I haven’t travelled much outside the US - just to Canada and the Caribbean.
I am wondering how to visualize foreign countries (until I have enough money to visit them). Since I have visited plenty of US States, do certain countries strongly resemble any states? I know that most North American cities, except Montreal, don’t really resemble European ones due to the age difference. I’m more interested in countrysides and how they compare.
Except Montreal? You mean Quebec City. The surviving old part of Montreal mostly dates from British times (Rue St-Jacques, formerly St James Street), and looks a bit like London.
If we’re talking countryside, there’s a lot of overlap around the world. That always fascinates me - it sure seems like someplace halfway around the world should look different than my backyard, but a lot of times, it doesn’t.
Parts of Greece, for example, looks an awful lot like parts of the American southwest, minus the oceans. Dry climate, red dirt, mostly small trees & bushes as opposed to big deciduous forests.
When driving from Paris to Beaune, Mr. Athena and I remarked on how much it looked like parts of Nebraska and Iowa - farms, corn, rolling hills. Unless there was something obviously French in the pictures, like a church steeple in the distance, you couldn’t tell the difference in places.
Southern Finland and central Sweden strongly resemble Central Ontario (the Shield country, the Thousand Islands). I was quite surprised by this; I had thought that the SHield country was unique in the world. But there are little rocky islands topped with cottages that could be straight out of Muskoka… in the middle of the bay around Helsinki.
Really, deserts look like deserts, temprate forests look like temprate forests, and scrubland looks like scrubland. Travel enough and eventually you get familiar with most basic landscapes. Now and then you get some real geographic surprises, like karstlandscapes or highmountains, but most places don’t look entirely unfamiliar.
I think perhaps you mean Northern California? My parents went there several years ago because the previous year they had been to Barcelona and then flown to Amsterdam, and along the way flew over the South of France. They thought it looked beautiful from the air and decided they wanted to go there. Their descriptions of it - rolling hills and vineyards - made it sound, well, really similar to the part of Northern California where my parents live (Sonoma County). Only with castles. I’m still kind of scratching my head that my parents traveled around the world to see the sort of landscapes they can see every day at home.
(I think they are too, a little, actually. They had a nice time, but ultimately decided that they shouldn’t have spent a whole week there, a few days would have been enough.)
I am thinking about the places I have been and it’s hard for me to answer the question. I guess parts of Northern Israel, like the Galilee, look like Northern California. That’s about it. I think every place is pretty unique, and I disagree that desert looks like desert and mountains look like mountains. The deserts in Arizona don’t look like the deserts in Sinai, and the rolling green hills in Bosnia don’t look like the rolling green hills in Pennsylvania.
Australia pretty much looks like most of America. From Snow capped mountains to broad deserts, to tropical rainforests to temperate rainforest and everything in between.
Israelis tend to congregate in Los Angeles and New York City because they remind them of home. LA because of the climate, NYC because of the attitude.
(Although it isn’t entire accurate - Israel is hotter in summer and colder in winter than LA; and Israelis tend to find New Yorkers a bid too polite and standoffish).