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How far do you currently live from the town where you grew up?
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The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
-- Mark Twain
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday January 01, @04:34PM (18 children)
I never understood the travel fetish because I moved a modest distance away for uni and also traveled the country for the Army, and as part of that I'd get to visit offbase or enroute quite a bit, got to travel for work all over. I've seen a lot of the USA, urban and rural, sat in a lot of little bars, wandered a lot of streets.
It's fun to see something new but I don't get the fetish that its "mind expanding" to talk to people in a different timezone or where its slightly warmer or colder.
They grew up watching the same TV shows on the same networks, reading the same books in school, listening to the same music on the radio, sometimes the same or very similar church, got the same professional career certifications, use the same tools at work. Now in their daily life they shop at the same nationwide chains and eat at the same nationwide chains. Most people are the same most of the time from NYC to Chicago to LA. Then you go visit Ireland and turn on the TV and they broadcast more American crap TV than american stations broadcast BBC imports. In the internet era its somehow 1000x worse. But dude, dude, you don't understand the climate is slightly different and its a different timezone its just soooo exotic. Dude you don't get it the corn imported from Iowa tastes so different and exotic when eaten off a plate in this city vs back home, and they haven't invented written language yet so you could never have food like this back home. Dude you don't get it, when a restaurant microwaves a package of food trucked in from Sysco Inc in LA it tastes SO different and exotic compared to when they microwave a package of food trucked in from Sysco Inc back home in Chicago its just so exotic and mind opening and the people who don't like it or can't tell the difference are just poor ignorant rubes.
Travel to experience culture is the same as audiophiles claiming writing a green marker around the perimeter of an audio cd changes the sound so much dude you just don't get it if you're not playing along with us let me sell you a nice $250 green marker that totally makes the bits sound richer and fuller and its just so culturally enriching and I guess people who can't hear the difference are ignorant deaf hillbillies who just fell off the turnip truck, not at all like us people who buy $250 green markers.
Architectural differences are nifty but that's been obliterated by the shared uniculture. A mcmansion in Florida is just as boring as a mcmansion in Seattle.
I know enough geology from my investing and engineering "hobby interests" that I like seeing stuff, but the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Is it really worth the $$$ to see the Permian Basin with my own eyes? Naah. Its still gonna be there even if I don't visit. Its not "just oil" there's a lot of halite mining going on too. I wonder about oil contamination of the mined salt; but I won't learn anything from visiting and merely looking at the surface, I would learn more about that from research, probably online.
On a somewhat separate topic when the kids were really little its nice living "a short drive" from the grandparents; they certainly like the grandkids, and I must have saved a cheap car's worth of babysitting costs over the kids lifetimes. I don't think I'd like the 1980s "everybody loves raymond" TV show thing where they live across the street but "next town over" or "other side of city" is just about right...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01, @06:14PM
There's some scientific evidence that traveling can be mind expanding for London cab drivers but not bus drivers, so maybe if you take new routes or plan the routes? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17024677/ [nih.gov]
😉
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01, @08:18PM
Well, this certainly explains the VLM unrecondite reactionary racism and fascist support! Like khallow, he is uneducable, not because of any disability, but from a profound lack of intellectual curiosity. Almost Trump/Bush-ishly so. (Note for janrinok the flagger, this is not a personal attack, just a neutral observation of the self-report.)
(Score: 2, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Friday January 02, @02:11AM (3 children)
If you're eating Sysco prepackaged meals, you've seriously missed out on a lot. During my truck driving days, I had many restaurants around the country marked in my atlas. Of course, said restaurants had to be accessible to 18-wheelers, so I missed a lot of great restaurants. Passing through Connecticut meant a stop at a fantastic Greek restaurant. Maine has little lobster restaurants everywhere you look, some better than others. I had a half dozen Mexican restaurants along the border that were outstanding. Seafood restaurants along the Gulf Coast, Florida, and northward into the Carolinas. Genuine Southern cooking in every state from Kentucky, on down south. Polski in Pennsylvania and north of Chicago. Oh, New Jersey - there's a pizza place on the edge of Trenton that NOBODY can compete with - I ordered their "White Pizza" more often than not. And, reservation eating? Native Americans just don't do Sysco except at the casinos.
And, I spent a great morning in a BBQ in Chicago. About 2:00 AM, my truck was unloaded, and I headed out to find a restaurant still open, that I could park at. I found it, walked in the front door and scanned, walked past the bar into the rear bar you might say. I can't remember his name now, but Admiral Richard E. Byrd's former steward was running the BBQ and restaurant. I only figured that out, because there was a picture of the admiral giving an award to a young man behind the bar. I looked at the old guy - same cheeks, same forehead, same nose, same same everything, just weathered. We swapped stories about the admiral and the ship named for the admiral for hours! And, the BBQ was delicious! No Sysco crap served in that little BBQ!
ICE is having a Pretti Good season.
(Score: 2) by ese002 on Saturday January 03, @01:51AM (11 children)
You didn't travel far enough or go anywhere different enough. Leave the USA. See Africa, India, and Thailand. Don't confined yourself to Americanised hotels either. Eat and sleep where the locals do. Talk to the locals. Even if you don't speak the local language, many people the world over speak English and can show you perspectives you may not have considered or even known were possible.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday January 03, @02:54PM (9 children)
LOL it doesn't work so you need to do it more, and the most important part is it has to be performative and expensive. Naaah.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04, @09:59PM
Let's try it this way, what are experiences you do enjoy or that you find provide for the possibility of personal growth, new cultural experiences, and retrospective life satisfaction?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04, @11:20PM (3 children)
You gotta have an open mind for it to work.