I guess many of us here on the forum share just one common dream: visiting the greatest country in the world. You can say what you want, you can have your own political, religious or cultural experiences and views – regardless of what you think, the US is still the number one nation and it will stay that way at least for the next couple of decades.
To cut a long story short, for those who have never been to the US, I’d like to invite you on an amazing virtual tour through the country. My friend Matthias and his girl fiend have recently traveled the US for a month on their own and Matthias has shot stunningly beautiful photos. He’s also created a very attractive blog albeit in German. Anyway, to embark on a breathtaking journey all you need to do is click on the link below and then click on the ‘slide show’ button further down the page: Amazing US photos!
Every time I browse through those photos I’m in awe. What about you?[YSaerTTEW443543]
Calico looks like an interesting little ghost town to visit. And I think mountains are always beautiful. The Sierra Nevada are no exception.
There are many other beautiful areas in the US. Did your friends also visit places in the middle of the country? How about the South? The Northeast? The Pacific Northwest?
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Amy, you should know that Germans traveling to the US go ONLY to New York, Chicago (which they call “chick-kagg-o”), San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Miami. (Sometimes they leave out San Francisco, Chicago and Miami.) For Germans, that is the entire US. You could tell them the Second Coming of Christ was taking place in Wyoming, and they’d never go there, because Wyoming isn’t on any TV shows. The Midwest doesn’t exist, the South doesn’t exist, nothing else exists.
I know, Jamie. My German friends and I have a standing joke: They’ll always poke fun at how Americans would only visit places like Munich and Neuschwanstein when they visited Germany, I’ll always point out that the Germans mainly only ever seemed to do a “Western Trip” in the US. It’s a shame, really. There are so many other interesting and beautiful places to visit.
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The ones that irritate me the most are those who get internships somewhere in the Midwest, and use the Midwest city as a base for going to the popular tourist cities. Almost every weekend they fly to some other place where Germans always go, and on the weekends they don’t, they stay in their apartments or go out drinking with other Germans. When they go home, they’ll still have no idea what’s in or around the city they were living in for half a year, and they may not even have spent an hour socializing with an American.
I have tried to convince Germans before to take a trip through the Dakotas and Wyoming, and they look at me in disbelief, thinking there can’t possibly be anything there to see. When I tell them what there is to see, they still look at me in disbelief.
To be fair, I have to say that I knew one German intern who spent every weekend exploring the local area, and spending days in towns even I wouldn’t see any point in going to. She said it was “interesting” to her to see “how people lived”. I suspect, though, that the real reason she did this was limited money.
Meanwhile, last week a Ukrainian student was gushing over a vacation she took, and she told me that Tennessee is not to be missed.
Hi, my name is Matthias and I read your replies about not visiting the untypical tourist spots. Of course, the main reason is the absence of time, not of interest. We planned our journey for 4 weeks and were only able to visit a few selected places. If we had had more time in the States, we would have been drawn possibly to visit places outside the main attraction areas like the counterparts of Munich and so on.
At first we wanted to get some general experience to become acquainted with the awesome country and people. Later, when we came back we wanted to refine our experiences. And we agree with the famous slogan by Coco Chanel that the art of life consists in leaving out.
And so I disagree with Jamie (K). There is of course more then L.A. and N.Y. There is also S.F., Wy., Bo. and so on, and also very important is that they are some of the nicest people in the world. That was the main reason why we visited the States. Maybe, one day i’ll get the chance to work in the States, I promise to spend more time in visiting all the places I had to leave out until now. But don’t be annoyed about that, it’s sensible to visit the well known places first.
What would you expect of places if you’ve never heard of them before? It’s also sensible not to know all one knows about people who live there.
Lots of the places in the western US are well worth visiting, and that’s naturally one reason those places get so many visitors. This is a huge country and that makes it even harder to see very much of it – even if you visit several times.
Did you happen to visit Gilroy when you were in California? That town calls itself “The Garlic Capital of the World”. Last I heard, they were still doing an annual “Garlic Festival”. You can smell the town 10 miles away. They sell all kinds of things made with garlic – including wine. :lol:
I still remember my very first visit to Germany. I had already met a lot of Germans who had worked here in the US for a few years. After they went back to Germany, I planned a trip to visit some of them there. They asked me what I wanted to see. I told them I was interested in “typical German” things. I wanted to see the places my German friends went to whenever they went out. But my German friends apparently couldn’t accept or understand the fact that I wanted to see the “real” Germany and not “tourist” Germany. They kept asking me things such as “Yes, but what do you want to see? There must be some place special you want to go.” After they’d said that to me a few times, I finally got a map of Germany and a travel catalog and randomly chose a few well-known places that seemed to be within a two or three hour drive from where they all lived. So, on my very first visit to Germany, I saw Munich and Neuschwanstein and Oberammergau. And, of course, I had to do everything very quickly because I was only able to take 9 days off from work. Typical American tourist. :lol: But, I also got to see some local, non-tourist things on that trip, and those were really interesting for me.
A few years after that first trip to Deutschland, I went to live and work there. I stayed for nearly 18 years. That gave me a tiny bit more time to investigate things and to get to know the “real” Germany. It also gave me enough time to learn a little bit of the Swabian dialect.
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Matthias, I think you and I have a very different concept of traveling, and even though I’m of German descent and seem very “German” in my thinking to other Americans, I would say that your approach to traveling is typical of that systematic German mentality.
On the first trip, you went to see the main tourist sites, and then you have the idea of later “refining” your knowledge of the US. Very systematic.
My attitude is that I’ve already heard about and seen all the pictures of the main tourist destinations, and I’d rather go see things that nobody talks about. I also would have four- or five-week vacations in Europe when I was younger, but I would stop in a train station bookstore, stick my nose in a tourist guide, and go see whatever my impulse led me to. And it was well worth it.
I saw the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz – very cool! In the art museum in Bonn, I saw a medieval German pieta that was a favorite image in my college art history books, but I never knew where it was. I got annoyed with the people in Paris, so after one day I went down to little tiny towns in southern France and it was full of amazing images and great people. The light was just like in an Impressionist painting – different from any light I’d seen in the US. Instead of going to Vienna, I went to Salzburg and had a similarly incredible “atmospheric” experience. There I also saw an amazing baroque churchyard, where the very masterful art on the graves were all images of death and decay, rather than of heaven. They even had sculpted skulls with worms crawling through them. Inside the church, there was a sculpted arm of a Franciscan sticking off the edge of the pulpit. What was it doing there? Why was it made? Who knows!
When Eastern Europe was communist, I went to Czechoslovakia and Romania just to see what I’d find, and it really opened my eyes.
I think the best advice I have ever gotten about travel was from a former college classmate of mine when I was in my 20s. She said, “If you go to Europe, make very detailed, meticulous plans before you go, and then throw them away when you step off the plane.”
and so on, and also very important is that they are some of the nicest people in the world. That was the main reason why we visited the States. Maybe, one day i’ll get the chance to work in the States, I promise to spend more time in visiting all the places I had to leave out until now. But don’t be annoyed about that, it’s sensible to visit the well known places first.