no idea what poverty was. We have it right here in the USA.
Poverty and violence lived right next door to corruption and wealth.
Yes, I wiped my feet on the way out of New Haven.
Yup, I find the Dubai thing more disgusting than most of these because of the attitude of the typical ex pat out there… it really is the three fucking monkeys
(Although be aware Hari has a reputation)
I lived in Dubai for three years and have been to North Korea, Sudan, D.R. Congo and other troubled places. Dubai is the polar opposite of D.R. Congo… no matter who you are. Expats who go to Dubai not knowing the law are asking for trouble. The laws concerning debt are well known.
Yet, the Italian section of New Haven (home to Pepe’s Pizza-YUM!) was always nice and clean! No crime, no prostitutes.
NH has been clean up (a lot), but it is still a very dangerous place (drugs and violent crime).
Concerning the -Stan countries, Krygyzstan and Tajikistan are the most unstable of the bunch. These nations commonly have revolutions, and civil wars.
Uzbekistan is ran by an iron fisted dictator who has more or less cracked down on the Islamic crazies. Uzbekistan is one of the few doubly landlocked nations in the World (a nation which is landlocked by other landlocked countries.
Turkmenistan was ruled by a goofy dictator with an extremely long name. He was the leader of the nation when it was still a region of the Soviet Union. He made up all kinds of ridiculous edicts like women not wear makeup on television, men must be clean shaven, close all the hospitals outside the city. He even wrote a book called Rumnana (maybe sic) which is his personal writings that all school kids had to memorize. He died and a new leader is in who may or may not be his son.
Kazakhstan actually sounds like the most promising nation of the lot. It’s a huge nation which is between basically China, Russia, and the Middle East. Even a small amount of the country is in Europe. I have never heard nothing negative about the government and things seem stable.
A lot of these countries suck or are hell holes not because of the repression of the government, but the corruption thereof.
I have been to Cambodia in 2005 and it was mostly a very sad place, because of the Khmer Rouge, and the corrupt government that is in place there now. I would say that 90% of the people there lived at our below the international poverty line, while the other 10% or so lived quite well, with the top 5% living like kings and lords. There is a lot of prostitution and drugs there. There is also a lot of old bombs and ordinance that kills and maims people every year.
No one has mentioned Myanmar, also known as Burma, which is one of the most repressive governments on Earth, probably the second most repressive after North Korea. Basically a military government with a broken down socialist economy, making money mainly through illegal drug sales, and the labors of the poor people, who commonly are held against their will while their boys are stolen from the villages to be conscripted into the Army, who have been fighting a guerrilla war with various tribes like the Karen people for decades. The government allows no desent, no elections, and plenty of gulags. That country sucks. I do perfer the name Myanmar, regardless that a bunch of butthead generals thought it up.
North Korea without saying. What a fked up country. The closest thing to an Orwellian nightmare.
Many nations in Africa are not safe to enter at all. Please mention a safe African nation, especially a subsaharan African nation with a stable democratic government, little to no corruption where most of the people live a decent standard of living. Kenya perhaps? Botswana? Tanzania? I wouldn’t even go into these countries alone.
No one mentioned Columbia, Venezuela or Mexico, especially in the larger cities. Caracas is supposedly a very dangerous place.
They say Baghdad is dangerous, but its no dangerous than inner city American Saturday night.
I would say that most of Iran is very safe and when one gets past the anto American, pro Islamic propaganda i think one would find nice people, great food, interesting landscapes and a lot of history. I would love to go to Iran. However, the eastern end of the nation near Afghanistan and Pakistan is a no man’s land and care should be taken there.
Well, there’s a difference between “It’s was so cold…IT SNOWED!!!” and “It was forty below for a month”. But yeah, there’s only a few countries that have really arctic regions–Iceland, Greenland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Canada and the US (Alaska). Although they aren’t arctic we could throw in highland central asia–China (Tibet and so on), Mongolia, Nepal, and Bhutan. But the Stans aren’t really arctic, more like the US and Canadian prairies. I guess if you look at North Dakota and Minnesota, they can get damn cold, as cold as Alaska, it’s just the winter doesn’t last as long.
And just looking at lattitude gives a misleading picture. New York city is at the same lattitude as Madrid Spain, but they sure don’t have the same climate. Europe and Mediterranean countries have warmer and more temperate climates than most parts of the world–higher lows, lower highs, and warmer all around.
Okay, first of all, the discussion wasn’t about “arctic” places, it was about “cold climate” places. I feel confident that the stans have cold climates, although I will agree with you that they are not arctic. But again, that wasn’t the point, and you’re seriously moving the goalposts here.
