I've been meaning to write about healthcare in the US for a while now. I'm not going to talk about why the European model is far superior and that governments should be responsible for the well-being of their people. Nor shall I mention that the US government spends $2051 per capita on health when the UK government spends $1429, but US citizens pay through the nose for healthcare (source). While these things may be true, I don't want to have my visa revoked for attempting to subvert the American way of life with my socialist views, and I'm certainly not going to argue about public spending during an election year!
I want to focus on the actual experience of the American health care system because, after experiencing the NHS, the system here is bloody weird. We're lucky because my employer pays for our health insurance and the plan would cost us almost $1000 per month if we had to pay for it ourselves. After signing up for our health insurance, we got provided with a list of GPs (family doctors in this country) who our health insurance will cover. It's then down to you to choose your family doctor. This sounds fairly straightforward, but this is where things start to get weird.
There is a website called HealthGrades which allows you to search for medical doctors in your area. We went down the list of medics provided by our insurance company and started searching through this website. It's basically Amazon for doctors, right down to having star ratings and patient reviews! The website also has the professional record of the doctors available for all to see.
The first doctor that we liked the look of turned out to have been through disciplinary action twice for failing her cocaine test - we could actually read PDFs of the transcripts from the disciplinary hearing. In the second practice that we liked the look of, the doctor who ran it had been censured for fraudulently signing her employees signatures to fake records. Yikes! (I'm not linking to actual pages here because I don't want to get sued by disgruntled GPs, who are obviously used to lawyering up..!)
The other thing which is different is that you get family doctor practices which are similar to those in the UK, with a health centre which hosts several doctors. But you also get practices here which are in residential areas and are just people working from a room in their house. While I'm sure they are excellent doctors, it just seems like a really odd way of running medicine.
After we had actually chosen a clinic which looked good and didn't seem to be run by the criminally-minded, we had to get a medical, etc. Actually, mine is next week, so I'm basing this on Dom's experience. As well as a physical, they also top up vaccines which are out of date and test our blood for absolutely everything (cholesterol, kidney function, etc etc). At every step of the way, you have to sign a bit of paper saying that you authorise the procedure to be carried out and will accept financial liability in the event that your insurance company chooses not to pay for that procedure.
(As an aside: Dom's brother got faced with a bill for several thousand dollars when his insurance company decided that a test to look for a blood clot was not an essential procedure. Yikes!)
A wee while after you have been tested for everything (with doctors horrified that you had never been tested before by the barbaric and backward practices in the UK), a letter from your insurance company comes through the post telling you every procedure that had been carried out on you and how much they would cost. It's REALLY detailed: consultation, $400. Several lab tests individually priced at $18, $15.25, $10.94, $9.94, etc etc.
The form also shows that haggling which has occurred between your insurance company and the provider. For example, the consultation was billed at $400 from our provider, but our insurance company paid $206.55 in the end. Therefore, it seems, if you're poor and can't afford health insurance then you actually pay more the treatment than someone who can afford the insurance... perhaps it's the European in me who find this kind of appalling.
In the UK, your GP acts as the first point of call for all NHS services, so if you need to see a consultant neurologist / physiotherapist / etc, then you go via your GP first. While this can delay treatment, it also acts as a buffer to stop cardiologists being hassled by someone with indigestion or a neurologist being called about a headache. In the US, however, you contact the consultant directly because the consultant is happy to bill your insurance company for the time. I now understand why, in Oxford, newly-arrived Americans would often whine about not being able to see a physio / etc.
Another thing which I'm still not used to is billboard adverts for hospitals in places like the metro stations. You can see posters saying things like "What if your headache is more than just a headache? Come to hospital X for the best stroke treatment in Montgomery County". Seriously, I'm not exaggerating here.
I understand the principle of having a market in the health care system: competition should drive up standards because it people can take their business anywhere they want. However, if I'm sick, I would much rather know that every hospital had the same baseline level of excellence. If my leg is hanging off, or I'm shitting blood, the last thing I want to think about is choosing which hospital to treat me. I think that people in England and Wales should be very cautious about the Tories trying to bring more of a market into the NHS - what I see in the USA is the logical extension of what happens when you let the market get involved. And I won't even talk about the madness of paying hundreds of thousands of insurance salesmen and other bureaucrats...
