For me, reality TV is the reason there are some three hundred channels to choose from on cable with absolutely nothing to watch. Still, there is one program I enjoy watching for the sheer voyeuristic pleasure of it, and it never seems to get old.
House Hunters International travels the globe covering real estate purchases in far away lands. In Mexico, Brazil, Paris or Tokyo, you can get a glimpse of how life is lived in the rest of the world — and what it costs.
In Paris, for example, $1 million might buy you 1,ooo square feet of a third floor walk-up including two bedrooms (closets not included), a kitchen with no stove, and a bathroom with exposed pipes and a tub the size of a footbath. Half that much will buy a grand estate in the Carribean, while in Taiwan 1,000 square feet is nearly impossible to find at any price.
It’s not just income that defines a standard of living, but what can be bought with it. Here, thankfully, most of us can go beyond the minimum requirements of modern living and express ourselves with more choices than almost anywhere else on earth — even though that sometimes requires the equivalent of scrolling through all those TV channels.
