View From Abroad
I miss the strong dollar. I can’t deny it. I do.
Other people miss nickel candy bars, leaded gasoline, Elvis Presley, Judy Garland, wide open spaces, cars with tailfins, civilized airline travel, the 60s, poodle skirts and saddle shoes, the smell of just opened bazooka bubble gum, and the dog from growing up—and I miss some of those things too—but lately I’ve really felt a keen longing for the strong dollar.
I know, nothing lasts forever, and if you don’t travel or buy foreign made goods the dollar’s strength is probably of no consequence to you. I do both, and for the past decade or so our mighty dollar has made world travel a distinct pleasure. And except for world-priced goods like electronics, everything North, South, East or West of the closest international airport has been on permanent deep discount as long as you were buying with greenbacks. Oh that pesky British Pound has always been worth more, but once you got used to doing the math, traveling in the UK was until recently a good value if you avoided hotels like the Connaught in London.
But no more. Just when we’ve demonstrated beyond a doubt that our military can whup anyone anywhere as long as we can find them, our deficit (current accounts, budget, trade, all of them) has started to climb again along with our unemployment rate (to near European proportions), and the Bushies in their infinite wisdom have apparently decided that the answer to the ills that yet another tax cut won’t cure lies in making buying and coming to America cheaper. Thus the plunge in the dollar.
I’ve traveled quite a bit over the past forty years—in the past two weeks alone to Antwerp, London, Tokyo, Osaka, Hiroshima, and Kyoto—and not since 1968 when Lyndon Johnson begged us all to spend our money at home have I felt like such a subversive. Instead of bolstering the local economy by eating out or buying a new car, I headed off to points east and west, in the first instance to do business at bargain basement dollar denominated rates, in the later to visit my daughter who is spending the year in Japan at Universal Studios doing her share to advertise the wonders of this great country, or at least the 1950s movie land version on display there.
Now I realize that not everyone is the experienced traveler that I am. So as a service to the onslaught of tourists that is surely headed this way with their bushels of suddenly stronger euros and yen, I thought I would point out some of the important differences that first timers might need help with.
Taxis Here Are An Experience, But Not Like Where You Live
Since practically Queen Victoria, the London Taxi has symbolized for tourists the world round what riding in a cab should be all about. You sit high and regal just like the Queen and consort. The driver is usually from the Midlands, or maybe down by the docks, or lately perhaps from India somewhere. While this may be of no interest to the locals, it just thrills the pants off us Colonials who squirm with delight at the sound of all those delightful accents.
In most of Asia the standard taxi is the Toyota Comfort, a car not much more attractive then the departed and lamented Checker Cab, but nearly as comfortable. In Japan, the cabs are often fitted out with lovely lace seat covers and are unfailingly clean and nice smelling. In Tokyo, they also come outfitted with all sorts of keen electronic goodies including GPS powered mapping so the driver has a hope of finding where you’re going.
On the continent, the cars are usually but not always Mercedes, which starts out feeling luxurious until you attempt to slide your wide American backside across the inevitable cloth seats, stare with wonder at the manual transmission lever sprouting up where God clearly intended an automatic gear selector to go, and gag uncontrollably at the smell of cigarettes that permeates every square centimeter of fabric in the car.
Here in the States, cabs are almost always Ford Crown Victorias, a name that is evocative of finer times but masks the fact that the only other people who drive the darn things are the local constabulary and the occasional octogenarian who got lost on the way to the Lincoln dealer. It’s possible that the driver will speak English, but not likely, so depending on what country you come from, this could work out really well for you. The only way you’ll know, however, is from the music he’ll be listening to at rock concert volumes. The seat will be covered in an industrial grade of vinyl that will be as slick as Bill Clinton but for the gum spots. The floor will most closely resemble a New Delhi back alley. Unlike the rest of the world where tips are not required or even excepted, Taxi drivers in the US, particularly in the big eastern cities, expect them, demand them, and will run you down like a three-legged dog if you don’t leave one that he deems large enough.
Unless You Come From Sub-Sahara Africa, the Australian Outback, or Parts of the Indian Subcontinent, Our Trains and Subways Are Worse
This is really one of the great puzzles of living in the great PX. We just don’t seem to get the whole railroad thing which is strange when you consider that building our transcontinental railroad was the greatest engineering undertaking since the great pyramids. It united a nation and helped create and sustain massive fortunes. Railroads and all that went with them virtually built the Western U.S.
Yet today, our national railroad is a pitiful joke. But for the Amtrack Acela which serves about ten cities, our passenger trains are slow, noisy, and ugly. If your standards are the TGV or the Shinkansen, make that really, really slow. Our passenger trains also don’t go very many places and are under constant threat of bankruptcy. The train stations they go in and out of are small by international standards with almost none of the hoopla of shops and restaurants that you see in any decent European or Japanese train station. For that matter, most or our airports aren’t as nice as most European or Japanese train stations (there are more shops in Kyoto station for example than there are in most American malls).
