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| Subject: Not just the same process? | |
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] Date Posted: 16:06:21 12/10/04 Fri In reply to: Jim (Canada) 's message, "British investment in Canada" on 23:24:49 12/09/04 Thu Surely Jim, what is happening in Ireland is exactly what has happened in Canada... the bigger country's businesses are winning out. After the "English" High Street in Dublin it shall be the American high street. After all, Walmart already owns Asda, and the Disney store is on many high streets in the UK already. [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ] |
| [> [> [> Subject: The big question... | |
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Author: Paddy (Scotland) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 18:10:53 12/10/04 Fri I feel, as a result of travel in Australia & Ireland and as a result of many interactions with Aussies, Kiwis, Canadians, Irishmen and even some Pacific Islanders and West Indians, that these people are not really foreign. Dublin is no different in layout from any British city (well OK it is in most respects much more aestetically pleasing especially with all of the railings intact) and, culturally there are no real difference between the Irish and the British. I felt perfectly at home in Dublin, just as I did in Australia. As a result of these discoveries I really would have no problem if most of the high-street shops in the U.K. were "Irish" or "Canadian" etc... because I can interact with these people as if they were not foreign and therefore I would not consider them to be a threat to my identity. The Irish and British governments have differences for understandable historical reasons. Despite these differences the two nations have an "equivalence of citizenship" that gives full rights to the citizens of each country when they are in the other. A full F.C. is an extremely unlikely outcome in the future, just as would be a political union between the UK and Ireland. However, this does not remove the similarities between the peoples of CANZUK and Ireland. In practice I would be VERY happy to have an equivalence of citizenship and no barriers between the nations of Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the UK. If Ireland is afraid of being dominated by the British that is an understandable thing given the history, but from my observations there is little difference between Britain and Ireland looking at them NOW. I do not think that people in Britain think of Australians, Canadians, Irishmen and New Zealanders as foreigners. Ironically, Commonwealth protocol is such that the governments of Australia, Canada & NZ are not regarded as foreign by the UK and they exchange High Commissioners instead of Ambassadors, while the citizens are classed as foreigners. Legally Irish citizens are not foreign even though the govenment of Ireland is a foreign government. The big question is: are the British foreign to the others? If so, then yes British dominance would be worrying. If not, then there is no problem and the success of British companies in foreign markets is a triumph for us all. It is a matter of perception I suppose. [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> Subject: The British are not foreign to us - they nurtured our country | |
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Author: Jim (Canada) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 19:13:45 12/10/04 Fri [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> Subject: Sadly not all are in agreement | |
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Author: Nick (UK) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 13:21:17 12/14/04 Tue I was in a dodgy hotel in Bayswater a few days ago and witnessed a depressing conversation between an Australian and a Canadian backpacker. The Australian considered herself well travelled, while the Canadian had never left North America before, so she went on to tell him all about where to visit. Or at least she would have done had she been able to think of anywhere. Of course Italy was OK, but a bit dirty. Asia was all right but every Asian country was the same so it was only worth visiting one of them. Australia was the best country. The Canadian begged to differ, but only because the Aussie made the mistake of bragging that the temperature at home was currently 46 degrees or something similarly ludicrous. He suggested that Canada was better, since it wasn't so hot. She should really visit Canada, as this was the best country. Furthermore, he had so far noticed that although it was currently -5 to -10 degrees in his home town, it was a lot sunnier than the weather in London, which made everything feel cold and look ugly. Canada was nicer and warmer than Britain, even if the thermometer didn't admit to it. And most of the houses he'd seen coming in from the airport would have been condemned had they been found in Canada. The Canadian government issued people with notices forcing them to repair their houses or they got bulldozed, like, straight away. Now, they have old houses in Australia too, of course, but not like in Britain. There they're all beautiful old bluestones that look great and the owners really love because they're worth squillions of dollars. They don't have all the cheap tat you get in Britain. Well, that was all very well, but what about Starbucks? In Canada there were hardly any Starbucks. Hardly any in Australia either, apparently. But what the Canadian was feeling cheated about was that he wanted to find something really English in London, and he couldn't. It was all, like, Starbucks on every street corner. That would never happen in Canada. England was just like America. They then proceeded to discuss their relative national histories. Canada was a very new country. It was founded in 1867. But