A couple of weeks ago my husband and I went to US for a house hunting trip. I have some prejudices about US so it was quite interesting to go there with the goal to find a place for living.

One thing I got surprised about was that the standard of the houses is so bad. Ok, the houses are huge in comparison to the German and Swedish houses BUT the standard of the building and especially the bathrooms is much lower. For me it is difficult to understand the need of a palace with 10 rooms, 5 bathrooms and kitchens that are perfect for a Michelin chef (except that the fridge and freezer is worn out) instead of keeping it smaller but with higher quality.

The food in restaurants is excellent however every where we ate it costed around 100(!!) dollars for 2 people. This was some dynamite shrimp. It was deeeelicious.

Environment and Sustainibility

The use of plastic is everywhere, even in places one could avoid it. The mentality I feel is that “no matter what we do there is no environmental problem with our garbage.”

The car…
The use of car is essential. Without one car per person you are completely cut off from the society. The whole way of living is around the car. There are no or hardly any pavements for a walk. To take a bike would probably be considered suicidal:/

Bad drivers!

What I saw the Americans are really bad drivers (or I had bad luck). They were very aggressive and egoistic drivers introducing tons of dangerous situations.

The highways are really bad…at least where we were driving. I find the ways in Bosnia are better than the highways in NY and CT (except in US the ways are broader). There are literally huge holes in the highway that are life threatening when driving faster.
Then the absolute culture chock…
At the high way they take over from both left and right side ending very often in very bad accidents. We were there 4 days and every day I saw one bad accident.

The flight

I was in US just for four days so the jet lag was an issue but I have to say that travelling business class made my days so much easier.

It was my first time flying business and it was an another dimension from my previous flights. All the space and the possibility to lay down and stretch out the legs…priceless (if you can afford the ticket) 🙂
The food was great in the business class, and one could watch movies and sleep. I am not a fan of flying so I took a beer to calm my nerves…

And the best thing is …we found a house 🙂