This post is turning into a long one, so I'll stop soon. Take home message: the US healthcare system is very, very different to what we have in the UK. It feels very alien. On the plus side: because we have good health insurance, this is probably the best health care that we'll ever have, so we're very lucky to have that privilege here. On the down side: I don't like the idea of paying medics for each procedure that they do. Imagine paying Fire Fighters on the basis of how many fires they extinguish? You wouldn't want to live in a wooden house when it was time for the Christmas bonus...
(nb I've used "doctor" here as short hand for medical doctors because that's the common usage. We all know that medics are not proper doctors; proper doctors have PhDs...)
Sunday, 5 February 2012
Saturday, 21 January 2012
Guilty Pleasures
Alright, folks! Happy new year. That is new YEAR, as in singular. Americans and Canadians both have this annoying habit of saying "New Years" when, as far as I can tell, we only get one new year per year. Every time I got asked "What are you doing for New Years?" back in December, my eye twitched a little as I had to contain my anger before replying "I have no firm plans for Hogmanay yet, but it'll probably involve drinking too much and vomiting in the Canadian snow."
Anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk about today. I was going to talk about health care, but then I had to buy gin (as you do), so was going to talk about booze. But as you can only buy booze from a liquor store, I had to go elsewhere to get tonic and that inspired me to talk to you about food.
As you all know, I take my food very seriously. Although beer did contribute to my belly, it's hard to cycle to work every day and still be a fatty unless you have a serious love-affair with food. Which I do. As does my wife: we're basically tall hobbits with less-hairy feet. Hell, we even live in a basement apartment with a low roof, making it the quintessential modern-day hobbit-hole!
When we first arrived in this great country of the free (so they tell me), one of the first things we had to do was (obviously) a food-shop. If you ever visit a USian supermarket for the first time, what will become immediately obvious is that either Americans LOVE processed food, or the supermarkets force it upon them. The initial supermarket visits were actually great contributors to our culture-shock.
Making real food at home is actually a life-style choice and not a way of saving money. Little jars of spices and herbs such as oregano or cumin are RIDICULOUSLY expensive. Even buying the cheap brands, a jar of oregano that costs around £1 back home will easily set you back $6 to $8 (£4 to £5.50) - I calculated that, to make a curry properly, it would have cost me over $70 in spices alone.
Vegetables can also be appalling over-priced. In September, when they were still in season, a pack of 3 bell peppers cost $4.99, more than twice the price in the UK. Compare this to processed food, where you can buy 10 microwaveable dinners for $10. Processed food is much cheaper, and even foods that should be natural have all sorts of crap added to them.
Trying to buy flour to make bread? Just simple, whole milled wheat can't be bought from the supermarket. What you can buy is a super-enriched ultramegacrappy flour, made to look like bleached white flour, or made to look like wholewheat flour. I guess it is the whole of the wheat grain. Want to buy a tin of tomatoes? You have to look long and hard to find one that's not had stuff added to it (especially salt!).
The meat can make me quite sad too - you should not be able to buy 0.5kg of beef for around £1. I'm guessing that the cow didn't have a particularly happy life. Battery chickens is bad, but the industial scale feedlots in this country have battery cows and pigs! Places like Whole-foods, the expensive organic hippy middle-class supermarket has a rating system where they tell you about the meat. They do quite well with selling grass-fed beef, but the best their chickens generally do is have the label that effectively says "we didn't keep it in a cage the WHOLE of its life...". This contrasts with Europe, which, on the 1st of January, finally enacted the law banning battery chickens. (Actually, Peter Singer wrote an interesting opinion piece about this for Al Jazeera.
Ah, how I miss Waitrose.
Of course, with all things in America, there's always a "but". Farmers' Markets can be pretty awesome - most weeks, Dom and I now chat with the man who raises the cows (mmm, Angus) and chickens that provide us with all the eggs and beef that we need. The animals have had a happy life, the meat isn't that expensive and, perhaps most importantly, the beef is bloody good and the eggs may well be the tastiest we've had. Yay for Walnut farm! And I found a company online that sells what are easily the highest-quality spices I've ever used, for less than we paid in the UK.
