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Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

Frankly world travel has made me happier to live where I am.

I think the Americans also deserve some slack for lack of international travel. I really think its out of touch. The rest of the world is far away and its not cheap to travel. $1500 isnt going to pay for many nights in a hotel either. Its a lot to ask for your average person, and very difficult if you have a family. Of course this is less true for your typical hacker news reader who has a good salary, lives in a large city (cheaper flights) and is less likely to have a family (younger and lower birth rates on top of that).

Compare 3 or 4 international flight tickets to enough gas for 8 hours which will get you to fairly different climate and culture and its a no brainer.

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Not flying is one thing, but so many US-Americans are scared of going into an actually different culture - somewhere where they speak a different language and watch different TV. A lot of people - not everyone, but a lot - could easily reach somewhere like that on that 8 hour road trip, but they won't, and they'll all try and talk about how it's "oh there's so much variety in the US I don't need to" which is just such a transparent lie.

> somewhere where they speak a different language and watch different TV

It is possible to get a little taste of this, gratis, merely by surfing YouTube in languages (and especially scripts) different from one's own.

American workers barely get any vacation and they probably don't want to burn what little they have on flight time. Mexico is a very popular and that's a different culture and language.

The concept of Americans being overworked and underpaid is simply incorrect. US PPP-adjusted median disposable income is $46,600/year. Only Luxembourg has higher amounts of disposable income. The average American works 1,765 hours per year, the same as New Zealand.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

Disposable income is income minus taxes. That money drops fast when you factor in America's extremely high rent, the fact most Americans need a car+insurance+gas, many pay for their own health care, and other various fees. Plus people who do have some savings are often paranoid and save it because they know car trouble or one trip to the doctor will financially ruin them.

Flat numerical values alone don't tell the full story. It's like assuming Irish are all rich because of their colossal GDP--and not considering that it's due to companies shuffling money around.

Average health insurance cost in the US is $5,250 per year, which would put disposable income just below Norway. The median American would need an extra $15,000 in expenses each year to have less spending money than the median German. To get down to UK or Italy levels of disposable income, the median American would need an extra $20,000/year in expenses. Cars, housing, and health insurance aren't that expensive, especially for the median American.

Typical Americans really are wealthier than typical people in other developed countries. As you said, they own cars (which tend to be bigger and more expensive than typical cars elsewhere). They also tend to have bigger houses with more amenities (air conditioning, dishwasher, clothes washer/dryer, kitchen island, etc). Some may consider these uses of wealth to be gauche or indicative of something unhealthy about American way of life, but that doesn't change the fact that they are uses of wealth.

And by spending money on bigger, expensive cars and bigger, expensive amenities... they end up with less money to spend on travel. Plus there's the fact Americans need to spend more on flights and spend more time to visit Asia or Europe than people in those respective regions do.

You can take a taxi and eat at restaurants daily absolutely anywhere in Asia with a fraction of the median US salary. The cost of many things is simply higher in the US. You can get paid $20 an hour, but if a basic sandwich costs $15, you're not saving as much as someone who gets paid $10 and can buy $2 sandwiches. But on paper, the person making $20/hour has tremendously higher disposable income.

So, where are you going next August?

In April I’m going on a 10 day cruise through the Caribbean, then spending some time in Puerto Rico.

In August people will be traveling to me, as I’m getting married. We’re not yet sure where we’ll go honeymooning.

congratulations!

> which is just such a transparent lie

Let's give it a generous read, though. Your life will be more interesting, in all likelihood, if you travel a lot (I can see a few narrow exceptions, but not the point). However.

If you don't leave the US, you are limited to one absolutely huge country that has pretty much every kind of subtropical to alpine climate, landscape, etc., that you can imagine. You don't need a passport to pick up and go whenever you like, and - and this really mattered in the immediate post-COVID world - they can't keep you from coming back home. I took my first ever trip to Hawaii right after they opened back up. It wasn't my first choice of destination - it's a long way from me, it's very expensive once you're there, even compared to the Caribbean - but since it's part of the US, I couldn't get stuck there the way I could in Mexico or the Caribbean. A lot of those resorts, especially in purpose-built tourist areas like Cancun or Cabo, were offering free accomodation if you failed your COVID test and had to wait out a quarantine. I'm sure it wasn't going to be the same room you had booked for your stay, but they were desperate to get the money flowing back in.

