Which countries are like this?
i intentionally don't read about the places before going there, to avoid influencing my experience by the subjective reports of others. especially reports of other foreigners.
i'll never experience the life and struggles as a local, especially not when the culture is very different, or the language or its a developing country. at best i get to experience what living in that place as a european, an expat, is like.
but, where i am able to make friends or become part of a local family, i still get way more insights than any tourist would.
while traveling in japan (where i was couchsurfing) i met a young european who claimed to have learned things about japanese culture that generally no foreigner ever finds out and his japanese friends would always be surprised when he told them about some of the things he learned. i could not verify his claim of course, but it was interesting nonetheless.
I don't know, but from personal experience, renting and living in an apartment in Tokyo is very, very different from renting an apartment in America.
>Once you get into the groove of actually living somewhere, don't you just realize it's the same as everywhere else?
No, not at all. Different places are extremely different. There's a reason people move emigrate to other countries. I don't know how you got this idea unless you've never even traveled anywhere else. Maybe I don't understand you correctly.
Anyway, if you're just a tourist somewhere, you might not even care what it's like to live in a place; that's probably not why you're there. But it does mean you have a very different experience there than you would as a long-term resident, and it's quite likely very, very different from your experience as a resident back home.
This means that things that will be a significant issue for a tenant in one location will be irrelevant in another location and vice versa. Understanding the issues on the ground usually requires living in that place for a significant amount of time.
Like South Florida.
Plus the more decades you go back, the more it was unlike the 50 states from Orlando on up.