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Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

Rural Croatia too, except it’s a truck that comes to all of the villages 3x/week with staple items. Plays ridiculously stereotypical Croatian music through a loudspeaker to announce his arrival.

And then a meat truck once a week and a fish truck more irregularly.

Took requests as well.

I think of it like villages having Amazon Prime starting in the late 90s.

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It’s the same here in rural Portugal. However, if you just go to the van and ask for some bread (for example), they look at you as though you’re mad. After all, you didn’t order it yesterday, therefore why on earth would they have bread for you today?!

I get why it works that way, but I was bemused nonetheless.

Here in Maryland, there are trucks from New York Chinatown stop at local park and ride regularly to deliver specialty Chinese food. You order through an app.

Marylander here - where is this? Sounds cool.

DC resident here, I'm really interested in learning more

Rural Italy also has the fish truck that comes 2X/week. They'll stop by pre-determined spaces for scheduled times so those who want fish know to be there at the scheduled time.

That's not uncommon in (very) rural France. We had a bakery-grocecy truck where I grew up.

Baguette vending machines are one of my favorite parts of visiting remote places in France.

That's interesting!

I would have thought Croatia to be small enough to not need such a system; i.e. supermarkets not further than half an hour drive away.

Or is it just a matter of convenience?

A very similar system is also common in small towns (population in the low hundreds or fewer) in Spain. Every few days a baker will come driving their van and selling bread, or a truck with fruit, etc. Even doctors and priests follow a similar pattern.

It's likely that one could drive for 30 minutes and find an even better selection. That assumes car ownership and the ability to drive, which is not widespread in the aging population in rural areas.

My first reaction is that this is sad but that is incredibly biased based on my expectation of having anything on demand.

On the contrary. When I lived in such a village on vacation, it was incredibly liberating.

The bakery guy would have a promotion every week with something new for you to try, but apart from that you didn't have to make any decisions. I find choosing between 20 almost identical flavors of sandwich bread in your average supermarket to be much more mentally exhausting.

And since you knew which weekly special everyone else was trying out these days, you had a shared easy conversation topic with anyone.

Plus, to my big surprise the quality of frozen fish and vegetable packs was impeccable. Now, years later, I know that pretty much all "fresh" fish that you see in a supermarket is frozen for transport. So there's no difference.

In Germany most fish is anyway required to be frozen for food safety: correctly freezing kills most parasites.

Heh, and my first reaction was that this is awesome. Different viewpoints I guess.

I used to work in a very small village in France. The bakery from the nearby city would bring a van full of bread to the campsite near the town, the reception would function as a 'depot de pain' for both tourists and villagers.

In Northern France there is also the "baraque à frites" truck which comes to villages and sell French fries.

Now they even accept request by WhatsApp. You can go to the nearest big town, but it’s much more convenient when they bring it to your door, and a van can serve 10-15 small towns each day.

>> I would have thought Croatia to be small enough to not need such a system; i.e. supermarkets not further than half an hour drive away.

I still think about the UK. I cannot imagine anywhere in the UK being more than an hour or two from anywhere else.

Why? UK includes Scotland, and you can easily go 600+ miles from a point in northern Scotland to southern England. Even in England, Liverpool is 200+ miles from London, and there are farther places in England.

Yeah, I think it's just someone from the US thinking in their terms. Florida is 447 miles itself.

600 miles? I had no idea Great Britain was that small. What is the widest distance West to East?

Per Encyclopedia Britannica[0], 300 miles is the widest, and no part is more than 75 miles from the sea.

It's smaller in land mass than 10 US states, coming in just behind Oregon and just ahead of Idaho.

0 - https://www.britannica.com/place/United-Kingdom

I’m American but was living in Seoul at the time.

A couple friends and I took an overnight trip to Busan. We were having lunch at a small restaurant, and my friend asks the staff if she can order takeout and have it sent back to her home in Seoul. Mind you Busan to Seoul is 325km.

This was mind-boggling to me. I asked her, “How long is that gonna take to get there?!” She was puzzled, looked at me and said, “It’ll be there later tonight.” She then laughed and continued, “Hey, this is Korea!”

The delivery network of small highly developed countries is simply amazing.

Wow... how does this sort of delivery network work? Is it inexpensive enough to manage food takeout? I've never heard of takeout food delivery across 100s of kilometers, especially same day! I really need to visit Korea

The food was already sealed and safe for travel. Can't recall clearly, but I think it was some dried fish or sausage dish. So it was just a manner of getting it delivered. She ordered a lot and didn't want the hassle of us lugging it with us during the remainder of our day.

Still, impressive nonetheless.

The German Railway used to deliver packages with the regular high speed rail system. You bring it to the train, it gets put in a cargo room, and you arrange for someone to pick it up at the destination station.