Going to Europe or Asia is a whole other thing. Not only is the culture different, but a lot of little details that might not be apparent at first glance. For someone who's used to being self-sufficient and just figuring it out, not so scary - but if you really don't know any of the local language, it's not trivial. I'd love to go to Japan, for example, but it's a long damned way, you can't even read a lot of the signs, and Japanese addresses are... uniquely formed. I'd feel like I had wasted a lot of money if I just went there and winged it, whereas in Europe I'm comfortable with (written) Spanish, Portuguese, and French, at least at the level you need to figure things out roughly. So now I need to find a guide or guides that I can hire for a week or two, pay for all their expenses as well as their salary, and at least occasionally navigate a sensible but immense transit system with all sorts of unusual quirks.

I could probably figure something out using Google Translate and have a good time - on my own. With my wife in tow, that's just not going to happen. She has a terrible sense of direction and has needed me to walk her three or four blocks pointing out landmarks along the way just to make sure she could get to the nearest pharmacy. There's no way she would have done the kind of trips I did when young, where I landed with no cell phone, no hotel reservations, and no particular plan, all alone.

> You don't need a passport to pick up and go whenever you like, and - and this really mattered in the immediate post-COVID world - they can't keep you from coming back home.

If you're a US citizen you can't be denied entry to the US; if you were going to another continent thne theoretically you could worry about a scenario where they ground all flights (even though they didn't do that at the height of Covid), but even post-Covid it's pretty implausible that they'd fully close the border with Canada or Mexico (and I believe you don't even need a passport?).

> I'd love to go to Japan, for example, but it's a long damned way, you can't even read a lot of the signs, and Japanese addresses are... uniquely formed. I'd feel like I had wasted a lot of money if I just went there and winged it...So now I need to find a guide or guides that I can hire for a week or two, pay for all their expenses as well as their salary,

This mentality is just utterly bizarre to me.

> She has a terrible sense of direction and has needed me to walk her three or four blocks pointing out landmarks along the way just to make sure she could get to the nearest pharmacy. There's no way she would have done the kind of trips I did when young, where I landed with no cell phone, no hotel reservations, and no particular plan, all alone.

You're talking like this is some innate property rather than lack of effort and practice.

>This mentality is just utterly bizarre to me.

It is bizarre, especially the stuff about the addresses. Has the OP never heard of Google Maps? You just point it where you want to go and it tells you how to get there. No one in Japan cares about addresses; the only thing those are really important for is addressing your mail.

But I don't think his mentality is unusual for Americans who contemplate foreign travel. They really do think they need to hire a tour guide for a week to get around in a foreign country.

> They really do think they need to hire a tour guide for a week to get around in a foreign country.

TBF I've done single day small tour groups with local guides, and when the guide is good, the experience has been amazing.

Doing it first day in Mexico City was actually super useful to get myself orientated and to get a good overview of the mass transit system there, and also to get a list of other things I should do.

Plenty of people from all around the world go on "tour bus" types of tours though, I'd say that before Google Maps and online resources, such tours were likely more popular. You still see huge tour groups at any popular destination, oftentimes grouped together by nationality.

I've done two-week trips of Central Europe, the UK and Ireland, southern Spain and Portugal, and the Low Countries/Normandy with no guides (except for local city guides to see interesting bits of history) and no assistance - land, rent car, drive to hotels, drive between cities, usually change itinerary partway through.

So I'm not averse to doing things that way. And I'm not doing some &^#$Q@ bus tour. But if you want to see the countryside and stay in an onsen* and all that, it's not quite as simple as "someone has good English". I've encountered places in all those where nobody around spoke good English, and we made do in another language and Google Translate. Assuming that, of course, you have good cell service - which was a problem when I tried to drive into a restricted area of old town Krakow. The police officer was polite and helpful, but we didn't share a language and cell service was slooooooow. And Google Maps was absolutely dead wrong about routing and cost me an hour of driving around in a circle (it was rush hour, so traffic, and it though certain roads were connected when they were not - this was only five or six years ago, so not ancient history). My hotel was in that area, so they let me through.

My concerns may be overblown, but they're not arising out of some complete ignorance of how the world works.

