People in Different Countries Don't Think Highly of Each Other

Yesterday I bought myself new running shoes at a store around the corner from sis-in-law's house which she had recommended to me. Very nice, very snazzy with a little running machine (treadmill, my kids remind me it's called) in the corner with a video camera mounted in front of it to capture your stride and all that.

I got nice shoes, I'm very pleased with them. But why I'm writing is that the helpful salesman was very scornful of my shoe inserts (very expensive, made specially for me after a whole foot-measuring thing in Bloomington). They're hard plastic and stop just below the ball of my foot - they're to help with the bunions, left one had been particularly painful in the couple of months before we left Bloomington.

So he said scornfully, next time you get inserts, don't get them in the States! We have such nice soft ones here, and they don't stop at the ball of your foot, and they're orthopedic (I'm thinking, what does he think mine are?).

And here's the part I was laughing to myself about: the podiatrist in Bloomington, when he heard I was off to Berlin and therefore he could not just drill into my feet then and there (thank you!), made a point of telling me a story about a guy who came to him after coming back from Germany where, according to my podiatrist, he had his pinky toe amputated! So Bloomington podiatrist said: whatever you do, don't go see a foot doctor in Berlin!

What's a girl with feet going to do? 

(For the record, my bunions have been fab and totally non-hurt since I've been wearing the fancy unwieldy unyieldy hard plastic inserts. Thank you, Bloomington doc. [There is a recurring pain on the left foot, just opposite the dormant bunion and a little further toward my ankle, top of the foot on the far left, that seems to be there as an echo to the memory of bunion pain.])

Oh, and p.s., of course hubby has had all kinds of tooth trouble, like a crown falling off, and the dentist here was shocked (shocked!) at the root canal work that had been done underneath it in the States and is redoing the whole thing. But as far as I recall in the past, hubby's U.S. dentists had completely dismissed everything that had happened in his mouth elsewhere before (Iran, I think, but also Germany). So you see what I'm saying.