Ethnic shops are also a very good way of getting decent ingredients at reasonable prices - it is possible to eat very well / ethically, as long as you're prepared to do a bit of leg-work. The two things that I've still not found are easy supplies of "exotic" meat like lamb or any sort of game animal. The supermarkets have effectively won the battle against localism to the extent that there are no butchers within a 12 mile radius of our home and, I suspect, much further. Your choices are evil supermarket or buy straight from the farmer.
The other thing I can't find yet is a decent supplier of flour that is nearby. There are some suppliers around, but generally in far away states where the shipping would cost more than the flour itself - definitely nothing like Doves who would deliver 25kg sacks of flour direct to our door.
Hopefully I've firmly nailed my foodie credentials to the wall. Now for my confession. What got me thinking about writing this post was where I went after buying gin. We needed some tonic water, so I stopped at the 7-11 to get some.
What I also bought was a trashy hot-dog, which pretty much embodies the antithesis of everything I've been writing about. It was terrible: fluffy white bun with ground parts of animal best labelled as "miscellanous". It was terrible, yet strangely satisfying, maybe even because it was naughty. It kept me warm in our first proper snow-fall. Perhaps processed food and cheap calories do serve some purpose?
Anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk about today. I was going to talk about health care, but then I had to buy gin (as you do), so was going to talk about booze. But as you can only buy booze from a liquor store, I had to go elsewhere to get tonic and that inspired me to talk to you about food.
As you all know, I take my food very seriously. Although beer did contribute to my belly, it's hard to cycle to work every day and still be a fatty unless you have a serious love-affair with food. Which I do. As does my wife: we're basically tall hobbits with less-hairy feet. Hell, we even live in a basement apartment with a low roof, making it the quintessential modern-day hobbit-hole!
When we first arrived in this great country of the free (so they tell me), one of the first things we had to do was (obviously) a food-shop. If you ever visit a USian supermarket for the first time, what will become immediately obvious is that either Americans LOVE processed food, or the supermarkets force it upon them. The initial supermarket visits were actually great contributors to our culture-shock.
Making real food at home is actually a life-style choice and not a way of saving money. Little jars of spices and herbs such as oregano or cumin are RIDICULOUSLY expensive. Even buying the cheap brands, a jar of oregano that costs around £1 back home will easily set you back $6 to $8 (£4 to £5.50) - I calculated that, to make a curry properly, it would have cost me over $70 in spices alone.
Vegetables can also be appalling over-priced. In September, when they were still in season, a pack of 3 bell peppers cost $4.99, more than twice the price in the UK. Compare this to processed food, where you can buy 10 microwaveable dinners for $10. Processed food is much cheaper, and even foods that should be natural have all sorts of crap added to them.
Trying to buy flour to make bread? Just simple, whole milled wheat can't be bought from the supermarket. What you can buy is a super-enriched ultramegacrappy flour, made to look like bleached white flour, or made to look like wholewheat flour. I guess it is the whole of the wheat grain. Want to buy a tin of tomatoes? You have to look long and hard to find one that's not had stuff added to it (especially salt!).
The meat can make me quite sad too - you should not be able to buy 0.5kg of beef for around £1. I'm guessing that the cow didn't have a particularly happy life. Battery chickens is bad, but the industial scale feedlots in this country have battery cows and pigs! Places like Whole-foods, the expensive organic hippy middle-class supermarket has a rating system where they tell you about the meat. They do quite well with selling grass-fed beef, but the best their chickens generally do is have the label that effectively says "we didn't keep it in a cage the WHOLE of its life...". This contrasts with Europe, which, on the 1st of January, finally enacted the law banning battery chickens. (Actually, Peter Singer wrote an interesting opinion piece about this for Al Jazeera.
Ah, how I miss Waitrose.
