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More and more people are ditching carrier roaming in favor of travel eSIMs
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this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
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Yeah I find it hilarious when Europeans make all the jokes about Americans not traveling abroad when traveling through several countries for them is just driving from Miami to Disney World for us. And if that comparison is big to them, they'll lose their minds when they realize how big Africa is.
the travel distance is not the point in that criticism.
the "having to actually interact with different cultures" is the point. You can experience pretty much all climate and vacation hotspots without leaving the US. Which is cool an all. But that way people from the US are never really forced to interact with cultures that are not the US. Which is the reason for the "uncultured US tourists are never traveling abroad" stereotype
I do want to stipulate, that the US is full of different cultures. I don't want to make it seem like we don't have tons of shared culture here, but I feel its a disservice to ignore how many different cultures make the US
If you don't include American Indians, the cultural differences in the US are miniscule compared to the cultural differences within Europe.
For starters, most countries in Europe speak different languages.
Even, say, the cultural difference between Louisiana and California is less than the cultural difference between France and England (even though those countries are neighbhours), IMHO.
What you're probably seing as different cultures are probably just regional differences, same thing all of us think about our own countries, even people from small countries: it's basically the same effect as the one that leads Eskimos to have a lot more words for different kinds of ice and snow than anybody else - when you know something really well you can spot all the little differences which in your eyes are very clear and obvious yet for others are miniscule or even invisible - it looks a lot different to you because you're an expert in American English accents, the subtle indications of origin (not just regionals but also socio-economic) in the ways people dress, talk and interact in the US and so on.
Some decades ago I actually left my home country and went to live elsewhere in Europe (and ended up being over 2 decades abroad, in a couple of different countries) and one of my early realisations was how all those "differences" between people in my own country (which is Portugal, so quite small) that I found so important before having lived anywhere else were miniscule compared to the differences to people in another country.
I mean even native american nations within the US have cultural differences.
I wish I had a metric to go by, like number of shared common past times, language, legal structures, life goals, etc.
Like China Town vs a minnonite community vs the bayou vs rual Midwest vs New York vs Atlanta vs Islanders vs Indians on the Res vs Inuits vs Cuban Americans vs Mexican Americans is just a awesome variety to me. I've had the pleasure working with people in all those places and it really destroys the notion of "common sense" because depending how you are raised it really changes what you think is common.
You do have the melting pot effect multiplied by living in the era of mass communication and rapid transport too. So one person maybe surprised that you having handled a rattle snake or wrestled a gator or shot a machine gun or gone surfing, but you can talk about what just happened on game of thrones or the news.
I was really just talking about the dominant culture of a place, since once you include immigrant communities you do get a lot more variety but that's outside the vast majority of people's life experience in that country (there is a tendedency to self-segregate, to hide from the locals behaviours which would be seen by them as weird and to adapt the outside visible facets of that culture to the local environment - such as how Chinese food outside China isn't actually like in China or even the same in different countries) plus that kind of cultural breadth applies just the same in all reasonably wealthy nation that attract immigrants from all over.
(Mind you, it's really nice you appreciate the cultural variety that comes that way, just beware you're only seeing a reduced, locally-adjusted, set of it unless you actually know well - to the level of having been to their place and met their family - somebody from that cultural background).
Cultural differences are a lot more than those surface things, they're about stuff like expected behaviours (say, how people in Britain naturally form queues and are massivelly averse to giving criticism or how dutch people tend to arrange themselves in a circle when in a small get together at somebody's home and are direct to the point of sounding insulting to the previously mentioned Britons), shared sports preferences, business and political culture (adversarial, compromise, confrontation avoidance), even things like what TV shows one grew up with.
In my experience moving to another country, we have a ton of expectations we are totally unaware off when it comes to contact to others (even stupid stuff like how people behave whilst walking on the sidewalk and somebody else comes) and which we are totally unware that they are unwritten conventions because everybody around us is operating under the same conventions.
Mind you, as a turist one doesn't really notice the vast majority of those things when visiting a country.
If you're travelling to another country, you also get a different culture, architecture, cuisine,... even if it's "close by". That's the real criticism here that people don't get, if you're only travelling within the US, everything's pretty much the same, and you'll never expand your horizon much
Although the EU has some similarities to the US at the federal level, every country is its own sovereign nation with distinct rules and regulations, pricing, culture, language, cell phone providers, etc. It's very different than traveling between states in the US.