It was expensive of course since it was the fastest way to move stuff (trains are faster than cars), but I imagine that at cost it would be cheap enough for takeout.

They still have a courier service:

https://www.bahn.de/p/view/angebot/zusatzticket/ic_kurier.sh...

Delivery can also be done to Paris, Vienna, Basel and Amsterdam along with the ICE trains travelling there.

Prices I'm shown ~0,22 EUR/km, 33€ to and from the station each and a surcharge of 33€ for night or holiday transport, so ~300€ for crossing the country, and it takes less than a day. Maybe there are rich people out there paying that much for takeout?

"an hour or two from anywhere else"

A few moments with Google maps and I found two places in Scotland that are ~23 hours apart by car. :-) And Scotland is only a small part of the UK.

Is there anywhere in Scotland more than two hours from any town? Only on some islands, I think (Unst is 2½ hours from Lerwick.)

I don't think so - at least if you exclude islands and villages on the mainland not connected to the rest of the road network (Inverie being the only one I'm aware of).

I was contemplating a post-lockdown trip to Shetland and was looking at the ferry times to Papa Stour which made me think of this!

NB 14.5 hours to get to Lerwick from where I live in Scotland and a couple of hours to get from Lerwick to Papa Stour.

If you allow private roads - then I think Fealar Lodge is about 2 hours from Pitlochry.

What you're not taking into the account is the standard of living though. This is totally how some rural communities in Poland worked not that long ago, and you could also say "but hey, Poland is fairly compact, you could drive from the village X to a larger city which has stores in like 30 minutes, what's the deal?", forgetting that for a long time the only vehicle in a village might have been an agricultural tractor, a lot of "daily business" travelling was still done with a horse and a cart. Besides, those rural communities had staples produced locally - my auntie always had a cellar filled to the brim with potatoes, milk from a cow, eggs from chickens, they'd butcher a pig from time to time so a freezer was usually full of meat, local bakery would get a delivery of flour from elsewhere. It's just that "hopping over to a town nearby for shopping" wasn't really an option until mid-90s at least, when the market got absolutely flooded with cheap cars and people found the ability to afford them.

I asked my mom if/where they got yeast in the 50s and 60s, and she said that once a week, a lady would arrive on horse/donkey and trade everyone for their eggs.

They probably had a train connection link somewhere that went to/from a big city and that’s how it all worked.

They had milk and pork, but generally sold/traded that for everything else they needed: oil, salt, sugar, etc. And of course some monetary savings for their escape!

There are still a few places in Scotland which operate on such a system (I spent a bunch of time in one of them growing up and still go there at least once a year). There's a fish van and a meat + fresh produce van which comes on a (relatively) predictable schedule. Nearest supermarket is 2-3 hours drive, more due to road quality than physical distance, so people still go there semi-regularly and generally run big deep freezes.

The stereotypical longest possible UK trip, from Land's End to John O'Groats, is occasionally walked or cycled as a charity event. It's a 14h drive.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/John+o'+Groats/Lands+end,+Pe...

The southwest most point and the northmost point are tourist attractions. The eastmost point is a small marker in an industrial estate next to the gasworks in Lowestoft.

The Scottish Highlands are generally not very accessible and you'll often be charged extra postage by Ebay vendors. There's a single good road that runs north from Edinburgh. Beyond that it's twisty little single track roads on which it's difficult to make good speed safely without risking hitting a sheep round a blind corner.

"it's twisty little single track roads"

There are a lot of single track roads - but there are also a lot of perfectly decent A class roads linking the main areas.

NB By single track I mean single track with passing places:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-track_road

In densely populated areas like much of Europe, a half hour drive is considered a pretty meaningful distance. Plus a lot fewer people have cars than in the US.

Many people don't own a car because they can't afford it or are too old to drive it. Owning a (registered) car costs with gas yearly about 1 net monthly salary. Croatia is small but even so very sparsely populated. 1/4 of population is in the capital metro area

> very sparsely populated

That's very relative. With 72 ppl/km^2, I wouldn't call Croatia "sparsely populated".

Looking at nationwide statistics can be misleading, often you'll find that while on average you get a figure like that, almost all of it is centred on a few large cities with anything outside those cities consisting of scattered small villages a few hundred people living in them.

Looking at land use in places like can be surprising - e.g. a great er percentage of the UK land area is peat bogs than is built on:

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr/land-cover-atlas-uk-1.74...

It's true that a supermarket or a shop is about 30 min drive for most places, but those rural areas are typically poorer, and populated with the elderly, so driving is not an option.

And the supermarkets and multi-good shops are usually the new and expensive places to shop. It’s the farmers markets and stalls (and maybe the baker) that have the good pricing, but fewer availability of hours.