Of course, with all things in America, there's always a "but". Farmers' Markets can be pretty awesome - most weeks, Dom and I now chat with the man who raises the cows (mmm, Angus) and chickens that provide us with all the eggs and beef that we need. The animals have had a happy life, the meat isn't that expensive and, perhaps most importantly, the beef is bloody good and the eggs may well be the tastiest we've had. Yay for Walnut farm! And I found a company online that sells what are easily the highest-quality spices I've ever used, for less than we paid in the UK.
Ethnic shops are also a very good way of getting decent ingredients at reasonable prices - it is possible to eat very well / ethically, as long as you're prepared to do a bit of leg-work. The two things that I've still not found are easy supplies of "exotic" meat like lamb or any sort of game animal. The supermarkets have effectively won the battle against localism to the extent that there are no butchers within a 12 mile radius of our home and, I suspect, much further. Your choices are evil supermarket or buy straight from the farmer.
The other thing I can't find yet is a decent supplier of flour that is nearby. There are some suppliers around, but generally in far away states where the shipping would cost more than the flour itself - definitely nothing like Doves who would deliver 25kg sacks of flour direct to our door.
Hopefully I've firmly nailed my foodie credentials to the wall. Now for my confession. What got me thinking about writing this post was where I went after buying gin. We needed some tonic water, so I stopped at the 7-11 to get some.
What I also bought was a trashy hot-dog, which pretty much embodies the antithesis of everything I've been writing about. It was terrible: fluffy white bun with ground parts of animal best labelled as "miscellanous". It was terrible, yet strangely satisfying, maybe even because it was naughty. It kept me warm in our first proper snow-fall. Perhaps processed food and cheap calories do serve some purpose?
Saturday, 17 December 2011
It's the economy, bawbag!
Just when I think I'm getting used to the weird way in which this country works... Dom and I both got emails on Thursday telling us that, because a budget agreement had not been reached between the Republicans and Democrats, the federal goverment would run out of money today, which is Saturday. Both the senate and congress had to agree a bill, and have the president sign it, by midnight yesterday. Apparently, this happened.
If a deal hadn't been reached, the craziest thing would have happened. All federal government operations, except of a few essential things, get shut down. So, the NIH would have been shut down: not only is it an offence to try to go to work when the government is shut down, but if they find out you've been doing federal work in your own time, you get something like a $10,000 fine.
I don't understand. I accept that politics here are pretty stupid and that the whole American system of governance seems designed to prevent any sort of progress or agreements being made unless all 3 legislative bodies are run by the same party. I find it amusing, but that's how this place is. But to actively prevent people from working, even for free, because a budget hasn't been passed is absolutely mental! As is having the capacity to fine employees for trying to do their job!
What happened is that the legislature passed a continuing resolution, a stop-gap measure which keeps the federal government running on current or reduced levels, for another 2 months. The budget they are fighting over is for the fiscal year which started in October 2011, so it looks like at least one third of the year will pass before there is a budget in place.
For my work-place this means that there will be enough money to pay our salaries, consumables and to feed my mice, but there will be little way to buy any big-ticket items or sign things like service contracts. This massively increases the costs to the tax-payers, which seems rather vulgar in these straightened economic times. Even if a budget does get agreed in February, it will only run until the end of September when this silly process will start again. Apparently this is pretty normal.
In any of the UK parliaments, or most of the ones in Europe that I know of, if a government can't get its budget approved by it's parliament / legislature, then it's taken as a vote of no confidence, the government collapses and there's a fresh election. It's a good motivation to put aside partisan differences and actually work in the service of the citizens (or subjects if you come from a silly country where they monarchy rules supreme and people have no written bill of rights).
How the US can get by with this permanent deadlock confuses me. It doesn't seem very efficient...
If a deal hadn't been reached, the craziest thing would have happened. All federal government operations, except of a few essential things, get shut down. So, the NIH would have been shut down: not only is it an offence to try to go to work when the government is shut down, but if they find out you've been doing federal work in your own time, you get something like a $10,000 fine.
I don't understand. I accept that politics here are pretty stupid and that the whole American system of governance seems designed to prevent any sort of progress or agreements being made unless all 3 legislative bodies are run by the same party. I find it amusing, but that's how this place is. But to actively prevent people from working, even for free, because a budget hasn't been passed is absolutely mental! As is having the capacity to fine employees for trying to do their job!
