As You Drive Out of the Center City, It's More Clearly the Developing World

As You Drive Out of the Center City, It's More Clearly the Developing World
Originally uploaded by jakeyd.

Home again. Hot and tired. Sagat arrives to take us on a whirlwind driving tour of the city, then to dinner. We head north to the railway station (pics for you, Eric, another day), then back south past a bungalow community dating from the ‘30’s, which Sagat insists is mixed income, notwithstanding its look of Appalachia, then out west toward the city edge. It becomes increasingly clear that we are living in the equivalent of the best neighborhood in Manhattan. Almost everyone lives in high-rise multifamily housing vaguely reminiscent of the crappiest parts of southeast Queens (or Mexico or Greece or Portugal or ……) The omnipresent casinos persist as we motor west. Sagat says the casinos are a post-Soviet development.