Australia was newer than that. It was the newest country, founded only 150 years ago. When Canada was founded there still weren't any people in Australia, only convicts, that the British sent there. Until there was a gold rush and people decided they wanted to go and live in Australia, so the British had to stop sending convicts there because they depressed Australian property prices and presumably the bluestone owners wouldn't stand for it. But while there had probably been people in Canada before 1867 - mostly Americans who wanted to stay loyal to the Crown - the borders of Canada had just been established in 1949 because before that Newfoundland was British but, like, the British didn't want to pay for its upkeep so they like had a vote and they voted to become part of Canada. Sensible enough really - no more cheap tat and American coffee shops. Needless to say my enthusiasm for our endeavours sagged a little. I felt like saying we might have a lot of Starbucks - something to do with free trade and consumer choice - but at least we didn't talk and think like Yanks. [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> Subject: This is awful | |
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Author: Jim (Canada) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 15:35:22 12/14/04 Tue What a terrible conversation! That Canadian was an ignorant twit. Thank God I don't think like that. I believe that when you visit another country, you go there to appreciate what they have to offer - you look for the best things and enjoy learning about that country's culture. You don't go there and start saying that everything back home is better - people like that should stay at home. I love Britain - the beautiful villages, the beautiful countryside, the pubs, the history, the charm of it all. These are the things I go to appreciate. I had an Australian visiting me last May who was in Canada for the first time and most of our conversations were about our similarities and our common ties. When I go to the UK, I always say how proud I am of our ties with Britain and how much I appreciate all that the British gave to us. Maybe I am better educated than that ignorant Canadian who had never left North America before. By the way, I have travelled a lot more in different countries since I was a child. At least you don't have Walmart in Britain yet, Canada does. [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> Subject: Interesting... | |
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Author: Dave (UK) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 16:35:09 12/14/04 Tue As ignorant as some of these views may seem, I have to say that I am in general agreement with a few of their observations. Although Britain’s city-centres are very old, and have some of the most architecturally stunning buildings, they also have some of the ugliest hinterlands in the western world. Few cities or towns in Britain (and none in Scotland) have been spared the scar of 60/70s misguided social engineering. Most cities in Britain are littered with, gap sites, empty shop fronts, chewing gum covered pavements, bill posters, graffiti and litter. I stayed in Bayswater once, and would not wish to do so again. Take a look at any post-industrial city like Glasgow/Liverpool etc, and the story is the same. I work in Glasgow, spend a lot of time in this city, socialise here, and generally love it. However, I also know that I can sip a latte in a marble-clad Victorian masterpiece, take a five minute walk, and end up in Kabul. Any tourist could potentially find this out the hard way. I work in an area of Glasgow full of beautiful Georgian townhouses. Is this were London, they would be in pristine condition, and cost 750 grand a pop. I am currently looking at a former hotel, with its beautiful but crumbling sandstone façade, wrought-iron railings, and boarded up windows. I despair, I really do. Contrast this with Vancouver, and the picture is night and day, with pavements you could eat your dinner off of and vandalism-free streets/trains/bus shelters. Where there is emptiness and dereliction, you can be assured there will be a gleaming tower within six months. I was quite frankly embarrassed at what I saw, and I thought at the time that any Canadian that visits a provincial city here that is not on the picture-postcard trail, would be thoroughly disappointed. In Vancouver, I found that I had to be told where the bad areas were, even when I was in them. However, in Britain, these areas are patently obvious, and require only the opening of the eyes to identify. I did not see any obvious slums over there, that are so easy to spot here. This country needs to get its act together with regard to the full-scale regeneration/restoration of our old buildings, and the flattening and rebuilding of all that is bad. If Singapore can do it, so can we. On the subject of Starbucks, I think Vancouver must have as many, if not more than Seattle, or anywhere else. In fact, if Vancouver were to have any more Starbucks, I’m sure some of them would be next-door neighbours. I even saw two on either side of a crossroads. I don’t think we are as bad as that yet. However, if a Starbucks can replace an empty shop, I’m all for it. Unfortunately Jim, Walmart own our supermarket chain ASDA… [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> Subject: Toronto is gettiing filthy | |
