Okay, cool. Sorry for starting this hijack on what is really an innocuous observance.
But I do have my own theory on why Americans don’t travel overseas as much as Europeans, which is a combination of several factors: our country is very large and contains every climate zone, from arctic to tropical, so traveling overseas to go skiing or visit tropical islands is unnecessary; Americans tend to have less vacation time than Europeans; because our country is very large, many Americans have a very widespread familial network and our vacation time is often used up visiting with them; over time, this has resulted in a culture in which traveling overseas is seen as a rare and exciting luxury, and not something that can be indulged in often. I think many Americans who could afford traveling overseas simply don’t because it isn’t the done thing, and it doesn’t occur to them that they could. Hell, I once asked the SDMB for travel advice - I had come into a lump sum of money and wanted to do something really interesting - and I had people suggest that I go to San Diego, which is, to my mind, the extreme opposite of a really interesting trip. (No offense to San Diegans, but I’m from California and was thinking more along the lines of like, Indonesia or Uzbekistan).
I think part of the travelling thing is also about the package holiday, Thomas Cook thing in Europe- charter flights, all inclusive 2 and 3 star resorts catering to blue collar workers etc. Much less of a cultural part of US life.
While an Irish family may spend two weeks in Orlando or Tenerife or Albufeira every summer, it is less likely an American family would spend two weeks in Orlando or Atlantic City or Hawaii, even if the expense is similar.
Many British, Irish and European teens go on big group holidays together in the summer, usually between the ages of 16 and 18.
In the UK it is often post GCSE (16) or A-Level (18), in Ireland post Leaving Cert (17). The kids either save up pocket money or wages from after-school jobs, or parents pay as a reward for completing the exams.
Often without any adults the kids (either mixed sex or single sex groups of friends) go off to somewhere like Ibiza or the Costa del Sol for sun, sea, sand and sex- basically a Spring Break kind of a deal, but high schoolers, not College kids.
My sister, for example, went to Lanzarote with three of her female friends for a week when she was 17. Nobody ended up pregnant or in hospital, but I know all the photos got mysteriously “lost” before they could be seen by my parents.
I don’t think that this particular teenage right of passage would go over well with the average American parent.
BTW, none of this applies to my students in Eastern Europe anyway, as most of them have never left Bulgaria. Probably about 30% of my students were ethnically Turkish and had been to Turkey to visit relatives. And some of my students were in a folk dance troupe that occasionally traveled to Macedonia or something like that. It was a BIG DEAL when the youngest group in the dance troupe went to Cyprus to participate in a children’s folk dance festival, because, of course, it required air travel. (They took a bus to Istanbul and flew from there.) I have no idea how they paid for all this, btw, because air travel is wayyyyy outside of the budget of most Bulgarians. My host mom once told me proudly of the time she flew - as a student, she flew from Sofia to Varna (on the Black Sea coast). (My host mom is the person who simply could not understand why my parents couldn’t take the bus to Bulgaria from America to visit. I know I’ve told that story before.)
I think the language barrier is really significant here. When I was doing my student teaching, I was in southwest Bulgaria, not far from the Greek border, and when I asked my students what they wanted to do over the summer, they all answered that they wanted to go to the Black Sea. I asked them why they didn’t want to go to the Mediterranean, in Greece, which was, after all, much closer. This was apparently a crazy idea, and they liked the Black Sea because it was “our sea”.
In my day (oh God, TWENTY years ago, in the UK) the In Thing after A Levels (aged 18) was to spend a month ‘inter-railing’ around Europe before going to Uni. You could buy a rail pass which gave you unlimited travel around most countries in western Europe and you would go off, with a pack of mates, a backpack, a bunch of travellers cheques and, if you were lucky, someone’s parents’ credit card for emergencies, and off you went. My group of 4 visited seven countries in 4 weeks, with no itinerary, no reservations and no mobile phones, and had The Time of Our Lives TM.
These days, the ‘month inter-railing’ seems to have turned into ‘a year out before Uni, working on a charity project in Africa’.
Which, of course, goes to show how crazy it is to ask what the European Adolescence experience is. We may be a small land mass compared to the US, but a French teenager might as well be the other side of the world from the teenagers of your experience.
Kids in western Europe might be more likely to have passports as a matter of course than in the US. For an American teen, having to get one is possibly one more hassle weighing against foreign vs. domestic travel.
OK now I am confused.
If your high schools are not as advanced as our high schools, but your unniversities are more advanced than ours…
Where do you learn what is in the gap left by our advanced high schools and your less advanced high schools, and your advanced universities if your high schools are not as advanced as ours …
There seems to me a bigger leap from High School to Uni here. For example, subjects like sociology and psychology aren’t on the Leaving Certificate curriculum here. There is a narrower range of subjects here and High School in US introduces subjects that we only really tackle at 3rd level. However, having some limited exposure to American college courses, it seems to me that ours demand more of students vis-a-vis workload etc.
