The same situation for people visiting the US and they only ever go to some major US city like New York City or Los Angeles. Visit some place that's more than 100 miles from the ocean and isn't an urban downtown center.
All the Filipinos I meet here say if they could go to the US, the first place they would go is Las Vegas. I tell them, "that's the last place you should go in the US, it's just a tourist trap" but it took me a while to figure out that culturally, they want the tourist trap experience and would prefer Vegas, LA, or NYC to someplace like Bozeman MT, Estes Park CO, Beaufort SC, or <pick your most beautiful town in the US>.
I realise this is more to reinforce your self concept of contempt towards flyover country than out of any familiarity with either place but did you do five minutes research?
I’d happily spend a week in Denver. Looks pretty nice.
Yep, I've visited both Phoenix and Denver before to see friends. I would not recommend someone coming to the US visit them.
There's a nice cities that are forgotten by international tourists. New Orleans, Nashville, Chicago to name a few. But imo you can skip pretty much anything west of the Mississippi without missing out on much until you get to the coast. I'm not saying all those places suck, just that they're not tourism friendly.
Thing is, I've spent a lot of time in Colorado and there's a lot of beautiful places in the front range of the Rockies that are a short drive from Denver. So yeah, maybe not Denver the city but you're not far from Estes Park or Golden.
Oh for sure, but I don't think most people travel for nature (with a couple exceptions like the grand canyon, Mt Fuji, etc). There's amazing natural beauty all throughout north America.
The coast is what the US actually is. There's more people on the coasts than not. I truly don't understand where the idea that the coasts aren't the "real" US comes from. They're more real than some city nobody moves to in a state barely anyone lives in.
There's a big difference between going to NYC and LA vs visiting small towns close to coast.
And visiting a one-sided 50% is still missing a big portion. That's like saying that if you visit Germany/France/UK, you've seen all the europe. Nordics and East be damned because it's less than 50% of population so who cares. But then you end up with very skewed view of what europe is.
It's not 50%, it's well over 50%. there's no hard numbers on this, but I would guess it's 70-80%.It's more than most people who live in the US have seen of it.
The ones with a skewed view of the US are the ones that think small towns are representative of the country in any major way.
Sorry, but I hate this when people claim they „travelled europe“ but turns out they've seen the usual Paris/Rome/London/etc central areas. No, that means you visited those cities. Getting to know a region requires visiting diverse places.
I've known practically all my life that I never want to visit NYC. I would like to visit a city like Pittsburgh though, or Charleston, or Milwaukee (and other US cities and towns smaller than these three too).
Never attracted me and the aesthetics of the city and its surrounding immediate environment put me off. (I would still like to visit other parts of New York state though.) There's a weirdness to the city, at least how I see it from afar and, to be fair, I'm sure in a somewhat distorted manner through media. Movies and TV shows set there put me off (even Seinfeld which I enjoy). Only The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill and The Chosen by Chaim Potok have shown me some charm in the place, and the music of New York native Suzanne Vega.
I appreciate that it's an important city, has many cultural attractions and many people love the place. But for me it's too big, too chaotic and, as I say above, too weird, and I would prefer to stay away from it entirely.
