When I take trains in the USA, I usually look out for a few seconds every couple of minutes, because it's mostly the same -- lower-middle class housing or warehouses if we're in a city, or ugly terrain outside of a city.
I went from modern metropolis of skyscrapers and tower cranes to run down rusty industrial facilities that wouldn't look out of place in a STALKER game to sod roofed villages that look as they might have when Napoleon was making an ill fated expedition. Then of course a vast expanse of nothing at all.
These kinds of broad comparisons are utterly useless. Continents are much too large for that kind of thing to be anything resembling accurate.