Handyman's Home

Richmond is actually a big melting pot. Where you can easily live in The Netherlands and never befriend a Turk, a Moroccan or a negro (is that PC? Oh, the sensitivities of the States!), it's simply natural here that blacks and whites are equals -- you don't notice any distance between people at all. This is so different from The Netherlands. But there is one other difference: the black people here actually have an education. One of the main reasons I don't have any black, or Turkish, or Moroccan friends (that I can think of) is that I simply didn't meet that many of them at university. Here, you have hordes of highly educated black people, and I can easily relate to them, no problem there. It's probably a cultural thing as well, black people don't really have different value systems than white people here.

Another observation of equal opportunities: I noticed that at Delta Airlines, half of the stewardesses were black, and the other half were really old compared to what I'm used to for stewardesses. No problem as far as I'm concerned (they were doing a very good job!), but a stark contrast with some other airlines. Also, I met a female VP of the client company I'm doing work for right now. Not something you'd see in The Netherlands, were it's still the men who decide what's done. We're so old-fashioned!

Just another note about the parking lots: it seems that if you have an office building with cubicles, the parking lot is usually double the size of the building. Why? Well, everybody has a car, and a car takes up about twice the size of a cubicle. Do the math.

I always wondered how people would be able to afford college fees of tens of thousands of dollars. Now I read in a magazine today that there's a special savings method where you can put aside money for college, and this is tax free. OK, then I can understand that it's actually somewhat affordable -- although it's still pretty expensive!

OK, that's it for now. Maybe some more notes tomorrow, if I notice some more weird stuff.