rudder wrote: ↑January 29th, 2024, 7:12 am
I wrote a much longer, more eloquent post, but then lost it all when I clicked submit, because I'm on an unstable, 3rd-world internet plan.
Suffice to say that you guys wouldn't have liked my post. I agree with the premise of this forum that you can find better women in the 3rd world.
Unfortunately the forum is based on another premise: that if you "escape the USSA" you can go ride off into the 3rd-world sunset and live happily ever after. The 3rd world is worse in so many ways, and if you're from a society that's at least moderately organized, and understands what good customer service means, then you'll forever fight an uphill battle trying to tolerate things. 3rd world countries are mostly a mess on all levels.
This anecdote from MrMan inspired my post:
MrMan wrote: ↑January 21st, 2024, 6:02 am
I saw your post on the forum. Indonesian brides often wear colorful cultural clothing for their weddings. We were doing a 'universal' wedding and my wife had difficulty finding a modest style she liked and wanted a cream dress because of the style. I insisted on white because of the virginity tradition in my country, which she did not know about.
The grumpy bridal lady was losing patience and wasn't going to let her try on more dresses, but she acquiesced and let her wear one like the cream one in white.
There are pluses and minuses to living in different places. I can compare the US to Indonesia. Pretty much, in the US, things tend to be well organized, public services tend to be good, and customer service tends to be good. There are places with traffic jams in the US, but there are plenty of towns with hundreds of thousands of people with fairly light traffic where there is decent shopping for international food, international restaurants (if you like that sort of thing), things to do (outdoors, museums, etc.) There are some places with potholes in the US, but in general, governments tend to take care of roads and here is good city planning. Generally, customer service is good in the US.
I was thinking about buying a bag of ice, leaving it in the car for an hour in the summertime, and taking the bag of ice back, complaining about the quality of their product to be ruined in just an hour, and ask for my money back. I wouldn't be surprised if our famous cheap store would actually take it. I was happy when Walmart was in Indonesia briefly that they took back stuff. One time, that was for dairy products expired before I even bought them (I didn't think to check.) But they had a return policy like the US, which was unheard of in Indonesia.
Traffic in Jakarta is horrific, slow moving cars on roads with no lines, making up whatever lane they can fit into, with motorcycles slowly in a line cutting around them trying to drive past them. It's like they have one law governing traffic there-- the law of physics. If it is physically possible... that's the law with the traffic. Try to cross the street and they just drive around you instead of stopping. Drive and signal that you want to turn into another lane and the cars tighten up to keep you from cutting on front of them. If you signal, do it a split second before you turn. Roads are laid out terribly, requiring you to drive a mile up the road wasting an hour to turn around and go in the direction you want. Potholes can sit in the road for a very long time. People in the community might put rocks in them if they get really bad.
I used to live in a small town of about 8000. It had a Walmart. In Indonesia, a town like that might not even have reliable electricity depending on the part of the country it is in. There would likely be few shopping options. In the US, development is fairly level. There is a minimum standard of development that is pretty high. Some of the bigger cities might have fancier malls, but there is basic shopping available everywhere.
The air is nasty in Jakarta. Relatively few places in the US get up in the danger zone for air. If you look at an air quality map of China, it is even worst. Finding to find a spot on the east coast of China with decent air is difficult.
In the US with the spread of convenience stores that clean their bathrooms, you can now usually find a decent restroom travelling all over the US (not like the US, where you had to get the key, attached to something big, and go use the restroom which had its own entrance in the back, and open the door to find a nasty toilet bowl that looked like it had never been cleaned with a kind of dirt-steam coming off of it.) Go to Asia, and you find squat toilets with no toilet paper, and a we floor on the bathroom, which might mean a lot of black footprints if it hasn't been cleaned in a while. Go some place poor and the toilet might be a floor with a whole in the wall, a bucket, and a dipper to splash your waste through the hole.
On the other hand, some wild buzzing city overseas where the rules aren't as strict and the environment is less sterile can be interesting to visit. People might be really friendly in these places also.
