Just back, well a couple of days ago, from a conference in Orlando. Florida in June is it’s own special form of hell. It wasn’t even particularly hot by Florida-in-June standards but it was 98 degrees everyday with an obscene amount of humidity. Walking from building to building, all of 2 minutes, was enough to drench you in sweat. How do people live here year-round? Oh and the thunderstorms that rolled in every night were biblical in their intensity; cats and dogs and golf-ball sized hail and total sky lighting bolts.
Orlando is a strange place in its own right. I actually wasn’t in Orlando per se because the convention center is over near the resort area some 10 miles out of Orlando, to take advantage of the 25000 hotels rooms feeding Disney, Universal and Seaworld, so unless you consider Mickey and Daisy and Homer Simpson to be high-culture it’s an island of crass-commercialism and blatant tourist-gouging.
Every time I’m in the States I’m reminded of how uniquely different they are. I don’t find it to be a sociable, hospitable or particularly humane place. While I’ve rarely met an American that was anything but nice to me, it just feels like a hostile, merciless society generally. It felt like there was little consideration for other people except insofar as they could get something from you. I liken it to being pecked to death by ducks. Every where you turn no one misses an opportunity to fleece you a little. II can’t say that I would ever go back to Orlando, or to most places in Florida for that matter, because I don’t like feeling like a mark, valued only for the money I spend. Maybe I’m just being naïve but I’ve rarely been made to feel that way in any other country.
Moreover, this me-first attitude seems a little cruel to someone raised in a country with a social conscience. Not that Americans don’t have a sense of charity, they most certainly do but that’s also how they view it, as charity, completely voluntary and done out of a sense of pity rather than on the rising-tide-raises-all-boats sense of social responsibility we have here; no one’s looking out for anyone else.
On another point, being there really makes me miss the 1 dollar bill. It’s just so much easier to deal with; down there I’m not routinely stuck with 2 pounds of change in my pocket, that there foldin’ money’s just lighter to carry around and use. I still don’t get why, when the Canadian dollar’s stronger than the American one, everything is still so cheap here; books, clothing, electronics, all of it is still 25% less expensive compared to back home and that’s not even mentioning the sales taxes.
The conference?, meh, not all that exciting, barely even worth mentioning.
1 comments:
Welcome to America. It's especially bad in tourist areas because people are low paid to begin with, and if they don't produce they are quickly replaced. Here, that means not only a loss of income, but often a loss of health care, which can be devastating.
You hit the nail on the head: a hostile, merciless society generally
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