Second, I spent two years living in rural Bulgaria, which is a “it’s so cold, it snowed!” sort of place. Hardly arctic. In the US, I live in Michigan, and I spent three years living in Chicago, so I do know a little bit about living in cold places. Winter in Michigan is much colder and longer than it is in Bulgaria, there’s no question. But given the choice, I would rather suffer through winter in Michigan than Bulgaria because in Michigan (and Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Canada) we have modern heating systems. And insulation. This is probably getting into emo territory, but I can honestly say that my second winter in Bulgaria (2007/2008) was the worst time in my entire life. My water pipes froze and I didn’t have running water for six weeks. Then we had a thaw and my pipes burst, spraying water all over my bathroom. Then it froze again and I had a layer of ice that I could not get rid of all over my bathroom for about a month. I thought I was going to slip and fall and die any day. I heated my house with a wood burning stove because - and I learned this the hard way - using a heater ran my electricity up so much that one month’s bill was actually more than my monthly salary. So I would walk around my village looking for twigs and pine cones to use as kindling. I slept fully clothed, wearing my heavy wool winter coat that I only wear when it’s below 20F in the US, under four blankets.
One good thing is that my village had mineral hot springs which are used for hydrotherapy, so on a few occasions, I went over to the indoor hot spring pool (which is open to the public) and swam around. Those times were probably the only times I was warm for the entire winter.
And I’m pretty sure that this experience was still massively better than living through winter in say, Tajikistan, where an energy conflict with Uzbekistan has caused them to have virtually no electricity (and none at all outside of Dushanbe) for the last several winters.
My point is: poor, cold-climate places exist, and it fucking sucks to live there. It’s not on par with life in the DRC or Haiti, but it’s not exactly a picnic.
You are overly paranoid. Botswana and Tanzania are among the safest, most prosperous African countries. My wife and I went to D.R. Congo alone - showed up at the border, paid our visa fee and walked in. We spent a few weeks in Uganda and Rwanda as well as Sudan and had no problems at all… even wandering around Kampala, Kigali and Khartoum at night.
I feel ya, Kyla.
I’ve lived in a cabin in Fairbanks Alaska through the winter, with no running water, an outhouse, and only a wood stove for heat. Except, it wasn’t that bad, because the cabin was insulated and I could throw more wood on the fire. No burst pipes because there weren’t any pipes. In Alaska you only get cold when you’re outside, because any building that isn’t designed for 40 below is uninhabitable. I can’t imagine living in crappy communist-era housing.
And the other thing is, cold and dry beats cold and wet every day all day. Cold and dry you just put another log on the fire. 20 below in Fairbanks feels warmer than 32F freezing rain here in Seattle.
Granted, it’s been over 30 years since I was there, but Kenya was a perfectly fine place. Nairobi was no worse than any other big city in an industrialized nation. Polite people in suits, street vendors with decent merchandise (I still have some of those carvings). I was a teenager, and my parents felt safe letting me explore.
Despite the aborted coup in the early 90s, they seem to have gotten their act together politically in Kenya. There hasn’t been a regime change (other than lawful elections) since they got their independence from England (in the 60’s, I think). I’d go back there any time, and I’d take my family.
Tanzania was certainly a backwater, and we were careful to follow the rules, but we didn’t feel unsafe at any point.
On the other hand, Uganda under Idi Amin and the post-Selassie government in Ethiopa in the late 70’s made us nervous. In Uganda, we didn’t even leave the airport property when we made a refueling stop, and I was scared.
Not a word to say about the exploitation and enslavement of the foreign workers? Dubai disgusts me more than these Third-World shitholes like Somalia, because at least Somalia can’t pretend to be more than a Third-World shithole. Dubai pretends to be a modern, advanced city – but it’s built on the backs of slaves.
I agree that the south Asian labourers are poorly treated in many cases. But they all came voluntarily… open up a Sri Lankan newspaper and half of it is ads to go work in the Gulf. It’s illegal to take their passports, but some employers do. Their Embassies however, usually do not provide any assistance. If it is so bad, why do they keep coming?
I agree it is not good, but having been to India and Sri Lanka, it is usually better than the conditions they have left behind.
I second Swaziland. I lived there in 2006 and it really is on a hiding to nowhere. Their King is a greedy self-serving arsehole with 14 wives and counting. The HIV infection rate is off the charts and Jesus, don’t get me started on the men. I know it sounds like I’m seriously generalising but the contrast between the men and women in Swaziland is just huge. The women are fantastic. Friendly, incredibly hardworking and ambitious. The men are lazy tossers for whom drinking and fucking is the only way to pass the day. I was pretty much assaulted in the middle of a busy main street at 3pm one day and the men came out of the bars to watch. And laugh. Horrific stuff. It needs to be burned to the ground and started again.
The most alarming thing when I first got there was the newspapers. Every single day there were countless obituaries of twenty, twenty-five year olds. They all died from ‘TB’ or ‘short illnesses’. AIDS was never, ever mentioned. I always wondered did they go and get their photos taken especially for the obits. Grim.
The kids called me ‘Gogo’ (Grandmother). I was 36.