I went to the College of William & Mary, portions of which are also considered part of Colonial Williamsburg, the open-air, live action museum of colonial history.
Basically it meant that nothing in town was really oriented towards students; the town was very tourism oriented. On the flip side W&M has very active campus life, maybe for the same reason.
CW is kind of neat to wander around on a nice spring day, however, most of the time we ignored its existence/actively avoided it, because, you know, screaming unsupervised kids, stupid idiots in crowds, people who are grouchy because tired/dehydrated/sunburned/bored of history.
We’d get occasional tourists wandering into our classrooms very confused. Also amusing: sometimes seeing people in colonial garb at the safeway, if they came straight from work.
One thing that impressed me about Barcelona was walking past Roman walls which were just there.
The same effect happens in the US. My parents took us to a historical home in San Diego from the late 1800s. My wife was less than impressed because the house she grew up in, outside of Philadelphia, was older than that and not considered something special. Ditto for where we lived in NJ which was across the street from a wall that was associated with a church which was where the Hessians fled after the Battle of Trenton. (The church there then burned down and was rebuilt a few times.)
In college I lived in a dorm which was not old but which was an architectural landmark. Nothing special except some BU architectural class stopped by every so often and startled you as you were heading from the shower back to your room. And here in Silicon Valley the random tour bus goes past looking at the HQs of well known companies.
There are anecdotes floating around the US here about European tourists (frequently Dutch) who expect to rent a car in New York and take a day trip to see the Grand Canyon (or, alternately, they plan on casually driving all the way to Los Angeles). It’s over two thousand miles, including hundreds of seemingly endless wilderness desert that is often scorchingly hot and dry during the day. Bring lots of water. I’m so seriously you guys. We don’t enjoy scraping dead European tourists off the parched pavement.
The mistake, of course, is based on average distances in Europe versus the US. In Europe, you can be in the next country over in a few hours. Over here, you can drive for three days straight and still have several days of Still America head of you.
In that respect, I’d liken Europe to New England. In the western US, you might not leave the state even after a drive of several hours. But in the northeastern US, you might cross two or three states in a drive of several hours.
That’s something that I noticed when I moved from CA to MA. It’s weird seeing signs directing me to multiple states from just a couple of miles where I live.
I’ve lived inside the Beltway and, yeah, cool to look at but it becomes just background. I did have some buddies who visited once and had never been to DC, they were holding up the bills in their wallets and comparing them to the White House and the Lincoln Memorial. Found that amusing.
I’ve also lived in Gettysburg and regularly rode my bike through the battlefield, but it also becomes just background after you’ve done it several times and summer crowds can be a hassle when you’re just trying to get the exercise. Still, it makes you think about how many people were killed there when you look over the fields where, say, Pickett’s Charge took place.
Former New Englander here, now living in central Europe. For 9 years I lived in an apartment in a town with Roman origins and always wondered whether there might be Roman ruins under the building. Well, a few years after we moved out they tore down the apartment building, and sure enough, found… Roman ruins.
I am so happy I was able to visit Gettysburg last summer. It was only for a couple of hours, so I want to go back and spend more time, but even then it blew my mind. I’ve read the books, seen the movies, looked at maps, but it’s entirely different to stand at the Angle and look over at the trees where Longstreet’s men stood and think, “fuck that noise.”
Americans have the same problems estimating distances anywhere outside of America. They’re not somehow specially attuned to estimating travel times they aren’t familiar with.
I had to go to Hangzhou in China the year before last, and got saddled with a side trip to Xinxiang “because you’ll be right nearby, anyway”. Sure, a 600 mile detour in China is “nearby”. That’s like visiting Washington DC and dropping by Chicago since they’re so close. So instead of sending someone from our Beijing office on an overnight trip, I added 4 extra days to mine.
It’s also quite common in the mid-Atlantic states too. I remember one trip where I was in VA, DC (technically a territory, but hey), MD, DE, and NJ all in the same day. PA is close enough that you could very easily add it too in an hour or so if you wanted to. If you really want to, you can add Harper’s Ferry, WV in another two hours. It’s surprisingly close to DC. State borders are weird here.
You can take a bullet train from Beijing to Xinxiang, so it’s an easy overnight. Hangzhou to Xinxiang, it’s a drive, trainride, and puddle-jumper flight; much longer. But Americans expect it’s as easily accessed from anywhere.
I grew up around DC and know what you mean. Do you ever have to take visiting relatives around touristing? Because I got sort of tired of the Air and Space Museum thanks to this. Which was remarkable considering that I was a teenaged boy.
Now days I work about a mile from Edison and Fords winter homes and sometimes walk down there for lunch. Just a lot of old people and bored kids saying, “Wow, look at that tree!” in various languages.
In Spain sometimes it seems like you can’t plant a rosebush without finding some ruins. There’s places where the basic architectural features have been the same since pre-Roman times (“rowhouses” where each house is four rooms built atop each other: garage/stable/store, kitchen, bedrooms); tiny places that have the consideration of “cities” by reason of having been important way back when. The town where I grew up is more famous for its artichokes, lettuces and asparagus than for anything else, yet it has a 13th-century cathedral that used to be mosque and sinagogue symultaneously (different entrances but you could walk from each part of the building to the other two), some still-standing medieval and Renaissance palaces, a Visigothic church… and of course, yeah, Roman walls under several stages of later walls under the street called “of the Wall”.
And if you spend some time in Barcelona, you’ll be likely to learn a lot of ways to try to name the most popular monuments by gestures
