January 10, 2008
People we meet often have interesting ideas about what the US is like: Africans generally seem to think it's a land where streets are literally paved with gold and you're handed a car, house and a job once you arrive; Europeans comment on the apparent humorlessness of Americans and our tendency to only care about work; but Australians seem to think it's a very dangerous place.
We checked in to a BIG4 park (specifically, this one) and the very nice woman at the desk told us they'd had the CEO of KOA in two weeks previously, and then said he'd shocked them by bragging about how secure the KOA campgrounds are because they have security guards with guns and are surrounded by barbed wire whereas they (they park we had just come to) doesn't even have a boom gate. After a moment of stunned silence, I said it was much nicer to be in a place where you don't have to worry about how secure the park is, and then we moved on to payment details.
And then, apparently to confirm that Australians think the US is a scary, scary place to live, this morning I chatted with a 10 year old who's in town to play in some pee-wee tennis matches, or whatever the equivalent is, and her first question on learning that I'm from the US was, "Is it cool?," but her second question was, "Is it scary?" I answered "parts of it" to both, and so satisfied neither question, really.
It's always nice to know that American media so accurately portrays life in the US.
