Tastes vary as to what is important and enjoyable so there are places you could live where the Standard of Living was genuinely lower than the West and likely enjoy more, though that is really about the local town then the country by and large. Visiting various tourist traps though tells you not a thing about the country. No major metropolis can be taken in during one trip and you usually only see the tourist spots and foreign-friendly bits. In that respect someone can visit NYC and get no better of an idea about normal NYC then they can visit Disneyland and get an idea what the US is like. Live in a foreign place for a while and you rapidly lose interest in the tourist spots there and begin realizing how much more there is to the city that's totally different and how entirely different the outlying suburbs and countryside are. You want to get to know a country you need to live with the people away from the tourist spots for some months at least. Out in the countryside where the people don't see foreigners as much and your coin tends to buy more. You can't compare NYC to Frankfurt and assume you've really gotten to know either country very well. Each town varies so much and a little town 50 miles from either is practically unrecognizable from either metropolis or even its neighbors.
That said, I can understand someone coming back from a trip to another 1st world nation and singing its praises, but Thailand's averaged about 2 military coups per decade this last century and most of the roads aren't even paved. You're comparing a horrible oppressive shithole where slavery is still common to the US on the grounds that you saw a bit of a city where they've looted the nation to make parts of it glitter. I'm glad their trains run quiet and on time, much of their population doesn't even have running water. So your singing of their praises doesn't come off so much insulting to the US as indicating you're easily fooled by a little glitter. That's happened a lot over the centuries too, some foreigner goes and visits a place and sees the palaces and comes back singing of those and forgetting filthy, poor, oppressive slums. A lot of places are just Potemkin villages.
I mean, c'mon: It was BANGKOK, whose reputation for luxurious tourist indulgence is matched only by Amsterdam and Vegas. The difference, as you note, is the US and Netherlands do not have a revolving door of military dictators, rampant poverty and enslaved child prostitutes.
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Slightly better than chocolate.
Love still can't be coerced.
Please Don't Eat the Newbies!
LoL. Be well, RAFOlk.
- 28/08/2013 08:45:07 AM
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