English, asked by pallabroy8688, 1 year ago

what was kom's first-impression of america

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Answered by abcxyz12
2
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For the first time in three years I have been on holiday; a good one. Together with my wife and two teenage sons we visited my half-brother's family in Connecticut, toured Boston, went camping (briefly and abortively) on the Massachusetts coast, stayed with friends in affluent Morristown thirty miles west of New York, whizzed round Manhattan, then rounded the whole thing off with a week on the lower Jersey shore in a big family get-together at Surf City, Long Beach Island.

Seeing so much of the north east USA in a little over two weeks left me with a gutful of tastes and impressions of a country that is always surprising. It is partly the place of massive cars, faux architecture and epic, trashy shopping malls that Bill Bryson mocks so relentlessly, but it's a young country raised from the dirt in two frenetic centuries, and frankly, the UK and Europe have more than outdone America in tastelessness, desecration and live-for-today consumption in the last couple of decades.

So in the interests of honesty and little myth busting, ten observations on my American experience of the last fortnight:

1. You can eat very healthily just about anywhere, including service stations. What's more, in New York and Massachusetts all restaurants and fast-food outlets are made to display the calories in their meals. It's a revelation. (Did you know that the average coffee shop muffin is about 500 calories? Or that a fruit smoothie with yoghurt is over 400, and with protein powder 550?) At the Massachusetts equivalent of Reading Services - a place heaving with travellers no fatter, far less pale and certainly more polite than their British counterparts - we got roasted veggie burritos at 400 calories. There was pizza and Dunkin'Donuts on offer of course, but they had to publish their calories, too, and consequently people were making an informed choice. This has to be the way forward for fat Britain.

2. Free speech is alive and well, and to an outsider it felt like hugely refreshing. Sure, Rush Limbaugh is an oaf and his views stink, and certainly the right has the pithiest bumper stickers - 'Somewhere in Kenya a village is missing its idiot' - but only the nuts take any notice. And that's the point: when extreme voices can be freely heard, most people just shrug their shoulders and turn away. The atmosphere of openness lends itself to far freer public expression than we're used to in the UK. A church in the main square of Morristown (think Guildford) lists all the categories of people it welcomes on a board outside: straight, gay, transgender, confused, agnostic, seeking, black, white etc You know it's a liberal church because it's not afraid to proclaim it. This is possibly the single thing I admire most about America: it's like a noisy room in which everyone is shouting at each other. How much better than a room in which everyone is afraid to speak.

3. Taxes are not low in the USA, especially local taxes. Our commuter belt friends, retired and living comfortably in a house that would certainly be top-band for council tax in the UK (£3 - £4k), pay over $22,000 p/a to the local government. By far the biggest slice of this goes to maintain the local schools, which do not receive central government funding. It means, we were told, that parents whose kids are receiving publicly-funded education get very involved with their schools. The swingeing local taxes have a depressing effect on the price of property, which, I concluded was probably a good thing. There's nothing more pointless than everybody's wealth being tied up in properties that do nothing except sit there.
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