When you can get a McDonald’s hamburger or meatball sub at Subway in almost any country on Earth, and English is spoken widely everywhere, does it make the experience of travel less of an adventure?
Does the fact that almost everywhere is mapped by GPS and connected to the Internet make true adventures feel like a rarity compared to how things were in say 1989? I know economic development is good, but it would have been cool to see China for example back when it was still quasi-medieval in parts.
It seems like youth today share the same culture (global capitalist pop culture) in every country, even if they still speak different languages.
Do the crowds of tourists in places like Prague or Paris make for a theme park feeling rather than visiting a “real” place?
My first time out of my home country (Australia) was a 2009 visit to Singapore, and I remembered thinking “err… feels a lot like home. Maybe just a bit more densely populated”.
Then I flew to India and spent two weeks training around the country, and definitely got the cultural experience I was craving.
I spend half my time in Prague and the tourists can be hell at the weekend. I try and avoid the city centre then. Most of the real locals head out of town at weekends as well. Which means if you get up early on a Sunday you can have the city almost to yourself while the tourists are still nursing hangovers in their hotels.
I live in a district called Nusle and I’m a 20 minute walk or 8 minute tram ride from Wencelas Square and the Old Town. We get very few tourists or even ex-pats in our neighbourhood. I like that a lot. My nearest supermarket is a Tesco (British brand that’s big in CZ), but I also try and use the vietnamese run potravinys as well if I just want a few things. (a potraviny is a grocery store and almost every one in Prague is run by vietnamese,)
We don’t have a MacDonalds or Subway in my part of Nusle, but we do have the best pizza place in the city and the best butchers shop. As well as lots of local places serving local food. My appearance is quite distinctive so the staff normally remember me and treat me as an honoray local. There are several restaurants I can walk into and my favourite beer will be at my table before I’ve sat down. It’s so much better than going into a touristy place in the centre and being just another face in a crowd.
Generally, a 20 minute walk from any tourist centre will get you the real city. If you are in Venice, most tour groups never go beyond the Rialto bridge. If you head north a few streets you can find lovely family owned restaurants serving Grandmas recipes and a lot less English spoken. Even if you don’t speak the language, they will usually apreciate that you have made the effort to go beyond the normal tourist spots.
Shrug, for me one of the coolest things about traveling is “stuff they do just like at home” and “stuff that’s different”. And sometimes the common things are very old ones: my team was laughing all the way to the table the first time the Flunch* where we used to eat had cassoulet, we’d just found out how to say fabada in French! But we’re reasonably sure the two recipes are very, very old and may perfectly well have developed independently, simply due to the availability of similar ingredients…
A chain of self-service restaurants that seems to be everywhere in France.
OP, if in your travels, you are only seeing the McDonalds and Starbucks in the large metropolitan centers, then you need to get out more. The world is still vastly different country to country. Local cultures still thrive.
Only if you actually eat at McDonald’s or Subway instead of visiting a more local establishment.
I’ve spent a total of 10 weeks in Japan. Although I laid eyes on a McDonald’s restaurant just about every day I was there, I’ve only ever actually eaten there once - and that was because it was the only thing open at 6:30AM, and we had grown ravenously hungry after having already been awake for hours (Detroit-to-Tokyo jet lag sucks).
You can stay off the internet while you’re there, and avoid doing any prior planning if you want seat-of-your-pants adventure. I prefer more planning, so I make a list of things I want to see/do (and a bunch of hotel reservations) before I head out on a trip. Google Maps is great for figuring out how to use public transit to get from our hotel to some other destination; I can write down what trains to take, what stations to transfer at, and so on. I know how long it will take, so (for example) I don’t end up accidentally taking a 45-minute train ride to get to breakfast. A lazy/aimless afternoon stroll down a shopping arcade or through a city park is a fine and fulfilling thing, but standing in a subway station trying to make sense of a route map is not; traveling to Japan costs a lot (physically and financially), so I don’t want to waste my precious time there just trying to figure out how to get around.
On this, I have to admit I feel a bit jarred when I bump into other Americans in Japan. Not so much a sense of “this feels like a theme park;” it’s more like wanting to feel like I’ve left America behind, and then that feeling gets interrupted.
I am at the tail end of a 10-day vacation in Palermo (Sicily), and I am pleasantly surprised at the total lack of American chain retailers/restaurants.
I think the OP has a point, in that “international” cities are going to be full of international chains that seem to dominate the visual landscape of cities’ downtown/shopping/tourist areas. It can make it feel like that’s all there is (though it definitely isn’t).
That said, my impression is that in many/most places, if you get out of those major, modern cities, you’ll get a more “pure” flavor of a different nation/people.
Even if they are chains you’re familiar with, there may be some entertaining differences. The McDonald’s we visited in Japan had some unusual menu options, including (for example) a shrimp burger. Breakfast (the reason for our visit) was identical to home - egg mcmuffin, hash browns, coffee - but unlike home, the restaurant was spotless, the staff were perfectly dressed in clean, wrinkle-free uniforms, and they were flawlessly attentive and cheerful.
And of course there was a substantial smoking section, the odor of which predictably drifted over into the non-smoking section.
Don’t go in tourist season, eat at local restaurants and stay in local hotels, and you’ll avoid almost everything you describe.
I’ve been to Prague, for example, but I went in late December, which is not the time of year when most non-European tourists go to Prague. Didn’t see or meet any Americans for the entire week I was there. Same thing in Budapest, Rome, Florence and Milan.
And yeah, even McDonalds can be pretty strange in foreign countries. I had a “Lamb McSpicy” in Scotland once, for example. It was a lamb patty on naan bread with some sort of chutney on it. Not your typical Big Mac for sure.
I haven’t gone traveling since I’ve had a smartphone though; last time (2012), it was still street maps and old-school navigation. I imagine smartphones will just make that a little bit easier, at the risk of losing the sort of fun, serendipitous happenings when you get lost looking for some place, and end up somewhere else. But there’s nothing that says you have to be wed to your smart phone- you can just stick it in your pocket and go about your tourism without it! Or you can use it as a sort of super-travel guide. Or as a pocket translator.
It might seem weird, but it can also be interesting to visit a local supermarket, or wherever the local residents shop for food (farmers market, fruit cart, etc).
Actually, going grocery shopping is something I greatly enjoy in foreign countries. You get a much better sense of what the people value there in terms of food, drinks, etc… than you do from street food, or eating in restaurants. You also get an idea of how they shop/how they eat by the product mix, packaging and/or what people have in their carts as well.
And sometimes, seeing what American (or wherever you’re from) items make the “international” aisle is pretty entertaining in its own right.
Traveled to China around 1985 shortly after the country was opened to “independent travelers”. Amazingly backward place. Hordes of bicycles on the streets. Not unusual to see 100 bikes waiting for the light to turn in places like Beijing or Shanghai. No refrigeration anywhere outside of the one “Friendship” store in Beijing and one had to show a passport to get in. Having lived in Taiwan for several years, I spoke Mandarin, but other travelers had a very difficult time communicating. Crossing over the border in a train to Hong Kong was like riding on a time machine.
I don’t eat at McDonalds or Subway here, why would I eat at them abroad? This summer I’ve been in India and the Dominican Republic and haven’t eaten at a single America or western chain restaurant. If you want you can water down any experience, but there’s no need to.
And dishes with the same name may change widely. The first time I asked for huevos rancheros in Costa Rica I must have looked pretty confused and getting them at the bottom of what I would have normally call red bean soup; the waitress laughed and said “yeah, they’re very different from the versions in other countries! Same name, but about all the dishes have in common is fried eggs.”
One of my coworkers had a degree in Marketing. He loved going to supermarkets and checking out which brands were the same, which were evidently the same but sold under a different name, the different color schemes… he could spend hours explaining the psychological effect of lighting choices and keep it interesting.
Going to my usual supermarket in Saint-Louis (the one right next to Basel, there’s several SLs) just as the new beer campaign had started was an experience in itself. Several aisles which normally held other things had mutated into beer aisles; some of the brands I saw that day for the first time are now sold in Spanish supermarkets. I wasn’t doing anything special, just my usual Saturday supermarket run, but I saw more beer in a single place than I’d ever seen outside a brewery.
The world is “becoming smaller” and the differences between cultures are becoming smaller. Plan your world travel soon! — don’t wait until you retire when it may be “smaller” yet.
When I toured rural Thailand 30 years ago, markets showed prices in Thai numerals (๐๑๒๓๔๕๖๗๘๙) instead of 0123456789; “Coffee” was traditional Thai coffee for 7 cents per cup; handmade fire strikers were still in use. Just making a phone call could be a complicated adventure. Today you’re never very far from a 7-Eleven or a shop with a Western-style espresso maker; and smartphones are ubiquitous. Rural Thailand may be a pleasanter place for a Westerner to live these days, but it has less sense of the “exotic.”
I agree that it’s kind of dumb to go somewhere else and eat NOTHING but food from chain restaurants like McDonald’s.
But I disagree that it’s necessarily watering down the experience if you have a meal or two in them just to see what the differences are, even at the same places. I mean, I don’t regret my Lamb McSpicy one bit- it was a really interesting sandwich I’d have never had anywhere in the US, and it was from McDonald’s in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1998.
And foreign fast food places are kind of an adventure in their own right. You never quite know what you’re going to get, especially if you’re not quite up on the language.
Yeah, this. Even if you go to a familiar place like McD’s or KFC or whatever (hilarious to see Taco Bell in some other countries :p) it’s probably going to be pretty different. The one’s in China (the ones that are ACTUALLY McDonald’s or KFC, as opposed to some Chinese knockoffs that have a similar name but aren’t either KFC or McDonald’s) and in other parts of Asia I’ve been too have pretty strange things on the menu. Some are pretty yummy, some…not so much to my tastes. But, as others have said, get outside of the large cities and you can find plenty of local culture and McDonald’s free areas.
Personally, I don’t think globalization makes travel boring. I like the fact that I can use things like GPS to navigate instead of old folded paper maps, and the fact that while English is popular, that I have an app to help me translate when it’s not.