What happened is that the legislature passed a continuing resolution, a stop-gap measure which keeps the federal government running on current or reduced levels, for another 2 months. The budget they are fighting over is for the fiscal year which started in October 2011, so it looks like at least one third of the year will pass before there is a budget in place.
For my work-place this means that there will be enough money to pay our salaries, consumables and to feed my mice, but there will be little way to buy any big-ticket items or sign things like service contracts. This massively increases the costs to the tax-payers, which seems rather vulgar in these straightened economic times. Even if a budget does get agreed in February, it will only run until the end of September when this silly process will start again. Apparently this is pretty normal.
In any of the UK parliaments, or most of the ones in Europe that I know of, if a government can't get its budget approved by it's parliament / legislature, then it's taken as a vote of no confidence, the government collapses and there's a fresh election. It's a good motivation to put aside partisan differences and actually work in the service of the citizens (or subjects if you come from a silly country where they monarchy rules supreme and people have no written bill of rights).
How the US can get by with this permanent deadlock confuses me. It doesn't seem very efficient...
Sunday, 27 November 2011
Black Friday, Black Squirrels
Coming to the end of this Thanksgiving weekend, I wanted to write a quick note on something that I find more than a little disturbing. I'm not talking about the Black Friday sales, where half of the US population hit the shops this weekend looking for bargains, occasionally shooting each other fighting over discounted tat trying to help rebuild the economy through rampant consumerism. Although the Black Friday shopping spree was bemusing, Friday was not the black thing that disturbs me. Well, to what black thing do I refer, I hear you ask? I'm talking about black squirrels.
Most people in the UK think that squirrels are cute, fluffy little creatures of happiness, bringing joy to parkland. Personally, I have always considered squirrels to be rats with good PR, although we did make a yummy squirrel casserole last summer. If people in the UK saw the black squirrels here, they'd think again. These creatures look very sinister as they watch you walk past with a malevolant glint in their eye, pretending to be innocently nibbling on their nuts.
I can see through their charade of cuteness though. Unlike other squirrels, black squirrels are organised, carnivorous monsters. They've even been known to form packs and hunt dogs, as reported by the BBC. Yesterday, we found one in our garden: it was hanging around the bird feeder trying to bully chickadees and robins. From the image below you can see that it was preparing to pounce on my wife, its little nose twitching with murderous intent.
If you come to visit from the UK, beware these evil creatures of the night!
Most people in the UK think that squirrels are cute, fluffy little creatures of happiness, bringing joy to parkland. Personally, I have always considered squirrels to be rats with good PR, although we did make a yummy squirrel casserole last summer. If people in the UK saw the black squirrels here, they'd think again. These creatures look very sinister as they watch you walk past with a malevolant glint in their eye, pretending to be innocently nibbling on their nuts.
I can see through their charade of cuteness though. Unlike other squirrels, black squirrels are organised, carnivorous monsters. They've even been known to form packs and hunt dogs, as reported by the BBC. Yesterday, we found one in our garden: it was hanging around the bird feeder trying to bully chickadees and robins. From the image below you can see that it was preparing to pounce on my wife, its little nose twitching with murderous intent.
If you come to visit from the UK, beware these evil creatures of the night!
Thursday, 24 November 2011
Are you talkin' tae me, pal?
Although a lot of the things about the US seem quite alien, there's actually one aspect of USian culture I enjoy a lot because it makes me feel like I'm back in Glasgow. And no, I'm not talking about a growing obesity epidemic due a penchant for sugary, fatty foods (although that is also the case). In America, it is completely acceptable to talk to strangers, which is a stark contrast with the south east of England.
As Kate Fox notes in her excellent book, Watching the English, talking to strangers in England is an interaction that has to follow a very complex, predictable script, otherwise you run rough-shod over social conventions and cause enough trauma to make the English person need to have lie-down and a cup of tea. Acceptable interactions involve asking the time, complaining about the weather or crappy public transport system, or sharing a disapproving look if someone else breaks social norms and does something as appalling as skipping the queue.
