What a depressing concept. Totally false, of course. Travel enriches my life more than anything else - engaging different cultures, experiencing the food, the changes in daily patterns, the incredible sites, the memories it leaves me with.
The thing I miss most about this bloody lockdown is not being able to travel.
Well, Europe isn’t homogenous in this regard - prices vary wildly between, say, Paris/London and a small town in Southern Italy. And when I was younger, I’d agree that the US felt ‘cheap’ in many regards.
But my last two trips to the US (California and Florida) have been the most expensive holidays I’ve ever taken. Value of the dollar to the pound doesn’t help, but the cost of things like hotels and dining out I have found astronomical, even compared to London.
Other than a trip through Canada as a child, my first trip abroad as an adult was to Vietnam in 1968. Literally everything was shocking, surprising and fascinating, not to mention somewhat horrifying.
:smack:
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It
On my first trip to Toronto I was surprised by the lack of ice in soft drinks, the French everywhere, the variety of flavored potato chips, and the availability of public transit. My first trip to Tokyo surprised me with… pretty much everything. Leaving our keys at the front desk of the hotel, getting used to walking on the left instead of the right, how green the city was, and how old the city was - not just burial sites and temples, but how much of the city looked as if it had been built in the 60s and 70s and just sort of left that way. No tipping in the restaurants. Tiny shops, tiny streets, tiny vehicles, tiny bars, all stacked on top of each other. Biking on the sidewalks! Smoking in restaurants! That last one is going away, apparently.
In Central and Eastern Europe, quite a lot. I mean, things have changed and they’ve normalized a bit, but when I was living in Hungary in the 90s and early 2000s, most things were about 1/3 of the price of the US. (Clothes were an odd exception: that was cheaper in the US if you went to places like Old Navy and Marshall’s). Head over to Transylvania and, holy crap, did things get cheap there. It was comparable to Poland in the 80s, where five bucks could get you dinner for four.
Now, the parts of Western Europe I’ve been to during that time, yes, in general they have been more expensive than the States. But I still remember getting decent wine in Paris was cheaper than in the US.
My father was a college professor but not well-paid so most of our vacations involved us going with him to some conference or another. (So the university would pay for his airfare, he’d cash that in and drive instead.) We were on our way to Montreal on one of these trips and got hopelessly lost in rural Quebec. We stopped at a farmhouse where only French was spoken, so my father pushed my brother in front, as he was in something like fifth grade at the time and French language was one of the classes. It did not go well, but eventually we must have made it to Montreal and then back home.
On a much later business trip to Bristol in the UK, one of the people in the office was going to Tesco to pick up her lunch so I went along to get something for myself. I was amused to find the shopping carts had four steerable wheels (as opposed to only the front two as in most American stores, although IKEA carts have the four steerable wheels). And just wandering around the supermarket was interesting just to see what was available. From then on, I try to visit a supermarket in whichever foreign country I’m in.
This is what I was going to say; I first encountered it in Germany in 1983 or so.
The only difference is that we didn’t get any kind of ID card or anything to show to the desk clerk. You would just go up to the desk, tell them your room number, and they would hand you the key. I don’t think I ever needed to show any ID of any kind.
Seems pretty unsafe, now that I think about it.
The first time I went abroad I went to Italy for my job around 1990. I rented a Fiat Uno and stayed in a little village in the south called Martina Franca. Each day I drove to the office in Tàranto. The first day, on a rural road I stopped for a red light. The car behind me starting blowing his horn at me, presumably because there was no other traffic. I was really conflicted about what to do, but I went through the light and the guy followed me through.
I asked an Italian at the office about this. She half-jokingly said, “In Italy, we think the red light is just a suggestion.”
I have been to Italy about six times and this sort of thing never occurred again. I still stop at all red lights.
I’ve been to Paris quite a few times; been to London once. I’ve lived in Northern Italy and Germany. In fact, I currently live in Germany (for the second time). I understand completely that prices vary wildly. It’s just been my experience, that in general, prices are higher in Europe.
I was last in Hungary around 2011. I don’t remember it being particularly inexpensive. Same with Poland, which I visited last Fall. I spent a month in Zagreb, Croatia recently, and even there the prices were not appreciably low.
You’re absolutely right about Romania, though. And in fact, prices in Ukraine are even lower! That’s completely my fault for not even considering those countries. When I think of “Europe”, I don’t immediately think of Eastern Europe and former Soviet Block countries–really, anything east of Czech/Poland/Austria (except Greece). Strange, considering I’ve been all over the continent. Eastern Europe and Europe, to me, are as distinct as Asia and Southeast Asia. But I admit, that’s my own mental hangup.