It just seems like a real perfect-is-the-enemy-of-good way of approaching it. Going to Japan would take a lot of money, so you need to spend a lot more money on a guide (does that really get you more bang for your buck than accepting that you might occasionally lose a few hours to getting lost)? You want authentic experiences that you feel would be too risky without a guide, so you'll hire a guide (never mind that that will itself destroy the authenticity of those experiences)? All of that is too expensive, so you won't go at all? I'm hardly a fan of the bus tours, but it sounds like at the end of the day they'll see a lot more of Japan than you.

When I first traveled to Japan as a tourist, it was dirt cheap. The only expensive thing was the airfare, though the shinkansen tickets I guess weren't that cheap, but compared to rental car prices in the US they actually were. Everything else was really cheap. But I didn't travel like an entitled American, and certainly didn't hire a guide; how ridiculous. If you need a guide to get around a safe, highly-developed country in the age of Google Maps and Google Translate, then maybe you should stick to bus tours, but still that's not a horrible way to travel I think if you need hand-holding. They take you to all the best tourist spots and arrange things for you; the main problem is you're surrounded by people just like you and don't have to actually interact with the locals and figure out how to get around on your own, and end up going to the places the tour group wants to go instead of places you want to go.

A US citizen cannot ultimately be denied entry, but they can be denied permission to board the plane to get there if it's an international flight.

And given that I can't go back to when she was 18 and train her how to do these things, it's just one of those things that I have to accept and deal with. Not all fights are worth having, even if you're in the right.

If you find it bizarre, well, so be it. It reflects certain constraints on my life. Maybe some of them are really silly, but if I'm going to Japan, I don't want to spend my entire time in major cities, and this is by far the most direct route to my goal.

> but a lot of little details that might not be apparent at first glance

That's the basic difference between domestic and foreign travel, isn't it?

You can go to the most isolated towns on earth and you'll find people who speak English working in nearly any facility. You'll find signs in English even when you're in the extremely rare case where nobody is speaking up and volunteering to help you in English. Needing to read the language before traveling is putting the cart before the horse. The vast majority of people don't get good at a language or even bother learning fundamentals until they're in a situation or region where the language is used.

I've traveled with people who are (forgive me for the bad wording) equally as easily confused as your wife, if not worse, and into the middle of jungles and villages of far off places. In the 19th century this would've been extremely difficult and dangerous. In the 21st century, you're honestly probably safer wandering around cluelessly in more of the world than you are in the US.

And I never felt like I was missing out by not being able to read a random thing in a language I don't know. Tourist locations, especially places like museums and historical sites, will almost always have full English translations of whatever the local language is.

There's no "winging" it. You can plan for a country even when you don't know the language. Just save locations on google maps and go.

When I was a young hacker, around 2002, I went for a couple weeks hike in the Greek mountains north of Delphi with little more than a map and a backpack. I wandered through a lot of tiny villages, slowly disappearing as the youth all moved to the cities. Each place o would show up and get led to The One Who Speaks English, and then have a truly unique conversation.

In one village the English speaker was an American oil drilling engineer who changed course to become a philosophy professor, and then changed course again to live out his retirement in this tiny Greek mountain town. I really regret not staying longer there.

In the next town, the English speaker was a guy who had left 30 years ago to work in the Canadian fishing industry, and only returned a week previously. He translated for a lot of the family elders, who were reaaally old and remembered doing the yearly pilgrimage on foot through the mountain passes.

(Then I came to a town and chatted with a random person... When I described where I had been and where I was going, she crossed herself and begged me to turn back! Felt like a scene from a Dracula knock off...)

And finally, I came to a very remote village, where I was housed by an Canadian woman who had lived in the village for like sixty years and forgotten all of her English! (Which was communicated through a combination of artifacts, drawing, and pantomime.)

Which is to say, you've gotta get real far off the beaten path to find places where no one speaks English. And even then, people are helpful and fascinating.

I just took my first trip to Japan, and found it amazingly easy to get by. There is actually a lot of English signage, but also just great design of public infrastructure which makes everything kinds easy.

(For example, one train transfer that I thought seemed dicey actually had enough time built in to figure out an ongoing ticket with the ticket both, get to the platform, and then wait around for twenty minutes explaining the local train's car numbering system to other tourists who hadn't figured it out yet.)