(Note to Americans: a queue is something you wait in; a cue is stick that you use to hit small balls. Sort it out folks, it's not hard!!!)
In the US, no such conventions exist. To pick one example from many, Dom and I went for a walk in the park on Sunday as I wanted to take blurry and badly-framed pictures of birds with my posh new SLR camera. Their was a lovely woman walking her child and dog and we ended up chatting to her for about 20 minutes. Of course, because it's America, we also ended up with her business card, but that happens a lot here.
Occassionally, the talking-to-strangers thing does come with a risk of people massively over-sharing, and it's possible that you'll end up with a person's entire life, medical and personal history when all you wanted was a coffee and to quietly read your book in a public place, but you can learn to avoid these hotspots of self-obsession (e.g. don't drink coffee in Bethesda).
In the interests of fairness, I must point out that talking to strangers DOES happen in England. Generally, this only happens after drinking about 8 pints of social lubrication. In Glasgow, talking to strangers is fair game all the time, although some less kind people would suggest that is because Glasweigans are likely to have indulged in social lubrication at any time of the day. But these unkind people are generally found in Edinburgh, where the social norms are somewhere between the south east of England and Glasgow (sort of like Manchester, but less fun).
A positive one today. Perhaps it's because another good thing about America is the four-day weekend that they give us at the end of November, although I'd recommend staying away from free blankets. So, happy Thanksgiving, folks!
Mick
p.s. The day after I wrote my last blog post, some arsehole of a woman ran a stop sign and very nearly killed me on my bike when I was cycling home from work. I need say no more.
As Kate Fox notes in her excellent book, Watching the English, talking to strangers in England is an interaction that has to follow a very complex, predictable script, otherwise you run rough-shod over social conventions and cause enough trauma to make the English person need to have lie-down and a cup of tea. Acceptable interactions involve asking the time, complaining about the weather or crappy public transport system, or sharing a disapproving look if someone else breaks social norms and does something as appalling as skipping the queue.
(Note to Americans: a queue is something you wait in; a cue is stick that you use to hit small balls. Sort it out folks, it's not hard!!!)
In the US, no such conventions exist. To pick one example from many, Dom and I went for a walk in the park on Sunday as I wanted to take blurry and badly-framed pictures of birds with my posh new SLR camera. Their was a lovely woman walking her child and dog and we ended up chatting to her for about 20 minutes. Of course, because it's America, we also ended up with her business card, but that happens a lot here.
Occassionally, the talking-to-strangers thing does come with a risk of people massively over-sharing, and it's possible that you'll end up with a person's entire life, medical and personal history when all you wanted was a coffee and to quietly read your book in a public place, but you can learn to avoid these hotspots of self-obsession (e.g. don't drink coffee in Bethesda).
In the interests of fairness, I must point out that talking to strangers DOES happen in England. Generally, this only happens after drinking about 8 pints of social lubrication. In Glasgow, talking to strangers is fair game all the time, although some less kind people would suggest that is because Glasweigans are likely to have indulged in social lubrication at any time of the day. But these unkind people are generally found in Edinburgh, where the social norms are somewhere between the south east of England and Glasgow (sort of like Manchester, but less fun).
A positive one today. Perhaps it's because another good thing about America is the four-day weekend that they give us at the end of November, although I'd recommend staying away from free blankets. So, happy Thanksgiving, folks!
Mick
p.s. The day after I wrote my last blog post, some arsehole of a woman ran a stop sign and very nearly killed me on my bike when I was cycling home from work. I need say no more.
Sunday, 20 November 2011
The Great American Dream (part one)
One of the most striking thing about Americans is their deep and profound love of the car. The usual clichés probably apply to an extent: the car is the ultimate embodiment of the American sense of freedom and convenience. And words cannot emphasise just how much Americans love convenience and freedom, even if that freedom is usually exercised only as the freedom to buy things.
