Yeah I find it hilarious when Europeans make all the jokes about Americans not traveling abroad when traveling through several countries for them is just driving from Miami to Disney World for us.
Comment on More and more people are ditching carrier roaming in favor of travel eSIMs
BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 7 months agoLet’s look at landmass - the US is equivalent in landmass to 16 Western OECD countries.
I haven’t seen roaming fees in the US for over 20 years. So you could travel 2500 miles and not once pay a roaming fee. Same with SMS - all messages have been included in my plan since at least 2005.
It’s hard to compare EU to US with something like roaming. Very few Americans travel outside the US regularly, so we’d need to look at something like hours outside home area per year, or something, to be any kind of useful - and there’s zero roaming within the US.
guacupado@lemmy.world 7 months ago
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
the travel distance is not the point in that criticism.
the “having to actually interact with different cultures” is the point. You can experience pretty much all climate and vacation hotspots without leaving the US. Which is cool an all. But that way people from the US are never really forced to interact with cultures that are not the US. Which is the reason for the “uncultured US tourists are never traveling abroad” stereotype
fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
I do want to stipulate, that the US is full of different cultures. I don’t want to make it seem like we don’t have tons of shared culture here, but I feel its a disservice to ignore how many different cultures make the US
Aceticon@lemmy.world 7 months ago
If you don’t include American Indians, the cultural differences in the US are miniscule compared to the cultural differences within Europe.
For starters, most countries in Europe speak different languages.
Even, say, the cultural difference between Louisiana and California is less than the cultural difference between France and England (even though those countries are neighbhours), IMHO.
What you’re probably seing as different cultures are probably just regional differences, same thing all of us think about our own countries, even people from small countries: it’s basically the same effect as the one that leads Eskimos to have a lot more words for different kinds of ice and snow than anybody else - when you know something really well you can spot all the little differences which in your eyes are very clear and obvious.
Some decades ago I actually left my home country and went live elsewhere in Europe (and ended up being over 2 decades abroad, in a couple of different countries) and one of my early realisations was how all those “differences” between people in my own country (which is Portugal, so quite small) that I found so important were miniscule compared to the differences to people in another country.
GiddyGap@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Although the EU has some similarities to the US at the federal level, every country is its own sovereign nation with distinct rules and regulations, pricing, culture, language, cell phone providers, etc. It’s very different than traveling between states in the US.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Yup. My wife went to Canada for a few days, so I bought a roaming plan. $20 and we were set. Yeah, that kinda sucks, but I’ve only needed to do that once.
If we go on a long trip somewhere, we’ll probably get a SIM, but it just doesn’t come up often.
Frozengyro@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Also, you can go to Alaska/Hawaii and not pay roaming. Some plans include Mexico and Canada as well.