I hate how North American farmer markets in big cities are turning hipster and expensive unless you’re really careful. Direct from the farmer is supposed to be cheaper!

Twenty odd years ago, we had a system like that though, despite there being multiple grocery stores in walking distance. Some people have mobility issues meaning they can't walk / cycle to the shop, but a grocery store on wheels is fine. It was called the SRV Wagen, which stood for "sell rationally together" when the scheme was started in the 70's. There are still 100 of these vans active last year apparently.

Anyway, think of it differently, instead of a need, why not a want? It's not that different from having groceries delivered to your home. Maybe not as scalable, but it's a valid buisiness model, especially in rural areas.

Nowadays I think it's becoming more of a need again; with the migration of people out of the small towns, more and more grocery stores have decided to pack it up because they just don't get enough customers anymore. A mobile shop that frequents multiple towns every week is a valid replacements.

And as another commenter mentioned, it's not limited to just groceries; we also had a fishmonger, and everyone remembers the ice cream truck. I don't see why hipster food trucks don't actually truck around either.

A more recent example, an ice cream truck would park out front of office buildings and ring its bell. A tiny coffee trike would park in the train station in the morning, then do the rounds at the office buildings nearby throughout the day. The important thing with those services is that they consistently appear on the same day and roughly hour, and that they have some kind of audio cue.

Small, but the transport network isn’t necessarily reliable. Mountains are a big obstacle. Croatia, like most of the balkans, is really mountainous. When it’s not mountains it’s islands. Nightmare for transport infrastructure development.

A lot of rural Europe has laughably poor mountain infrastructure - dirt roads, often badly damaged, are sometimes the only way in or out of a village, and when it rains, the guy with the 4X4 truck is your only ticket in or out.

I’ve lived in rural wales, three miles up a paved but steep and narrow lane - if you meet someone, you’re looking at ten minutes of reversing on a bad day - no passing places. I’ve been stuck in the middle of two opposing convoys and one person refusing to back up, and it’s just... well, it makes you not want to go out. Sometimes, someone gets a motorhome stuck on the bridge, and the village is cut off for a day or more. The nearest store is 30 minutes drive away, if the road is clear and the bridge is open.

I’ve lived in rural Bosnia, in a village that you can only reach by a track that looks and drives worse than most river beds. It’s only 15km or so from Sarajevo, but it takes nearly 90 minutes to get there, and there’s little inbetween.

Here in Portugal, a 15km line of sight is a 60km drive - it’s a mountainous region, and again, most of the roads are dirt, single track. The nearest village with a shop to me is 4km away by drone - 28km by road - two rivers in deep valleys between here and there, and only so many medieval bridges are passable by car. The nearest modern bridge is so far off it may as well be in Spain - oh wait, it is!

For someone like me (young, strong, hands on) getting around is a pain in the ass. I never know which journey is going to turn into grappling with straps and jacks in mud. For someone elderly, going out is a daunting prospect. What if I don’t get home? What if I get stuck? What if I break down and nobody passes for two days?

The importance of these services can’t be underestimated - I don’t think these places could continue to exist without them - their population is too low to support permanent stores.

The places you choose to live in sound pretty interesting. And diverse!

May I ask: Is this work-related that you live country-side in so many different places, or are you a restless soul? :)

Sample bias - I’ve lived in my fair share of big cities around the planet - but over the last few years, after burning out from chronic stress after a decade of building my business, I’ve made a focus of examining slower ways of living, closer to nature - I still do tech consulting, and off grid living suits my skillset handily.

How do you choose where you live? How often do you move? Tell us more, that sounds interesting!

These days, trying to stay put - been here about eight months and have no particular plans to move on.

As to how we choose - we do a lot of overland travel, and see a lot of places as a result. We’ll get to know a local in some forsaken spot who’ll be like “that cottage is for sale for cheap, it needs a lot of work”, or “the goatherd’s daughter has gone to university and he’s going to struggle this winter” or “there’s an old mill down by the river that only an idiot would buy”, and we just kinda do it. That’s all been in the three and a bit years since I stopped giving a damn and just decided to do whatever - I’m lucky in having a spouse who was willing to trust me when I suggested we both quit our jobs, stop being director of this and manager of that and just go be humans of earth. Before work got silly, we, and before that I, used to go wandering periodically - usually somewhere where people would stop and stare at the outsider - had a great time in the ‘stans, both times, and Siberia - and did a tour of all the bits of Latin America nobody visits - love the interior of Uruguay. Nearly settled down there, but only stayed two months, as I can see economic and environmental doom just around the corner for them.

Anyway. I digress. I’ve always had itchy feet, and I probably should have been an anthropologist or something.

What about Uruguay made you feel that way? It's the first place in South America I plan to visit, so would be interested to hear any stories!