As a European, I come from a country where the cities were built before the car was invented, so we have narrow roads, which are ample for what I considered to be normal-sized cars. But the cars here are absolutely huge! Below is the one we hired when we moved house a few weeks ago:
I don't know if this is purely a DC thing, or a general US thing, but the standard of driving here is absolutely terrrible! If I had a pound (or dollar) for every time I've seen a massive SUV fail to stop at the right place at traffic lights and be 2 full car lengths past the line, I'd have enough to buy a new lens for my camera. As a pedestrian or cyclist, there is nothing more annoying than having a massive car blocking the crossing, although shouting at them seems to be socially-acceptable here. However, this is a completely moot point because, well, there are no pedestrians and very few cyclists. Although it's illegal in the state of Maryland, I see many people driving whilst sending text messages and we even saw a guy with a laptop open on his dashboard. Absolutely crazy!! Which explains why so many cars have obvious signs of bumps and scrapes.
The public transport system here is bloody good - you can track the buses by GPS from your smart phone / computer so that you can time your arrival at the bus stop with minute-accuracy (did I mention that USians like convenience?). The bus is also cheap, with a $1.50 flat rate. However, it seems that, in general, only poor people use public transport - tell someone that you've walked more than a mile or got a bus, and they ask "Oh, is your car broken?". Quite a bit of the suburb we live in doesn't have any pavement (or sidewalk, if you're that way inclined), because there doesn't seem to be much demand. We live about 1 mile from the metro station, and people genuinely have asked us how we get there if we don't drive.
So far, we've resisted the American dream and have refused to buy a car, instead using our trusty Bromptons to get about. Alas, this whole country is built around the automobile and is massively spread out. Although the public transport system is great, it's only useful for ferrying people around places where they can be good capitalist-consumers and buy more stuff to keep the economy afloat. Ah well. I think a lot of people who know us are placing bets on how long it will be before we break and get a car - at least that's good motivation to hold out!
However, we did spend several hours yesterday trying to convert our driving licences to US ones. I refused to surrender my UK licence to get only a provisional licence here, so I now have a learner's permit and Dom has to supervise me for 60 hours driving over 9 months. The state of Maryland only recognises Candian, French and South Korean licences! Obviously there've never seen people driving in France!! Or perhaps that's the point!? Maybe countries like the UK and Germany have too many standards for driving, so our licences aren't recognised as we'd expect too much skill from other drivers!?
Of course, in this crazy country of extremes, nothing is quite so clear cut as I've laid out so far. At the NIH, where I work, there are 15,000 employees and the number who commute by bike regularly is only 600. Quite shocking. So although cyclists are very much the minority, they are a very vocal minority and have managed to get quite a lot done. There are some absolutely stunnnig trails connecting most of the different urban and suburban centres, so my 5 mile bike ride to work consists of being surrounded by stunning trees in Rock Creek Park and trying not to run over deer. Dom has a 15 mile cycle, and most of that is also off road with the excellent Capital Crescent trail, which connects Silver Spring to downtown DC. There's also a funky scheme called Zipcar, where you can hire cars by the hour - the scheme operates quite a bit like the Boris Bikes in London.
Although it's quite tricky to avoid buying a car, so far so good. Hopefully we can get by without one... our tune may change once the winter kicks off properly (still T-shirt weather there!), but we'll see.
As a European, I come from a country where the cities were built before the car was invented, so we have narrow roads, which are ample for what I considered to be normal-sized cars. But the cars here are absolutely huge! Below is the one we hired when we moved house a few weeks ago:
I don't know if this is purely a DC thing, or a general US thing, but the standard of driving here is absolutely terrrible! If I had a pound (or dollar) for every time I've seen a massive SUV fail to stop at the right place at traffic lights and be 2 full car lengths past the line, I'd have enough to buy a new lens for my camera. As a pedestrian or cyclist, there is nothing more annoying than having a massive car blocking the crossing, although shouting at them seems to be socially-acceptable here. However, this is a completely moot point because, well, there are no pedestrians and very few cyclists. Although it's illegal in the state of Maryland, I see many people driving whilst sending text messages and we even saw a guy with a laptop open on his dashboard. Absolutely crazy!! Which explains why so many cars have obvious signs of bumps and scrapes.
