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Films that made people emigrate

theguardian.com

71–72 of 72 posts

Re: Films that made people emigrate

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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 wan…

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.

Re: Films that made people emigrate

#72
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wan…

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 th…

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.
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