The liking it, or the impending doom? I liked it as it’s down to earth and relaxed, the people are kind, and it has a lot going on in and around arts and culture, all over the place.

The impending doom - environmentally, they’ve problems. Tainted aquifers, severe topsoil erosion bordering on desertification from overgrazing, vast eucalyptus monocultures. Economically - they have a final salary pension scheme that everybody scams (e.g. we’ll pay you 30% of your normal wage for your last three years before retirement and then 400% for your final year), and a huge black market with Brazil - people smuggle everything from toilet paper to cars, and it’s universal and normal. They are resorting to foreign agribusiness investments to bridge their deficit, and that only worsens the environmental degradation. Mercosur could go a long way to solving Uruguay’s woes, but it suits the bigger players better to keep Uruguay on a tight leash.

I really recommend the interior - Salto, Carmelo, Fray Bentos, Tacuarembo (Patria Gaucha festival was kinda fascinating - all the gauchos and their families ride in from all over for a week of rodeo and country activities - it’s very much for them, not tourists, so you’d better like steak, beer, and watching people get kicked in the face by horses), Paysandu - charming little cities with lots to explore around them. We loved San Gregorio do Polanco - sleepy little town smack in the middle of Uruguay on a huge reservoir, covered with art, all slightly offbeat, beaches and swimming when there’s water, galloping bareback across the dried up lakebed, startling flamingos, when there’s not.

Coast-side, Punta del Diablo is a cute little beach town, but as you near Montevideo it just slowly gets more built up and crappy, until you reach Punta del Este, which is a sort of micro-Miami.

Montevideo itself is great, interesting, cosmopolitan city, and generally really safe - but it’s a mistake to treat it as representative of Uruguay as a whole.

I appreciate the background on their issues and tips on where to go!

I'll need to brush back up on my Spanish, but hope to go over the next few years.

Quite different from rural Norway which has the same landscape issues but perfect infrastructure.

Money, that said it wouldn’t surprise me if Norway has villages that aren’t that accessible.

Iceland has quite a few villages (like 3-4 buildings in size) that are connected by compounded earth roads rather than paved ones.

Poor people in similarly remote (similar travel distances but less circuitous routes) parts of the US and Canada with manage to get to Walamrt and back about once a week in run of the mill 20yo SUVs.

Either there's some economic situation preventing similar transportation solutions working in Europe or the people who say that Europe has great transit options have a lot of explaining to do (frankly I think it's a little of both).

It probably saves a ton of time not having to make that run yourself. Also, often just because something isn't common doesn't mean it isn't possible or doesn't happy; it just means that cultural norms swing one way or another. I'd bet the fish truck is ower-operated (even if the owner is a co-op), for instance, which probably has roots in how things were done for a long time.

There are a few major differences:

For the most part, American towns are built next to the roads. If there's not a road, there's not a town. (Alaska is a notable exception.) In Europe, said roads and towns often long predate SUVs and wouldn't be passably in such.

Also a number of the countries being mentioned are relatively poor. The GDP per capita of the US is more than 10 times the GDP per capita of Bosnia (and close to 3x that of Portugal). That obviously has an influence on the affordability of vehicles and the quality of infrastructure.

Do you think motorbikes are a viable alternative in these kind of areas? It would just seem easier to ride a dirt bike down difficult roads.

With a tank of propane and a week’s shopping? Yes, bikes get you around just great, but a load of cargo, not so much. Here in Portugal, the Toyota Hilux is the standard vehicle - usually 80’s or early 90’s.

The sad part is, Bosnia once had an incredibly dense narrow gauge railway network throughout the country and region but it deminished and closed down starting in the 1960ies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrow-gauge_railways_in_Bosni...

Can I ask what "ridiculously stereotypical Croatian music" sounds like?

I’m guessing turbofolk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo-folk

Turbofolk is more of a Serbian thing.

depending on the region it could be something like Mišo Kovač (Dalmatia)[1] or any tamburaši band (Slavonia)[2]. Istria and Zagorje have their own horses in the race, but I cannot name any.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUiA1zP3tU4

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4AYnl2TVKg&list=PL_YB4oZW18...

Imagine you’ve given an accordion amphetamines.

In the US, check your local cable access channels for the series "Croatian Magazine".

That's also how groceries were distributed in rural areas of the Soviet Union, so this way pre-dates the 90s.

Same thing in Portugal, but with ridiculously stereotypical Portuguese music.

To be fair we saw 1-4 car crashes every time we took a bus for 30+minutes in Croatia in the early 2000s so it was probably just to have some people left in the village ;)

Ya, I found a lot of those paved but single track roads to be safer at night because you can at least see oncoming headlights.

That's really interesting! I'd be curious as to what part of Croatia since I find it hard to believe.

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