France is amazing by the diversity of the landscapes you can find there. French people are alright if you get out of big cities, like Paris, Lyon or Marseille.
Hehe, I've been to Paris twice, and to Bordeaux, Montpellier, Hauts de France, and surrounding countryside as well. This year we'll drive to Alsace-Lorraine and visit the Vosges. I've liked every visit 🙂
I mean, some people are rude, that's normal. But overall we've been treated really well no matter where we've been.
I was in Bordeaux with my family for the world cup in 2018, it was a great experience even with thousands of people and us with two toddlers.
Sorry, this comes of as a love letter to France 😂 I promise, I also love visiting other parts of Europe!
Many people claim the French are rude which is not my experience at all.
99.9% of this is from US-americans who visit just Paris and speak very loud US-english to everyone. The Parisians are not as nice as the rest of France and no one appreciates an ignorant tourist speaking loud US-english into one's face as if it were a walmart in Texas or something.
I think it's a power-thing. Some Americans follow the 'customer is always right' thinking and expect staff to be servile. But my experience in Europe is that when you interact with a waiter or a shop assistant you're interacting with an equal who happens to be serving you at that moment, and who also expects a certain something from you.
I still remember a waiter who was very disappointed in me because I didn't know which wine I wanted to have with my fish 😂 Sorry, Danes don't know much about wine. Anyway, the only time I've encountered rude staff was in Belgium and only once or twice - and probably just because we seemed impatient.
My impression is that things have changed in the last 20 years or so. These days, people will not look at you like you're some disgusting bug if you speak to them in English. Haven't really been there a lot, though.
French on the other hand can be nice on the front, and then stab you in the back. Also i have made the experience that many of them are increadibly racist and when they travel assume a colonial attitude. I'll never travel again with French people for that matter.
That's incredibly generalizing. You seem to have had the misfortune of traveling with some assholes, that doesn't mean all or even most of us have that kind of behaviour.
Greece Malaka! The original Europeans, the honorary middle easterners. Great food, beautiful nature, lovely people. Additionally, Athens is a fucked up but also very interesting place.
I’m hating on the influx of non-European tourists that are willing to pay the most ridiculous prices. This has made most of the islands impossibly expensive, where 5 years ago it was still very affordable if you avoided places like Mykonos and Santorin.
Both my parents immigrated from Germany before meeting and marrying each other.
When I went back on my own in the late 80s, I got the most disconcerting feeling of being somewhere that was simultaneously intimately familiar while also being completely foreign.
Even just walking through the countryside gave me an indescribingly aching feeling in my chest, like I wanted to lie down in the tall grass and become one with the land and bind myself to it like some giant oak tree. Even the small villages with homes that often were a thousand-plus years old gave this impression of disturbingly compelling and eternal intimacy, and It absolutely freaked me out because I couldn’t understand it.
In all the places I have physically been, I have only ever felt something familiar in one other place: Vancouver Island in the Nanaimo region.
I've never vacationed in Germany, mainly because my wife does not speak German. I do want to go, though, I have a feeling that there's a lot of regional culture and food to discover if we just gave it a go.
I'd also like to take a look, about a year ago I started regularly speaking to some Germans and it's a lot more interesting to me for some reason now...
if you do don't concentrate on the southern regions with brezn and weisswurst. visit the north! eat fischbrötchen, krabbenbrötchen and braunkohl mit pinkel.
Russia because usually it's Russia that visits you. Then stays way too long, eats your food, sleeps in your bed, clogs your toilet and finally leaves with everything you own.
I love visiting Portugal, been a few times to Lisbon, amazing city, and to the Algarve region. Visiting Porto is still on my todo list, I hear it's really nice too.