You can live for years in a place and have the wrong impression about it. In fact, you can even be born in a place and leave there all your life and have and have the wrong impression about it. And you can also have historical reasons to disagree that don't apply to the general population (e.g. one's relatives being big-shots under the previous regime).
It's also easy to visit a place and just see what you wanted to see. Tourists traveling in utter misery do it all the time -- they have a great time, and people a few km from their hotel might be dying in slums.
I'm not saying that you did those things and I didn't. Just that measuring how many times more one has been there is not really relevant.