Quote:
Originally Posted by Ivy
I didn't really mean hiding it like in a car, because one is worried it might get stolen... That's just normal behaviour as far as I'm concered.
What I meant was this exactly:
From all these posts I concluded it's more like a cultural thing, than anything else. I live in Croatia, which is an ex socialist country. For years, everybody had as little or as many as everybody else. If someone did have more, it wasn't obtained in a legal manner. 
We've changed our socialistic regime (some 20 years ago) and we have capitalism now, so differences in wealth are allowed and normally occur. Still, people look at someone who jumps out of the average kind of wrong.
For example, I have a feeling people wish to be more successful than their neighbour in America. Or at least as successful. Where I live, people wish their neighbour was as unsuccessful as they were. 
I know this is a generalisation, but I'm just trying to paint a picture of the society I live in. |
I was in Croatia in 2006, and I had a hard time figuring out what was considered a sign of relative wealth, what was ostentatious, etc. I did see this attitude of concealing wealth, mainly in the way that the outsides of the buildings often did not match the insides - people let the outsides of their homes go to ruin, yet they would be pretty nice inside. In the USA, people fix up the exterior first and pretend the inside is nicer than it really is - and we help them by not pressing to come in. I guess we are more ostentatious.
Also, the relative prices of things were confusing - some things cost far more than at home, others cost far less, and I couldn't predict which would be which.
So I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable reading from my Sony reader there either. OTOH, if I were there again I would be a visitor and should probably look at my surroundings instead of having my nose in a book. There is much to see there!