Where's the Biggest Shithole You've Ever Been?
11-19-2018, 09:36 PM
I haven’t been to Africa, the Philippines, or Bangladesh, so bear that in mind.
While north India was dirty like much of the rest of the country, I won’t go so far as to say it was a shithole on the virtue that the people I came into contact with were quite pleasant and I never felt unsafe. Not fearing having my ass beat makes it hard to hate the place too much. It might help that I can pass off for being just a very light skinned North Indian, so maybe it helped that I didn’t stand out from everyone else. I was in New Delhi, Ghaziabad, Agra, and Jaipur. The air pollution was a bit rough, and I had a big problem with car sickness from always suddenly moving and stopping so much. Other than that, I really don’t have anything bad to say about the place. It’s an old civilisation, and there was enough charm to it for me to enjoy it on a trip. I have a friend from my university days who lives and makes his living there, and I stayed with his family. If you have a contact in India, that’s definitely the way to go. He was able to hook me up with everything I wanted to do, and I was in good hands. I do wonder though if I didn’t have any contacts and had tried to navigate my way through the place, I might possibly be able to understand calling it a shithole.
In North America, I think the Mexican border towns are the biggest proper shitholes I’ve ever been to. I think it speaks for itself when you just name off places like Matamoros, Nuevo Laredo, and Juarez along the Texas-Mexico border; I always felt tense and I never could fully relax when I was there. Always looking over my shoulder, which just gets old after a while. I can’t speak for elsewhere along the southern border, but at least along the Rio Grande, there’s a point that i’d guess as being roughly 50-75 miles from the southern border where you’re technically in America, but only in name. Feels dangerous. Wouldn’t recommend it. Exceptions to this are El Paso and even parts near South Padre, but that’s only a small walk from actually being in those Mexican border towns in itself. About 10 years ago, a local (Mexican in origin, and questionable nationality) in this general area was to get us a little oz sack; I asked my a relative what he was doing, and he said that was going to run to Mexico real quick to get it. 30 minutes later he was back. Shit like that got me feeling the danger of the southern border in a very real sense for the first time.
In South America, I was a bit disappointed by Cali, Colombia, and these sentiments have rung true for most of my experiences in South America. Part of the family is from there, so I was visiting them and also spent time doing the typical tourist stuff in Medellin, Bogota, and Quito in Ecuador as well. It’s possible part of my disdain for the place has to do with my expectations for what I perceived South America to be like, but there are enough objectively undesirable things as well. I was welcome to stay in my relatives homes, but I got hotels so I could bring women back just in case. Everything gets locked down at night, and you presumably have to stay vigilant. It was also the only time I had ever gotten sick abroad from eating or drinking something that didn’t agree with my body. Turned out to be some juice a cousin made that was mixed with tap water. I guess the locals can handle it, but I was pretty much out of it for the next two days after that. I found a place to party at near the end of the trip, and the people were quite pleasant and didn’t weird me out too much, but I was still pretty paranoid about watching my back; I can blend in there just fine by how I look, but I can’t really speak the language which will always inevitably give up that i’m gringo. The traffic was pretty insane, but not any worse than East Asia and India. Wore shorts and sandals a couple days, and learned my lesson after I was eaten alive by the insects. It kind of soured me on South America, and most all those factors that make a place a shithole seem to apply (some dangerous nature, people, and not nearly as clean as the rim of my bathroom throne.)
Most recently I was in the UK, and found London to being rather close to becoming like any other American city, in that you have shithole areas, and then everything else, until we presumably run out of space or voting power. While the facilities were definitely of the developed world along with there being lots to see and do, I was particularly annoyed by the lack of Britishness that seems to pervade the place. I had never seen so many letter boxes in my life, even compared to the UAE/Oman. Seems they’re going down the same path where we’ll have a lot of gated communities and a lot of ghettos, but I personally did not feel particularly safe surrounded by what appeared to me as being some pretty hardcore moslems. YMMV
The cleanest place i’ve ever been is Abu Dhabi, funny enough. There was a little bit of sky haze, but I’ve never seen streets that clean. It was impressive.