My first trip abroad was to the UK- 2 weeks, about 2/3 of which was in Scotland.
The first thing that startled me was actually that it was so much LESS foreign than I had expected. For some reason, I was expecting to share a language and not much else. But in reality, the US and UK share a LOT more cultural history than I had really expected on a day-to-day basis, and I felt much more comfortable.
The second is more embarrassing as an American, because it made me confront my inherent racism. One day in Aberdeen, I returned to my hotel room and the cleaning lady was still working. A white, red-haired, blue-eyed middle aged cleaning lady. My first reaction was (it stuck hard enough in my mind so that I recall my inner monologue) to say “Oh no, honey. Get up off the floor- you shouldn’t be doing that.” Then I realized that I was in Scotland, and that yes, that was her job, and that growing up in Texas, I was so conditioned to seeing Hispanic or Black women doing those sorts of jobs, that my first reaction was that a white lady shouldn’t be doing that job.
Really opened my eyes to preconceived notions about race and role, let me tell you.
I was kind of surprised that 90% of the cars on Okinawa were white.
I’ve been to Europe many times over the years but had encountered this one for the first time last year outside of Paris.
We were driving on the expressway leading into the city and traffic was at a standstill. I was quite surprised to see that motorcyclists were permitted to drive in between the cars in the lanes located furthest left. The drivers of the cars allowed it and were giving a wider than usual space between lanes and the motorcycles formed a steady stream that breezed right through the stopped traffic.
You definitely can’t do that here and I’m not sure it’s allowed anywhere in the US.
That actually is allowed in California. The term for it is “lane splitting”. It surprised me the first time I encountered it after I moved here, too.
Yeah … no. In my experience, people who say stuff like this are people whose judgment can’t be trusted.
Until I moved to Brazil in the early 90’s I had no idea what abject poverty looked like. No photographs can do justice to a 360 degree view and the sounds and smells that go along with it. Makes US poverty look like a walk in the park.
I had stuff stolen the first day I got there, my watch torn right off my wrist a few weeks later, and I saw my first and only gunshot homicide victim within a year. That was pretty shocking.
You would probably never experience this if you went on vacation there. The beaches and hotels that line them are as first world as can be. You have to get back several blocks before it gradually degrades, until you run into places that are essentially mud shacks with tin roofs, and honestly I wouldn’t recommend it. I have no desire to go back there, frolicking around while knowing that exists.
Save for the ubiquity of turquoise, that was exactly my experience driving into Quebec from Vermont. Small towns, long two-lane county highways, isolated farms.
What really struck me was how flat it was. Felt like there wasn’t a single level road in the whole of Vermont, but the mountains stopped right at the border, as if they weren’t allowed into Canada without passports. One minute, we’re driving through Yankee West Virginia; cross the border and we’re suddenly in eastern North Carolina.
The thing that blew my mind visiting the U.S. as a young kid – using our neighbour’s outdoor pool on Christmas Day.
My trips to Europe (aside from Paris) didn’t flabbergast me. Amsterdam reminded me of San Francisco in the late 60’s. Parts of London, I’m told, have a character not dissimilar to parts of New York. Squat toilets were annoying: Was it rude when I said, asked by Parisian co-workers why I was making a trip to the States, that I needed to take a poo? 
Southeast Asia is different. This vivid quote from Graham Greene (where from? It’s in the Quiet American movie-script but not in the novel.) reminds me vaguely of my first reactions:
An incident in one of my early trips to Bangkok made a striking impression on me. Slip through a hole in the fence on Sukhumwit Soi 22 and find yourself in a vast slum with many hundreds of very cheap (pasteboard?) hovels, with no paths for motorcycles let alone cars. I couldn’t walk around there without getting muddy. Yet people emerge through the hole in the fence from the slum onto the Soi 22 sidewalk perfectly groomed for work, with spotless clothes carefully ironed.
I was last there in 2017 and while it was nowhere near as inexpensive as in the late 90s/early 00s, for an American, with the exchange rate at the time, it was still pretty good. Like $2-$3 for a half liter of beer (where in the US it’s more typically about $5 a pint). Or here’s a menu from 2017 of one of my favorite middle-to-slightly upscale restaurants in Budapest. The beef tenderloin with goose liver, mushroom, croquettes in demi-glace are 4990 forint, which translates to $15 today.(ETA: Looks like in 2017, it would have been closer to $17-$18 at that exchange rate.) That would be at least $30-40 here in Chicago.