There's a lot of understanding and tolerance of difference, in Japan in particular. You are a guest. Putting in some effort to learn how to do things is respectful, and there's a lot of tolerance for getting things not quite right of you're giving it an honest shot.

I've lived a lot of places: US, Hungary, Kenya, and visited a lot more. if you approach the world with an open heart and good intentions, people will tend meet you there.

> I'd love to go to Japan, for example, but it's a long damned way, you can't even read a lot of the signs, and Japanese addresses are... uniquely formed.

Japan caters very well to American tourists. Plenty of menus are in English, signs to anyplace you need to go will have romanized letters, and on top of that your phone will happily translate a decent % of written text.

Heck lots of countries have English signs all over the place. Since a large % of people with money know English, it has become tourist language of sorts.

> She has a terrible sense of direction and has needed me to walk her three or four blocks pointing out landmarks along the way just to make sure she could get to the nearest pharmacy.

Yeah my wife is the same way, we did just fine in Japan. We stuck together, and as a reminder, phones have maps on them, maps that let you live stream your location to other people. Maps that give turn by turn directions so you can find someone if you get separated.

> So now I need to find a guide or guides that I can hire for a week or two, pay for all their expenses as well as their salary, and at least occasionally navigate a sensible but immense transit system with all sorts of unusual quirks.

No, you just go to Japan and eat really damn good food. This is particularly easy in Japan since restaurants there have 3d sculpted models of the dishes they serve out front. Plenty of restaurants have digital ordering kiosks (and they've had them long before the US did), and you just tap on the picture of the dish that looks yummy. It is pretty damn easy. For the ones that don't have kiosks, you can just point at the miniature of whatever dish you want.

Japan gets over a million and a half visitors from the US every year. Capitalism being what it is, plenty of services have sprung up to ensure tourists who can afford a $2k flight have ways to spend the rest of their disposable income.

I left America a decade ago and, luckily, the country I ended up in--the first time I ever went outside the US even--turned out to be much better than anywhere I lived in the US. A lot of my life anxiety vanished the moment I walked off the plane and I immediately knew I'd arrived in the place I was meant to be. Despite struggles involving learning the language, cultural differences, and lifestyle changes, the stress was and is miniscule compared to the day to day in the US.

I've traveled a lot since then. A lot of the countries I've visited were other places I'd considered moving, but I immediately knew they weren't for me. They reassured me that I really did find the perfect place to call my home. I've also found some places that I had zero expectations for that were almost as comfortable as where I live now. But generally, no matter where I go, I feel better about the home I've made for myself. Traveling is (mostly) fun, but I'm always glad to come home.

>$1500 isnt going to pay for many nights in a hotel either.

You're right: $1500 will only get you a few nights at an American hotel chain like Hilton here in Japan ($400/night at Hilton Tokyo). If you use local hotels, you could spend a month here for that much money, but Americans can't stay at non-American hotels, just like they can't go anywhere on public transit and need to rent a huge SUV to drive everywhere.

It's extremely expensive for Americans to travel internationally, because they simply can't live and travel like the locals, and need to do everything like they're back in America.

I've never understood why Americans keep insisting that travel is expensive. Of course it can be expensive if you choose to make it expensive, but it doesn't have to be.

When I was a kid in Finland in the 80s and 90s, families often took vacations in the Mediterranean and the Canary Islands. It was affordable enough even to many lower middle class families. Those were not particularly close destinations. The distances were comparable to Americans flying to the Caribbean.

Cultural habits are probably the real reason. Finns travel internationally because Finns travel internationally. Americans do it less often because Americans do it less often.

Are Finnish families flying to the Mediterranean and the Canary Islands for culture or for a beach vacation? I'm guessing the latter. And to replicate this, Americans don't need to leave the US - they can fly to south Florida any time of year, and a bunch of other places like California during the summer.

Americans travel a bunch, and I'm not convinced they travel shorter distances than Europeans. It's just because the country's so big, it's not international.

Everyone has their own reasons, but most people are pretty curious. If you go to a faraway place and have the free time, you are probably going to spend at least a few days exploring what's out there.

Same, that is the one thing traveling did for me. After seeing and living in different countries i just have a new found appreciation and calmness to where from now. It’s like something i can’t describe but i just feel so comfortable and don't take things for granted anymore. You spend enough time in other countries and you realize how frustrating just simple daily things can be. There is really nowhere in the world like America.

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