Light rail and subways do marginally better. In fact in some cities, they’re really quite pleasant as long as you’re not talking about any place north of Washington D.C. or east of San Diego. Although they’re better now, subways in places like New York and Boston are truly horrifying, nothing even close to the standards set in any of fifty cities I can think of in Europe or Asia.
It’s All About Cars
As you surely know, we Americans like our cars. We have all this space that we stole fair and square from the indigenous peoples and we love to build on all that land and drive across it like it’s our God given right. We’ve got all the great scenery that everyone else has and then some. We’ve just spread it out more and as we put none of it near a train station, we have to drive to get to it. So we keep the Sixth Fleet steaming around the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf as a $300 billion dollar subsidy to world oil prices and let our subways and railroads languish because we don’t believe in subsidizing mass transit. I know, it doesn’t make sense, but if you read it enough times it sort of does.
We also don’t believe in small cars. In fact, our idea
of a small car would be something like a Ford Focus or a VW Golf which in
most countries will suffice for a family of five and everything they own.
Even a Mercedes
E
Class, Audi A6, Lexus anything (which you call a Toyota something), or Jeep
Grand Cherokee which seems to be one of the few American rides that makes it
across the water don’t seem all that big to us. Quite a contrast to Japan,
for example, where every third car makes the average American want to yell,
“Fore!” and the delivery trucks look like they just barely hold a box of
cereal (well, American cereal) and two cans of beer. The new Mini looks
immense, and when you do see a Mercedes it’s like spotting the Hindenburg.
Over here, large doesn’t start until you get into something that in your country is usually used by the military or perhaps by the Foreign Service to convey diplomats or world leaders. But in America, every man is a General and every mom is the General Manager of a futbol team, so as a rule, we sit high, wide, and handsome in our Chevy Suburbans, Ford Expeditions, and H2 Hummers gulping 89 octane like we’re on our way to arrange a surrender or perhaps launch sorties against some disagreeable despot. Unless you previously served in the tank corps or have experience piloting at least destroyers, you should avoid driving here.
Which Brings Us to Bicycles
Here’s something you’ll never read about in America. I found it at an online travel guide.
Unfortunately the most common crime in Holland (where few things are considered criminal) is bike theft. It occurs on such a regular basis and hits most people (esp. in cities) that no one bothers to file a police report or insurance claim. They just go to the part of town where the thieves (often junkies needing a fix) sell them back to those who had their bikes stolen, for just €25. Thus few Dutch bother to buy new expensive bikes, preferring to get around on oma (grandmother) bikes. These solid, heavy duty bicycles are slow and ugly roadsters, usually painted black.
The Dutch have bikes for different occasions like an old bike for the market or to go to the station, and a good bike to go to work and a race or mountain bike for hobbyists. Some people use a carrier tricycle (very big and ideal for moving stuff). Nowadays smaller trikes are used to transport children. A few people like the reclining bicycle, where you're practically lying down. Sometimes these models look like rockets, sporting streamlined shells, to decrease wind resistance and to protect from rain. >
Here, everything is a crime and we don’t believe in
bicycles either. Actually, that’s not completely true. Every kid has at
least one though he or she probably rides his or her skateboard instead.
University students actually seem to use them with some regularity. We
invented mountain bikes and all the X-game stuff where kids ride around
backwards in
swimming pools with helmets on. Orville and Wilbur Wright played with them
before they invented flying (despite what the French may claim). And as I
recall, American’s have won seven Tour d’ France’s since 1985 which was the
last time a Frenchman got to hang the fabled yellow jersey in his closet at
home.
Even adults ride bicycles here, though usually only a couple of times before they’re put up in the garage, never to be seen until the house is sold and the they’re carted off by a charity. The bikes, not the adults.
So while we like bicycles well enough, we just don’t see them as real transportation and we certainly don’t own several. Several cars and many televisions, but not bicycles. So while every city outside North America is wheel to wheel with bikes just waiting to be stolen, we stick to our cars, and if necessary, use taxis or those dreadful subways.
We Don’t Worship Our Phones, But Only Because They’re Not As Cool As Yours
The world is kooky for cell phones. In fact, The Gartner Group estimates that worldwide, 40 million handsets are sold every month. And we scoop up our fair share as befitting our great wealth and sophistication. And we talk on them plenty. If only they were half as good as yours.
The hidden agony is that unlike the rest of the world, we make use of every competing standard here in our great land. We have GSM phones, TDM, and CDMA. We’ll have 3G phones someday maybe, but not anytime soon. It doesn’t make a lot of difference if all you want to do is travel around your own city and talk, but going anywhere your provider isn’t is an iffy proposition (by the way, cell phone reception goes down as the price of the nearby homes goes up), and traveling outside the US with your cell phone only works if you’re with AT&T. In other words, you’ll be able to use your phone here, but we probably can’t use ours there.
