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My godson and his parents live in the U.S. South, and I ran into their neighbors in the laundromat of a campground and RV resort in Nova Scotia.
I had a short job in New Delhi India, in & out in a couple of days & then I took off immediately for a few days of R&R to Chiang Mai Thailand. Second night there, as I'm strolling through the Night Market, I run into one of the principals from the ND gig 2 days earlier... 1500 miles away (he wasn't Thai).
THE GOOD - how wonderful the buskers are in Quebec City. Instead of a disorderly, annoying, haphazard mess as in many cities, Quebec has a formal licensing and sign-up system in which buskers book 30 minute time slots to perform music/magic, etc. in a well maintained area with seats for public viewing. No one cursing or aggressively pan handling or doing anything inappropriate; just an extremely orderly and family friendly vibe.
THE BAD - the number of homeless drug addicts walking menacingly around the streets of Salt Lake City in the daytime. We absolutely LOVED Utah generally - and SLC has some great things to see and do - but we absolutely couldn't believe how seemingly every city block downtown had a stumbling meth head or someone drugged out of their mind and screaming profanities, etc. Totally unexpected and a shocking juxtaposition with ultra clean cut Temple Square nearby.
Never been to QC, but it's a similar arrangement in Montreal (and you did note that the licensing system was at the provincial level)
Copenhagen Denmark. I was working there for a few months a long while ago. I joined the thousands who were biking home from work, or wherever. I expected to see it on the beach during that warm summer, but I nearly crashed into a pole when a topless girl got up from tanning in a public park. I hadn’t heard that they did that so it was a big shock. That’s not to mention the time I visited a cemetery and saw some laying in the sun on top of old graves. It’s not shocking anymore, but back then it was an eye-opener!
Interestingly I recently saw a list of the most gridlocked traffic cities in the world and 2 of the top 5 were in Africa: Cairo and Lagos.
Googling /most congested cities/, twice, I got two different TopTens, no city repeated on both lists. Neither Cairo nor Lagos on either list. Certainly no surprise there.
Which leads to another surprise when traveling... how nice the subways are in some developing countries. Both Panama and MedellÃn have relatively clean, safe, and well functioning subways. Mexico City, not so much.
What I meant by "no surprise" is Google returning contradictory data to the same question. Cherry-pick one that supports your bias.
I don't think it takes a bias to see that clearly there is lots of traffic congestion in many large cities in Africa, where exactly they fall in the rankings isn't really relevant to that point.
Here is an interesting video explaining the horrible traffic in Lagos:
"Lagos metropolis is synonymous with traffic congestion otherwise known as 'go-slow'. The yellow transport buses conveying thousands of residents across different routes are usually blamed for this vehicular logjam. They are said to have little or no regard for the state’s traffic management laws.
On average, residents spend two to three hours in traffic daily commuting to and from different destinations."
Lagos by itself is not a good example. and has actually improve since the 70s, when it was scandalous. But even then, it was possibe to move about, except for a few bottlenecks. I don't consider Cairo to be in the "African" development arena.
I rode for half a day with an Addis Ababa cabbie, and traffic was at speed-limit pace the whole time, not a single slodown. I suspect YouTube reports badly exaggerate. I never see it, anywhere, Bangkok, Manila, Colombo. Houston.
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