Trip to the States

More features of the Boston area:

Mom and Pop stores with high prices and rude attitudes because the liberals
keep the chain stores away to protect them. Full serve gas stations because
many towns banned self-serve for "safety" reasons (noticed all the wounded
people lying around the Phoenix gas stations?).

Until a few years ago, the speaker of the house was brother to one of the
biggest mobsters in the city. The state police got their funding cut whenever
they tried to investigate the mob. The feds finally broke it up (some).

Expressway and mass transit infrastructure was completed in the 1950s with
very little updated since. Looking at the bridges over 128 I don't think they
even bother to paint. Potholes everywhere - and the back roads were laid out
on old horse and buggy trails, now 18 wheelers are swerving around on them.

I-95 cancelled to save some dump neighborhood that everybody abandoned,
leaving a huge town with just three expressways into it. Big dig is a big
expense, it will help but will not solve the basic problem of insufficient
expressways.

It's called Taxachusetts for good reason.

You're paying a shitload for an apartment but others in the same building are
paying $80/month on some kind of welfare program. You get up and go to work,
they get up and go to the pool. Made me wonder why I bothered to get an
education and go to work.

Freezing cold and ICY all winter, melts into mud in the spring, then when it
is finally summer the mosquitoes have bred in the mud puddles and are out
chomping on you. A brief but beautiful fall followed by more winter.