US Travels – Part One: Cincinnati – kinda, and no politics included
So, on the road yet again, this time to the US of A. A combination of business trip and some holidays to attend the 70,000 Tons of Metal cruise! At first business, the fun later.
Business led me to Kentucky and to Michigan. My first stop was a small town close to Cincinnati called Florence where one of the plants of the company I work for is located, then on to our office in a town called Plymouth, close to Detroit.
I didn’t see anything of Cincinnati unfortunately and nothing much of Florence either, first because it was winter, second because I was there only on working days, and third because I don’t drive by myself due to my well-reported car driving phobia.
Colleagues took me out to dinner though and drove me around a bit and my impression was that Florence is a 1000% car town. Nobody was walking the streets anywhere I went. Everything is spread out, the area is basically flat with a few soft hills and without a car you are totally screwed. You drive to the parking lot of the restaurant and walk in five meters and that’s it.
It’s been five years since I’ve last been to the States, and I had forgotten the pain of choices. You can’t just get a smoked salmon bagel, you have to decide if you want cream cheese or not, if you want to have capers, tomatoes and onions with it or not, next, what kind of bagel, meaning type of bread, and last but not least whether you want your bagel bread toasted or not, big laugh. And that for everything, how you want your meat, with which sauce, what dressing from a choice of ten for your salad. It’s nice to have choices, but it takes forever to order. At times it was hard for me to understand what the waiters were saying with their thick American accents and I had to exert patience not to say I don’t care, just give me a stupid bagel! Lol.
Whilst there is an enormous choice of foods in Japan there are hardly any or no variants to the selections. You have the ten different ramen variants already laid out for you and the selection does not have to be specified further, for example.
Another thing that struck me is the nature of the TV ads. There is a hell of a lot of medicine TV ads, much more than in Japan, and also medical recall ads for such obscure things as spidery constructs some people put into their clotted veins to unclot them and now the plastic or whatever pieces wander through the body and might cause damage to arteries and internal bleeding. Holy crap, have so many people done this to their bodies that they need a TV ad about it??? The fancy named drugs presented seem to be monstrous creations considering the possible side effects they rattle off during the ad. Another prominent feature in ads is security related things, cyber security, whatever other security for your house, your computer, what the heck. No wonder people are afraid if even the ads blast danger at you 24/7, not to speak of the news…
Another topic that struck me was how empty the airports of Cincinnati and Detroit were. Well, it’s a big country, but I wonder if it’s always that empty at these airports or whether it was the season or a not so good economic situation?
One word about my hotel in Florence. They were refurbishing some of the rooms with the guests in attendance, lol. In the morning I had a green sofa, in the evening I had a blue sofa and some styrofoam packaging bits lying on the ground next to it. What? Lol. Couldn’t they wait with that until the next change of guests? Very odd, but hey, my butt was thus the first that graced the new blue sofa.
Anyway, thanks to work, the few days in Florence went by quickly and on I went to Detroit.