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Author: Jim (Canada) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 17:56:38 12/14/04 Tue When I was growing up, Toronto was so clean you could walk barefoot on the sidewalk and you would not injure yourself. Today, the city is filthy - strewn with garbage, there are homeless people everywhere and the roads are full of potholes. This is an embarrassment for Canada's largest city. Many American visitors have commented on this in our local press. Even the mayor is so embarrassed by it, that he has ordered a street clean-up campaign in next year's budget. Too bad he hasn't put enough money into fixing the roads. I know that Walmart owns ASDA, but at least it kept the ASDA name. In our case, all our Woolco stores were renamed as Walmart and they look exactly like their counterparts in the USA. They do, however, carry Canadian-made products, but they are the cheapest and most poor-quality brands, like a pair of rubber boots which are actually made of a cheap vinyl, or a kettle that doesn't work, or underwear that tears after wearing them only a couple of times (this has been my experience of Walmart Canada - I am going to go back to shopping at the Hudson's Bay Company. [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> Subject: Well said... | |
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Author: Ed Harris (Venezia) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 22:02:26 12/14/04 Tue Living abroad for much of the time (but returning permanently next week, thank god), I have found it easier to look at Britain through the eyes of an outsider. I remember, not long ago, driving from my place in Fitzrovia to my aunt's place in Kew. Two lovely Georgian villages in the middle of London, you might say. En route, however, one has to go through that dread zone known as South of the River, and frankly some of it nearly brought tears to my eyes. The ugly stained concrete cubes next to the windswept carparks with no cars in them, the utter desolation around Waterloo Station, and generally the absolute ghastliness until one gets as far west as Hammersmith - all this in Zone One, don't forget. I remember feeling a sudden and powerful swell of admiration for Mrs T., until whose stubbornness and refusal to compromise with The Enemy Within this country was so broke that the only things with which we could afford to fill the bomb craters were the mind-buggeringly awful concrete prefabs which have ruined the town. I remember London in the late 80s and I look at it now, and they could be two different cities in different countries: a country on the way down has been replaced with a country in which the wealth, confidence, brashness, fatness and fashion are back, and there is no place where this is more obvious than the capital. It will be a black day for all of us when she passes away. Be that as it may, the work is not yet done, and there are an awful lot of NCP carparks and whatnot which need to be condemned and destroyed before Canadian backpackers are likely to be impressed. In fairness to Nick's Gruesome Twosome, backpackers don't have a lot of cash and probably have to stay in the nastier parts of town, which may explain their attitudes. Oh, and to quote the great Marge Simpson on holiday in Toronto: "Oo, it's so clean and bland... I'm home!" Give me Detroit any day, where the chance of getting shot in the head and the entertaining hard-luck stories of hobos keep one amused, and where the piles of rubbish throw the clean bits into sharper focus! [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: Toronto is no longer clean - it's getting like Detroit with crime, filth and homelessness | |
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Author: Jim (Canada) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 22:24:05 12/14/04 Tue [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: Splendid! | |
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Author: Ed Harris (Venezia) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 23:29:43 12/14/04 Tue I make it one of my rules in life never to waste an air-fare going to a city which scores highly on the annual UN Top 100 Cities list. They are all places like Geneva, Copenhagen, the Hague, or, worse still, bloody Vaduz. They are scored according to a lot of categories in which no sane person could possibly be interested unless that person were Swiss: cleanliness, crime-rates, levels of air-poluion, noise-polution, absense of grafitti, efficacy of traffic lights, proliferation of pedestrian crossings, disabled access to bungee jumping events, straightness of white-lines up the middle of the road, and so forth. You get the idea. As a result, Basle and Stockholm are invariably decreed to be Greater Cities than London and New York. Such twaddle. The idea is to look for the cities about half-way down the list: say, way after Zurich and way before Baghdad. If Toronto has joined this list, then I will be the first at Canada House in Trafalgar Square clutching my passport and pointing out just how valuable a Canadian citizen I would be... [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: Criteria... | |
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Author: Dave (UK) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 15:47:41 12/15/04 Wed Whereas I would agree that some of the cities you list are pretty, but essentially soulless places, I think you are being a bit unfair in dismissing the criteria with which they are judged. I would assume that the absence of graffiti and litter from a city would denote the absence of feckless yobs, or the presence of law enforcement: both of which I think are desirable characteristics. If London had no ghettos, no commie-blocks, no litter and perfectly painted white lines, would it not be perfect? [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: Depends how you look at it. | |