The part you’ll notice is that by comparison, our phones are pretty much just phones. Just one look at what the average businessman carries around and you’ll swear it was 1999. We are so last century when it comes to our handsets. So while folks in Japan are now toting 1 megapixel, internet enabled, camera phones, messaging each other constantly—and I do mean constantly, it seems like everyone spends every walking or subway riding moment messaging each other—we here in the land of the free are just getting phones that take pictures and otherwise do little more than talk on the darn things.
Our Stores Aren’t Like Your Stores and Either is Our Money
One of the reasons I’ve wanted to cover off on all this transportation business is that you’re here with your strong yen and euros to spend money and I wanted to be sure you knew how to get to where you wanted to go.
Before I go any further, let me apologize for how ugly our money is. I’m sure you’ve seen it before, it is after all, the DOLLAR, but that still doesn’t excuse its boring, monochromatic bad looks. We recently redid a couple of our bills, presumably to make them less susceptible to counterfeiting. We may even have accomplished that worthy goal, but the $20 bill got even more hideous in the process.
Then again, maybe we didn’t. Just the other day I saw a prototype for the new $20 bill which is coming out shortly. It at least will have a slight color gradation to it. Who knows? Maybe 100 years from now we’ll have color coded money just like you’ve had since way back when. (I must say, however, that the new Euro is less than a stunner in comparison to all those lovely francs and marks and such that it replaced.)
While you’re here, you may want to avoid purchasing cigarettes unless you’re planning on visiting an Indian casino, Virginia or North Carolina. Unlike Japan, you won’t find a vending machine anymore, so you’ll have to go to a store (more on that in a minute), and when you do find that pack of Marlboros you’ve been craving, be prepared to part with the ugly green bill with the bearded man in the middle and the number five in each corner (don’t bother with coins, the biggest denomination we use here won’t buy you a stick of gum).
So why are cigs twice as expensive here in the land of the free? Because here they’re not just signs of sophistication. They’re not just carriers of a potent addictive drug that is highly likely to cause your early demise. No, to us, they are much, much more. Here in America, cigarettes are “funding mechanisms.” Not just in prisons (did you know that we imprison more people per capita than any country in the world?) where they are a direct form of currency.
No, we also use cigarettes to fund state deficits, build roads and more prisons, pay for social services, fund the occasional anti-smoking ad, and to enrich plaintiff attorneys so they can build up war chests to sue child care providers, the Catholic Church, and makers of convenience foods (which you won’t want to try, they’ll give you gas, diabetes, and heart burn as well as make your butt big—convenience foods, not the Church).
When you do decide to go shopping, you’ll notice immediately that unless you’re in New York and maybe one or two other places, we don’t have small shops anymore. We apparently don’t believe in those either. We have Starbucks, The Gap, Pottery Barn, Barnes & Noble, Foot Locker, and Crate & Barrel. We have malls and lots of them. We have big box retailers like Home Depot, WalMart, and Costco (if you’ve been to a French Hypermart, you’ll feel right at home). We also have AM/PM Mini Marts and Seven Elevens. That’s pretty much it.
If you do find a locally owned anything, definitely stop in. It will be like walking into a collector’s item or a soon to be distant memory. Unlike where you live where you can find street after street of little family owned shops, some not bigger than a Chevy Suburban, selling a huge variety of goods, we seem to reward retail success with increased rents and an “Opening Soon” sign.
So Bring Your Money And Have Some Fun
I’m surely forgetting something, but this should get you started. Oh yes, we don’t love umbrellas or vending machines nearly as much as do the Japanese, and you won’t find a fully netted driving range in every neighborhood either.
We don’t have really excellent pubs on every corner as do the Belgians, Brits, Aussies, Germans, Irish, or Scottish and I’m pretty sure you won’t like our beer unless you order something named after a body part, some old piece of industrial junk, the local fire station, or a lame attempt at a European sounding word.
Some people still use film cameras here, but you can take picture phone pictures or digital movies just like you take at home if you want.
Our best chocolate won’t make you ill, but won’t measure up to yours. And if you try to buy some of yours here, it will make cigarettes seem like a bargain. Leonidas, which is an averagely good Belgian chocolate that sells for about $5 dollars a pound over there sells for about $25 a pound here. See’s, our equivalent which isn’t nearly as good, sells for about $12 a pound.
But come anyway. You’re yen and euro will go further than ever here. The folks at the theme parks are hurting for traffic, and as Disneylands and Universal Stuidos look the same in your country, you’ll feel right at home visiting them in our country. Arnold has a new Terminator movie out which lays out a truly horrifying vision of the future. You’ll love it. Our automobile manufactures are practically giving away cars, so for the price of a train ticket you could buy a Ford Explorer, drive it around for two weeks and throw it away before you leave. Unlike what you read, we’re mostly friendly and really looking forward to playing host. So come on over. You’ll have a ball.
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Last modified:
05/03/06