The public transport system here is bloody good - you can track the buses by GPS from your smart phone / computer so that you can time your arrival at the bus stop with minute-accuracy (did I mention that USians like convenience?). The bus is also cheap, with a $1.50 flat rate. However, it seems that, in general, only poor people use public transport - tell someone that you've walked more than a mile or got a bus, and they ask "Oh, is your car broken?". Quite a bit of the suburb we live in doesn't have any pavement (or sidewalk, if you're that way inclined), because there doesn't seem to be much demand. We live about 1 mile from the metro station, and people genuinely have asked us how we get there if we don't drive.
So far, we've resisted the American dream and have refused to buy a car, instead using our trusty Bromptons to get about. Alas, this whole country is built around the automobile and is massively spread out. Although the public transport system is great, it's only useful for ferrying people around places where they can be good capitalist-consumers and buy more stuff to keep the economy afloat. Ah well. I think a lot of people who know us are placing bets on how long it will be before we break and get a car - at least that's good motivation to hold out!
However, we did spend several hours yesterday trying to convert our driving licences to US ones. I refused to surrender my UK licence to get only a provisional licence here, so I now have a learner's permit and Dom has to supervise me for 60 hours driving over 9 months. The state of Maryland only recognises Candian, French and South Korean licences! Obviously there've never seen people driving in France!! Or perhaps that's the point!? Maybe countries like the UK and Germany have too many standards for driving, so our licences aren't recognised as we'd expect too much skill from other drivers!?
Of course, in this crazy country of extremes, nothing is quite so clear cut as I've laid out so far. At the NIH, where I work, there are 15,000 employees and the number who commute by bike regularly is only 600. Quite shocking. So although cyclists are very much the minority, they are a very vocal minority and have managed to get quite a lot done. There are some absolutely stunnnig trails connecting most of the different urban and suburban centres, so my 5 mile bike ride to work consists of being surrounded by stunning trees in Rock Creek Park and trying not to run over deer. Dom has a 15 mile cycle, and most of that is also off road with the excellent Capital Crescent trail, which connects Silver Spring to downtown DC. There's also a funky scheme called Zipcar, where you can hire cars by the hour - the scheme operates quite a bit like the Boris Bikes in London.
Although it's quite tricky to avoid buying a car, so far so good. Hopefully we can get by without one... our tune may change once the winter kicks off properly (still T-shirt weather there!), but we'll see.
Friday, 11 November 2011
Breid - Plain or pan or sweetened?
I've been rather quiet recently, as we moved house and didn't have any internet until last week. Dom and I like to make our own bread, because store-bought bread is generally fluffy, air-filled rubbish that has no flavour, unless you want to pay several quid for a wanky, artisan loaf. When we first arrived in the US, obviously we had to buy bread until we had could find decent flour and yeast, and also live in a house where the kitchen was not infested with ants (don't ask!)
So we went to the supermarket, grabbed a loaf that looked reasonably decent and didn't think more of it. The next morning, I made a cheese and ham sandwich for breakfast. I bit into this sandwich. I was then somewhat startled with an unexpected explosion of sweetness in my mouth: unexpected explosions in one's mouth are not generally welcome at the best of times!
It turns out that, in the US, it's pretty much impossible to find a loaf of bread that has not had corn syrup, honey or sugar added to it. It's absolutely disgusting - bread should be a neutral medium upon which you build your desired outcome. If you want it sweet, add peanut butter and jam (urgh! Another weird North American habit). If you want your bread savoury, make toast or a sandwich. But, damnit, I reserve the right to choose how my bread should taste!!! I know Americans have a sweet tooth, but I hail from the land of deep-fried confectionary, and even we wouldn't do this to bread. And this isn't a case of me being a bread facist, honest! Another UKish person in Dom's work has been here for 5 years and still makes her own bread because she can't stand the sweetness of the USian stuff.
Of course, bread is an institution for me. Very few culinary experiences give me greater pleasure than a well-crafted loaf of bread, which I can easily demolish if left alone with some butter and toaster. Bread is beautiful, but what the Americans do to it is sacrilege.
Although they defile bread, however, they do have very pretty trees in the autumn.
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