“Tens of thousands of people vegetate on the streets.” My cultural shock in the USA
Probably in no other industrialized country there is as much addiction to drugs and painkillers as in the USA. A headache also gives a state of public transport – a network of trains in this country is nothing but a joke – and not very top flights.
“All life dominated by cars”
This text is not to be a defense of Germany, and certainly not Berlin. In many areas in this country is going bad and we are threatened to be behind – and the failure of digitization is just one of many examples. However, I would like to refer to a few arguments that Dan Honigstein cited in his text.
He writes, among others, about the “civil war between the pedestrian and the bicycle army”. I can understand this. Germans love to ride bicycles, especially in the summer. In crowded urban movement, emotions sometimes boil and some behave like Rambo on two wheels. In this way, most Germans commute to work in this way, thus protecting the environment and their wallets.
In California, in turn, the only cyclists are those who go to the surrounding mountains on weekends, because they have a hobby. To work on a bicycle? In most places in the USA it is completely unthinkable. In this country, all life is dominated by cars.
The availability of public transport and its safety is often a disaster. For decades, urban planning in the USA was subordinated only to cars. Most of the residents of the Silicon Valley probably never used public transport.
In turn, traveling by bus in San Francisco is torture – they move extremely slowly, and there are annoying sound signals. To travel a distance from three to four kilometers, you often have to sit for three quarters of uncomfortable, hard, plastic seats.
In a metropolitan region, such as San Francisco, a network of trains is also a bad joke. Several times it happened that traveling late in the evening, I was the only passenger of dirty trains “Bart”. Sometimes I was accompanied by several homeless people.
“Tens of thousands of people vegetate on the streets”
I understand that the ubiquitous smoking in Berlin can be unusual and annoying. However, I do not agree that the inhabitants of California are so focused on health.
Sure, in the US people smoke and drink less than in Germany, confirm this statistics. In almost any other industrialized country, however, there is no much drug addiction and painkillers as in the United States. Compared to these substances, smoking seems relatively harmless.
What ends with taking these funds? This can be observed in California cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles.
People dying on the streets are not everything. Also, the centers of some large cities are exposed to a fall that no one can stop. Almost no one works in the office in the United States. This makes Śródmieście sometimes resemble the cities of ghosts – this applies to both San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The homeless camp in Los Angeles, 2022
This is all the sadder because there are one of the most architecturally impressive buildings from the Art Deco era. In many cases, they simply rot, which is undoubtedly a tragedy of these cities.
It can be said that Germany also has a big problem with drugs. For several years I lived in Frankfurt am Main and in my way to work I rode a bicycle through the notorious Bahnhofsviertel (a district near the main railway station in Frankfurt – ed.). And true – German politicians cannot cope with the misery there.
The conditions prevailing in Los Angeles or San Francisco, however, are incomparably worse.
Full digitization does not always mean that it is easier
When it comes to cash, I agree – the fact that many German restaurants and bars do not offer the possibility of paying by card is very problematic. Californians are far before Germany.
However, total digitization does not always make everyday life easier, which I have experienced on my own skin. On a March day I wanted to arrange a quick coffee meeting with my two friends from San Francisco.
We went to one of the cafes. The menu could only be found by scanning the QR code. And it was not a single case. In many places in California, this is currently a standard, which means that people sitting in a cafe at a table instead of talking, are staring at their cell phones.
To pay for coffee using a mobile phone, we had to provide an e-mail address or phone number to be able to connect with PayPal or Apple Pay. Finally, we were asked to leave a tip for the staff who did not serve us – and in the amount of 10 to 30 percent. Purchase prices.
Dan Honigstein rightly noticed: “Germany likes to complain about things that are typically German.” This may seem a bit clichéd, but on the other hand it is often very funny, especially when you talk about it with someone who grew up elsewhere and for whom this is something new.
So we can exchange impressions. We can arrange and watch the Berlin clashes of cyclists from a safe roadside. Preferably with a cold drink before one of many POPTIS (a type of grocery store found in cities such as Berlin, Dresden or Leipzig, which often operates 24 hours a day – ed.). With a little luck, we may even find a table free of tobacco smoke.