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Author: Ed Harris (Venezia) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 16:33:26 12/15/04 Wed In my opinion, these negative things which you list are the inevitable symptoms of things which we would miss were they abolished: vitality, tolerance, and above all a relaxed attitude towards minor irritants. In Singapore, there is no chewing gum on the streets, but this has been achieved at the cost of the most stomach-churning authoritarian measures which we would not accept in London. Road accidents in Geneva are rare, but I have been at pedestrian crossings in Switzerland, and watched as the natives stand at a red light, waiting for it to go green, in spite of the fact that there are no cars coming in either direction. Indeed, on one occasion when I just charged across an empty side-street with a complete disregard for the fact that the little green man had not yet lit up, an elderly lady remonstrated with me, drawing my attention (in the Swiss' quaint imitation of German) to the little red man's continuing presence in our lives... and I was able to stand in the middle of the road and listen to her do this because of the total absence of traffic. I suspect that she went away with the conclusion that I was one of those notoriously eccentric and erratic Italian visitors, what with all this crossing-the-road-outside-the-prescribed-moment madness, the like of which she had only previously seen on a shopping trip to Milan to get furs. I stand by my contention that the world's cleanest and safest cities have had all the life sucked out of them. Perfection is, after all, just another trade name for blandness. As for removing feckless yobs from London, I think that we pretty much have; or, rather, we have moved them out of London Proper to the Dreaded Outskirts (a solution borrowed form Paris, I should think), where they can't bother anyone except for other feckless yobs ;-) [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: 'vitality' | |
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Author: Ian (who lives there) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 00:18:39 12/16/04 Thu You'd love Porto Alegre, Ed. It is seething with vitality: the smell of it can be overwhelming at times, you have to be careful not to step in it when you are walking around in town, it almost certainly will never stop for you at a pedestrian crossing, it avoids any unnecessary proximity to silly foppish concerns like the rule of law, and as soon as it can scrape together a few million in embezzled public funds, you can sure it will be hiding it away out of sight in those lovely tax havens of yours. Oh, and it's also terribly proud of being the Brazilian capital with the highest quality of life. [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: So how much are flights from London? | |
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Author: Ed Harris (Venezia) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 01:07:20 12/16/04 Thu I've spent far too much time in the 3rd world to me much concerned with odours and corruption... In fact, if I couldn't live in London I'd probably choose Bombay. Such fun. [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: I hear Bogotá is quite nice at this time of the year... | |
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Author: Dave (UK) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 09:44:27 12/16/04 Thu [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: In defence of Geneva... | |
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Author: Herr Schweiz [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 13:13:59 12/15/04 Wed Geneva isn't such a bad place. It's got the lake, which is stunning in the summer. It has snow in the winter, and the potential to get way up into the mountains in about half an hour by train. It's one of the most international and cosmopolitan cities on the planet. It has the best pizza with chanterelles and porcini in the world, not to mention the occasional fondue restaurant if you come over all alpine all of a sudden. And, what's more, it's not in the EU! Anyone else with me on this? And Ed, surely Roma, Milan, Napoli, Torino and all of the other major Italian cities would rank right near the top on your list. Why the constant moaning about Italia, mate? Best country in the world, imho. [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: Hm. | |
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Author: Ed Harris (Venezia) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 15:46:44 12/15/04 Wed I wasn't being entirely serious, you know...say, 50%! And Geneva is all right to visit, but one wouldn't want to live there. Notwithstandling its extra-E.U. status, I rather think that there are more fascinating cities... grime is evidence of a bit of life. A lot of Swiss towns remind me of wards in an expensive private hospital. And yes, Rome, Milan, Naples and Turin are all very jolly. Now there are cities which are lived in, and you can tell from the chaos and the mess! Venice, on the other hand, is rather like the Swiss cities: beautiful, international, but about half the size of Highgate Cemetry and twice as dead. If I had to live anywhere in Italy, though, it would certainly be Milan. But does this make Italy the best country in the world? I doubt it, since I doubt that any country can seriously claim that accolade. [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> Subject: Of course they kept the name 'ASDA' – I mean, what sort of name is 'Walmart'? 'Asda' sounds cheap. 'Walmart' sounds..... like an exotic wart. | |
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Author: Roberdin [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 18:08:37 12/14/04 Tue [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> Subject: How grim | |
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Author: Ian (Australia) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 11:34:22 12/15/04 Wed Anyone who can say that their country is "the best" without the benefit of irony should probably be deprived of the right to reproduce. I mean, do these people want to visit a country or a theme-park? [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |