Everyone jokes about "culture shock", returning to North America after cruising the Bahamas and Caribbean, but despite the wide gulf between our recent experiences and our current environment, this place is only strange because it is so familiar. It doesn't matter that we've never been to St. Petersburg before. As Americans, our subconscious is imprinted with the icons of America (freeways, Safeways, McDonald's, Wal-Marts), and it all instantly falls into place. The only shock we've had is sticker shock. Our first morning back, we went out for breakfast and stopped in at the first place we saw, a little gourmet hole-in-the-wall with counter service and a few small tables outside. Two egg-and-sausage sandwiches, a latte, a coffee, and a bottle of juice -- twenty-six dollars? We canceled our order, and went elsewhere.
We will miss 50-cent beer, two-dollar comida typica meals, six dollar filet mignon. We will miss spearing fish and lobster, snorkeling in clear water and eating all we wanted from the sea. We'll miss the cheap and frequent public transportation. We'll miss having our laundry done for us, but at least American laundromats actually have hot water for washing. We'll miss being close to the world news Americans ignore -- the leadership crises in Venezuela, the election in Colombia -- but we'll get more information on the US news we had wished we could hear more about.
We won't miss seeing trash everywhere, or the abandoned half-built projects and failed resorts and businesses that litter the Caribbean. We won't miss the petty thievery that forced us to lift and lock our dinghy every night. We won't miss being obvious gringos, different-looking, funny-speaking, strangers at best, walking wallets full of Yankee dollars at worst.
We're back in the land of free refills on restaurant coffee -- too bad it's usually not that tasty. We no longer have to worry that the guy at the dock who helps with the lines wants a tip, but we have to tip taxi drivers and waitresses now. (Not that we are going to take many taxis, at American prices!) We can see first-run movies and listen to Garrison Keillor on NPR every weekend. The local grocery store's fruits and vegetables section is bigger than most Caribbean stores (and bigger than some Caribbean islands!) The roads are all wide and smooth and filled with shiny cars and trucks with no obvious pieces missing. Nobody walks or bicycles anywhere, unless they are jogging or fitness-biking to nowhere. Buildings and buses are all air-conditioned to within a few degrees of the frost point. Banks are not guarded by scowling, swarthy men with sawed-off shotguns. We've got excellent libraries, mail delivery, and fresh milk.We can drink a hundred and one varieties of tasty microbrew, rather than the ubiquitous thin lagers -- of course, the tasty microbrews cost about four times as much as we paid for any local beer in the Caribbean. We don't have to pause before every transaction while we mentally convert the local currency into dollars. And almost everybody here speaks English.
America is constantly, relentlessly exporting itself. Coca-cola is available in Venezuela, you can go out to McDonalds in Trinidad, and Kuna kids in Panama's San Blas are wearing Nikes now. All the people watching subtitled Hollywood-made movies see exactly how Americans live, or wish they did. Maybe eventually the entire world will look like the highway 19 strip here in St. Petersburg, which looks exactly like the US 36 strip back in Boulder, and just about everywhere else in the US, with chain car dealers, chain restaurants, chain tire stores, chain supermarkets, chain furniture stores, and chain clothing stores all lined up one after another, an endless chain of chains. Of course, we don't think the homogenization of the world is a good thing. But the reason these chains do so well is that when you walk into a Denny's or a Jiffy Lube or a JC Penny's, there are no surprises. You know exactly what you are going to get. And sometimes, that's exactly what you want. We're back in the US, where a hamburger is a hamburger, where we speak the language and blend right in. We know exactly what we are going to get. And for now, that's exactly what we want.