So my analytical husband challenged me on my quest to compare a city with a country... fair point! When I say South Africa I mean Johannesburg and Cape Town in general as the smaller towns are very different to these two cities.
How Boston differs to South Africa... continued
- They have Zipcars, a wonderful invention where you can book a car online (there are many cars parked around Boston) and use it for a certain time period and then just return it to where it was parked. Far cheaper than buying a car
- Public transport (bus, subway, taxis) is huge here in US, unlike SA where most people have a car
- Baseball, ice hockey, basketball and american football are the popular sports. Surprisingly soccer has become fairly popular here
- Education is critical. Everyone is educated. A Masters is the norm whereas in SA the majority of people don't have a Matric Pass never mind Honours/Masters
- Most food/grocery items are super-sized and the variety is amazing
- When you buy electrical appliances they try sell you insurance with it
- Grocery bags (paper or plastic) are free, even when you order online. Unlike, in SA where we now pay for plastic bags at grocery shops
- Their debit/credit card machines by cashiers are operated with a "pen" by the customer who signs and approves the transaction
Some obvious differences:
- They drive on the right side of the road whereas we drive on the left side in SA
- Their weather is more extreme than SA, summers are extremely hot and winters extremely cold (or so I will learn!)
- Their voltage is 110W compared to 220W back home. Plugs differ. They don't have on/off switches on the plugs like we do in SA
- US use dollars and have a $50 note even - equivalent to over R400 (the biggest note in SA is R200)
Some similarities which I was surprised by:
- We both have whales coming to our shores (CT in SA)
Plastic bags are actually banned or starting to get banned in more and more cities in North America. And some shops are charging for them as well to encourage shoppers to use reusable bags.
ReplyDeleteIn Vancouver we have a few companies like Zipcars ... some of them even allow you to park the car anywhere so no need to return to original or assigned location. They have GPS to locate them!
Am enjoying reading your blog very much and looking forward to more :)
Am glad that someone is reading my blog! :)
DeleteThanks for your comments Owen! nice to compare Boston, SA to Canada too :)
That's very interesting, I like the GPS innovation, we don't have anything like this in SA. Mmm a really good business idea...
I've only seem Whole Foods here who so far encourage shoppers to reuse their bags, I hope that more and more stores will encourage it