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Comment by holoduke | Hacker News Reader

Just wondering. But I hardly see any Americans in foreign countries. Seems they all have to work all the time. But in the many countries I travel through I generally see only Europeans , Asians and occasionally Australians. Hardly ever an American citizen.

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In USSR foreign travel was severely restricted even to soviet block countries.

Not only to the bloc countries, but even travel entirely within Russia was also restricted and bureaucratically regulated, requiring internal passports and visas for travel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport_system_in_the_Soviet_...

what was the rationale?

People were not supposed to see how people actually live in the "west" since quality of life was much higher even in other soviet block countries.

Not enough KGB officers to tail them.

There was multitude of reasons but the main ones were what you needed to have a good standing in the society[0] and the need to control every aspect of that society. People who would see a (even a little) better living could start asking questions. One could say that was a result of fear.

[0] the article provides one such example:

> Because of Dmitry’s active involvement in the communist youth groups, when he was 15, his school sent him to the Pioneer summer camp in Nordhausen near Erfurt in East Germany.

Probably luck or something about how you went that made you not interact with Americans. I met lots of Americans all over the world.

Also: https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/ST.INT.DPRT/rank...

The European numbers are probably a bit inflated due to Schengen and their closeness.

Most of USA citizens live pretty close to either Canada or Mexico.

Canada isn't much a vacation destination. Canadians travel South. Mexico is not very attractive to Americans right now due to crime.

There is way less crime in Cabo than in most of the US.

Americans all go to the same places (they tend to be very trendy / checklist oriented and go for small amounts of time), it’s really obvious as a French person in America, all my American colleagues go to places I never visit in France and vice versa.

We see a lot of american visitors in europe (basically all over the place). In a normal year.

Where? I mostly meet European tourists, as well, but that's probably because I only travel within Europe, which is where I live, so it's very easy to reach.

Americans take 93.0 Million international outbound trips each year

The gp observation is anecdotal, right?

In 2019 Germans made more international tourism trips than americans, despite having only a quarter of the population.

But the observations depend on where you travel and see other travellers, right? Go to nw mexico and I expect most tourists are from the us? Whereas mallorca is practically the southernmost german bundesland? And cyprus presents plenty of russians?

And comparing geography: Germany is geographically much smaller than the US, and in a place like Liechtenstein it is easy to make an international trip just to go shopping, even if you take the bike.

I wonder how this statistic would look if you'd stop counting Majorca and such as "international tourism" :)

Which is more than the population of Germany. These numbers must include Schegen movement otherwise the German are quite a touristy people. But including Schengen movements is like including inter-USA travel for Americans. I bet the US will rank much higher if we were to do that.

all very valid points I think the discussion was in the context of USSR

Source? Is this the number of passengers, aircraft movements, or something else? Also is it for American citizens or just people flying from US to non-US?

Also factor in that many people who do fly, fly multiple times a year.

If that 93m is individual passengers then you should discount it quite a bit to accommodate frequent fliers and overseas tourists returning home.

A google search snippet :) thats number of trips taken by US citizens Number of US citizens who traveled is 44 mil so about half of the number of trips.

At least Berlin is chock-full with US peeps.

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