This has definitely been my observation in Australia. Lots of Australians have passports (even if it’s only because they got one when they went on a family holiday to Bali or a Ski trip to New Zealand in Year 12 or something) but lots of them don’t.
I’ve got a couple of really good friends who don’t have a passport and seem to be under the impression that overseas travel is an expensive luxury only available to a select few, despite the fact I’ve shown them several times that you can fly to places like New Zealand, Malaysia, and Bali for about $400 return.
Finally, one of them said that actually getting a passport was a lot of hassle for them (finding people to act as approved witnesses, going to the post office, getting photos done, etc) and that just seemed to put the whole thing into the “Too Hard” basket when they could fly to Sydney or Melbourne or Cairns using their driver’s licence as ID.
It’s certainly different to how things were in NZ when I was a teenager; everyone I knew had a passport because even if they weren’t travelling at the time, it was understood they’d be doing so in the near future (Going on OE or something).
This sounds similar to a lot of Americans, and I wonder if Australians have the same attitude that I’ve encountered a lot in the US, which is that the only place worth traveling to overseas is Europe. Because going to Europe from the US (and Australia) is, in fact, pretty freaking expensive, but there are other places nearer by that are also really interesting, and not nearly so pricey. I went to Colombia last year for about how much it would have cost to visit my parents in California (this was from Michigan). But a lot of people (including my parents, who have each been to Europe several times, but nowhere else) were really surprised that I would want to go to South America. (In fact, when I told my mom about it, she thought I must be going to do some kind of volunteer work, because the idea of just traveling around in Colombia for fun just sounded so crazy to her, apparently.)
Oh, unwad your panties, nobody called you stupid. I said your argument was stupid. There is a completely unsubtle and fairly important difference between the two. And a total apples-to-oranges comparison like you were making does make for a stupid argument. It just does. I’m sorry if that makes you unhappy.
And I would have to agree with the suggestion that Europeans are more likely to have passports–they can’t go all that far without one, after all. Even a little puddle-jump flight of an hour would generally take you out of the country, so not having a passport would seriously limit one’s travel options.
Most of Western Europe is within the Schengen Zone, and a passport is not required to cross borders. In fact, I’ve occasionally heard stories of clueless Western European teenagers trying to enter non-Schengen Zones countries without passports and being confused about why they’re being turned back at the border.
Hm, really? That’s interesting. When I lived in Bulgaria, I was a legal resident and had a Bulgarian national ID card, but when I went to Romania (this was in 2008, and both countries were part of the EU, but neither yet in the Schengen Zone…and probably never will be, at the rate at which they’re [del]devolving[/del] developing), I had to have my passport - my ID card wasn’t good enough. OTOH, it was an extremely fast border crossing.
Other than that, my own (laughably low) income level required that my travels be confined to countries with similar prices to Bulgaria, so I never ventured out of the Balkans. I wonder how effective my ID card, which did make me a legal EU resident, would have been if I’d tried to use it to get into France or Spain.
Yes, but those possibilities of traveling with little ID to foreign countries is not linked to Europe, it is linked to precise countries inside Europe, as it is possible through cooperation treaties. What I mean is that I dont believe any passport or ID from Eastern Europe or the Balkans would grant you those abilities. Whereas several countries in Western or Northern Europe would have those kind of agreements with some off Europe countries.
I got two passports, one of them is French. I was able to travel to Morocco and Tunisia without any visa. And I’m pretty sure, that something like 10 years ago, a French ID card was sufficient for both of those countries (not sure if it still holds true now, what with War of Terror and bigger, more encompassing European treaties). With a EU passport, you could also travel to Egypt without any visa, and buy one upon landing in Cairo (US passport was probably the same).
Actually, there must be plenty of countries where just showing with a US passport is enough to get in. The distaste for traveling abroad in Americans has less to do with the distances in the US than a cultural streak (though they can feed each other). Simply said, even in accounting distances and other excuses, there’s a low percentage of the US pop with a passport, especially if you compare that with other Western nations.
Maybe the “greatest country on the planet” trope plays a role in that.
Oh yeah, it’s rare for Americans to need a visa. I needed one when I went to India. I guess I needed one when I went to Turkey, too, but I bought it at the border for twenty bucks. I also know you need one to go to Russia and to China. But in general, it’s not typical to need to get a visa ahead of time.
Getting a US passport isn’t exactly a difficult process as well. Using that as an excuse for why one doesn’t travel is pretty weak.
Absolutely, since one can get in amounts of travel within one’s country (culturally, geographically and distance-wise) to rival any Western European teenager, without ever needing a passport. I thought we already discussed this upthread. And until recently one didn’t even need a passport to travel to Canada or Mexico, if one is one of those who subscribe to the belief that crossing an international boarder magically makes one a better person for some mysterious reason.
Funny, you totally failed to see the point. Traveling has always had to do with discovering other cultures. Europeans dont need passports for that, yet they do tend to have passports way more than Americans. It just doubles the evidence that curiosity to other cultures is more developped in Europe than it is in the US.
