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Comment by scop | Hacker News Reader

There is a large degree of “this is normal” that creeps into your mind. You begin to assume that all cities are exactly like it. You can’t comprehend it being otherwise. As a native San Franciscan who moved to DFW TX area, I vividly remember walking into a TX Walgreens for the first time and being flabbergasted by how nice it was: orderly, minimally locked shelves, etc. It almost seemed like it was a fake store in some hidden camera prank or something, no way a Walgreens could be like that based on all my time in Walgreens in SF. It was normal, like a commercial or something.

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I have family that live in SF proper. I remember talking with them about the demeanor of BART's riders a few years back. They had mentioned that they had to move cars earlier that day because someone was smoking a very large joint and it was fouling the air in their car quite badly. They concluded the anecdote with something along the lines of " you know, it's just like every other metro system, nothing you can really do". I was like, no way. No other metro system is like that. I literally know of no other metro system where people are smoking in the cars, let alone pot, let alone to the point where the air is foul, let alone that you just think that's a normal thing, let alone that they aren't thrown off the car by law enforcement, let alone by the other passengers. My family members thought I was joking, that this kind of thing must happen all the time in nearly every other metro system, at least a once a day occurrence. The disconnect was just flabbergasting to me.

It's even more extreme outside the US. One of my most surreal experiences was eating at a food court in Bangkok in a businessy, but not especially ritzy, area. It was extremely crowded and tables were limited, so people were claiming tables - by leaving things like their purse on the table! Or in the Taiwan subway going up/down escalators there is this extreme discipline where literally everybody stands to the right, leaving the left side open in case somebody happens to be in a rush. Here's [1] an image of that.

[1] - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Escalator_to_Bannan_...

That used to be true even in Toronto, not too long ago. Folks would just leave expensive laptops at their seat in Starbucks/Timmies in order to reserve it while they wait in line.

People have been doing that on public transport in London for 100 years

https://web.archive.org/web/20110615070709/http://entertainm...

Yeah it’s definitely not normal. I’m in Seattle and visited Chicago and Boston over Christmas and it was night and day. Sure those cities have bad neighborhoods, but the downtown area actually seemed to enforce laws and there wasn’t people screaming on every block or encampments. Stores didn’t have intimidating security guards at the front door etc

The US is interesting in that regard as you can sample high trust & low trust micro-societies within an hour of each other.

A lot of "NY/SF or nowhere" types have forgotten their prior lives, or simply never lived outside their bubble. I have many friends like this in NY and I find the "global citizen but only leave my city when I take a jet to another country" demographic fascinating.

Living in NYC or SF is great, but you know there's more to the world than your downtown condo & the same dozen European/Asian cities and tropical resorts you fly to 1-3 times/year.

You may find that the surrounding "nowhere", "flyover country" and "the burbs" you frown upon do bring something to the table and at least are worth experiencing from time to time. You may find it does almost feel like another country in some respects.

You just reminded me of a girlfriend I had in NYC when I lived in NJ. I remember the first time she came to see me. She had never left the city by ground transportation & didn't know how to use NJ Transit lines.

This isn't unusual and is part of the appeal of living in a big, self-contained city. When I've lived in NYC I rarely had much need or desire to go anywhere else and if I did it was something vastly different and via plane.

When I moved here from California I was confused by the “pump before you pay” gas stations. Hadn’t seen them in 30 years.

I live in Florida and have traveled all over this country the last few years and haven't seen these in decades. These still exist in Texas?

Not in Texas, but they still exist (around here they switched just last year, but if you go further and further from "the city" you still find them).

You also find "pumps open 24 hours" even when the station is closed, but those are credit card only, of course.

They do not exist in Texas. I'm a Texas Parks enthusiast which has me driving throughout the state.

You pay at the pump.

Texans aren't somehow morally superior to everyone else, despite wearing crosses on their sleeves.

Our ancestors stole this land from Mexico, and Texans will absolutely steal fuel from you if they think they won't get shot.

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