I’ll settle for fake America, thanks.
We camp a lot in the National Parks of the west for several months at a time; Teton, Yellowstone, Glacier, etc. It seems we meet as many non-Americans as we meet Americans; Germans (including one who sincerely asked if we had ever heard of a guy named Hitler*), Chinese, Japanese, Israelis (we helped a group put up their tent). We have met a lot of French folks (the women seem to all wear skirts camping, which seems strange to me). They are probably not seeing the “real” America but at least they are not seeing the TV comedy show America. Hee, the strangest thing I ever saw was a group of four German tent campers sweeping their camp-site with hand-held whisk brooms in the Tetons.
*He obviously hasn’t read the SDMB.
Yup. You can go to Barcelona or London and travel just twenty miles out of town and see the ‘real’ Spain/England. It’s that much harder in the US.
From my own anecdotal experience, there are more people visiting ‘the real America’ than there used to be, because we get to know people online and end up visiting them. My ex-GF recently went to loads of places in the north of the US (as well as the south of Canada) visiting friends that she knows from a music writers’ board; she encounted many people being stunned that they had an actual tourist and got a little trouble at the airport, but she was definitely seeing small towns.
I also visited an American friend that I knew from the internet. Granted, she lived in Florida, but I still got to stay in an ordinary house and go to ordinary places.
It was an eye-opener for me. Everything was so far apart! Not just the distance from the houses to the nearest shop, which was big enough to need a car, but the distance from one house to another. The cars were freakishly huge. And the houses (they were cheap ones) seemed more like sheds than actual buildings, but they were perfectly serviceable - and all on one level. Her parents were building an extension to their house just by adding a few walls here and there, but no bricks were required.
It all worked and made sense in context, but it was so different to what I was used to, in a way you can’t appreciate via the TV.
New York City central is still the real America, of course, just as central London is the real England. It’s just one part of the real England, not less real than the suburbs, smaller towns or countryside. I get what people mean when they say ‘the real [whatever country],’ but the only problem with that is in generalising a particular area to the whole country.
And I did get a lot more out of seeing real people’s homes in Florida than I did when I was 15 and spent the entire time there being shuffled from one theme park to another.
I think of Disneyfied as being a place that was originally built for people to work and live in, but that has become so thoroughly touristed that it’s just a tourist stop and few “regular” people not related to the industry work there. Venice (or large parts of it, anyways) by this definition is hugely Disneyfied, for example.
Anyways, to the question at hand, I don’t know how many foreigners set out to see the “real” America…it certainly seems like you don’t see as many international tourists in smaller American cities and parks as you do in comparable places in Europe. Maybe American places don’t hold as much appeal, maybe foreign tourists are less adventurous, maybe our truly terrible public transportation system is an impediment.
There’s plenty they can see…while I think the poster upthread who said that for most Americans “real life” is played out in suburban office parks and Wal-Marts, there are enough distinctive places off the beaten path that are plenty interesting. Small towns in New England, the Maine coast, Amish country, the Appalachians, Nashville and the country music scene, Southern plantations, Kentucky bluegrass, blues joints in the Delta river valley…and that’s just scratching the surface of the east coast!
I agree, by that definition. Central Stratford-Upon-Avon is mostly like that too.
Nah - we often hear that America is a BIIIG country, and it is. It’s simply harder to get to those small places. I think you might be right, though, about public transport, in that to see American suburbs you would usually need a car, which is an extra expenditure for a tourist.
Well, it’s also that there are more small places in America. Ten thousand Europeans can disappear into the American hinterlands without much trace. Ten thousand Americans in a European country, and you can’t get away from them.
…Like maybe Los Angeles and San Francisco, perhaps you’ve heard of them. But yeah, I pretty much agree with your point. Most foreign tourist go to those types of places, where they see other tourists; the first requirement for a locale to be “the real” (whatever country) is that it isn’t overrun with tourists.
The BBC’s Top Gear car reviewers took a road trip through the real America of four south-eastern states: http://www.streetfire.net/video/top-gear-american-holiday-trip-from-miami-to-new-o_191659.htm
…where they did their best to seek out affirmations of every bigoted stereotype of Southerners they held. That whole segment was really offensive.
Wow, that really was terrible. Those guys were the epitome of the “Ugly Brit” stereotype - rude, whiny, condescending, obnoxious. And unfunny: “The right turn on red - America’s only contribution to Western civilization! Haw haw haw!” “A racetrack with left-hand turns? Must be too complicated for the colonials! Haw!”
I wouldn’t have minded if they showed stereotyped Southerners, per se, but they really did seem bound and determined to find and film the worst of whatever they could find. Having driven through much of the same area, I can say they missed out on a lot.
Yup. Deliberately ignorant Brits being stoned by enraged rednecks – had me laughing.
When I think about it, my best experiences in meeting Americans have been in hot springs, for example, sit in the hot spring on the side of the hill in the cedar forest on the Locsha River, and people happen by. You chat with them as you soak with them. Hot water, cedar scent, stars in the sky, and good conversation with interesting people. It’s really wonderful.
It’s less jarring for those familiar with Jeremy Clarkson. He’s had a pretty much pathological hatred of America and everything in it for a very long time- and Top Gear is largely produced for domestic consumption, even though it airs here.
Besides, I’ve driven through much of the same area, too, and saw a lot of the same things.
Anyway, the left-hand-turns joke was pretty apt, considering the US obsession with oval tracks.
Except Cameron Diaz.
Find out what the locals eat and go to the little ma and pa restaurants to eat. That’s where you can eavesdrop and listen to the local patois and subjects of concern. If so inclined, you will often be included in the conversation if you introduce yourself.
Those people can also steer you to sites of interest and provide some information about them that you wont find in the guidebooks.
The Zephyr is gorgeous (though the family stopped in Denver and took the plane to DFW under the assumption that driving through the plains is like riding a train there.
So because it’s a long-held bigotry it’s not so bad?
I don’t quite see what his doing this regularly, or doing it for a British audience, has to do with him being boorish, snide, and unfunny. Or, on preview, what Spoke says.
I don’t know about the specifics of his opinion of the USA but I do know he has that comical cynicism about a hell of a lot of things, not just the USA. The show is basically an extended exercise in (YMMV) good natured comic cynicism about pretty much everything, through the lens of cars.
Um, somewhat of a caution here: as much as I like trains, I’ve found that they do have their limitations. Well, for one thing, I don’t think that Eurail-type on and off privileges are easy to come by, if available at all. You’d need to make special plans to get off at various places, if you’re not satisfied with simply waving at all the scenery as you roll past.
You’ll find the real America where you least expect it. Chinatown in San Francisco may be a little touristy (or not - I’ve never walked around there), but Los Angeles has a similar district not far away from Union Station, not far way from touristy/kitschy Olvera Street (the humble Mexican pueblo at the center of LA, don’t ya know), and not far away from Little Tokyo. Simply, the U.S. is a nation of immigrants, and those districts are neighborhoods are where immigrants and descendants have held on to a lot of old-country language and culture - and that’s America for you.
Union Station is also not far from Dodger Stadium. Major League sports are pretty commercialized, but if you go to a game, you’ll have an experience that is mostly not packaged for the international tourist.
There are local county or state fairs in most parts of the country - with a quirky combination of displays of local arts and crafts, agricultural displays, some decent scheduled music and shows, junk food of a truly junk nature, flea market merchandise, and carnival rides. Doesn’t get much more America than that. But all of anything here is just part of America.
It’s easy to see some America, nearly impossible to see all of it. Darned few Americans have.