To start with, I will discuss how Americans perceive Europe by looking at what we would like to see when we visit. While browsing a few websites for this assignment, I have noticed that we Americans seem to like England a whole lot. This may be because of the lack of a language barrier that many other country's have. A large number of tours that I saw included London, in some form or another, whether it was just a day or two or a longer stay. Included in these few days, was an almost mandatory trip to St. Paul's Cathedral, Big Ben and Buckingham Palace, not one mention of any of Gordon Ramsey's restaurants. Other major stops include Paris, Rome and Amsterdam for major Western Europe and Prague and Vienna for a more Eastern European tour. Although I have not been to these cities, upon thinking of this question, I did think I would see most of these cities high on the list for tour cities.
It seems to me that most of these locations have a lot of history both in the city itself as well as art work and other historically significant objects. London has Big Ben and Parliament, Paris has the Louvre and Notre Dame, Rome the Colosseum and the Vatican, Prague has more art work as well as buildings and architecture and Vienna also has the art work and architecture. This leads me to believe that Americans want to see art work, architecture and religious artifacts. There were other types of tours as well, for example, more of destination packages like to the Alps for skiing, however I felt these were not the tours to be looking at for this assignment.
As for the other side of the pond, what are the Europeans looking for when they visit the US? When googling tours of USA, I found something a bit interesting that I hadn't noticed looking at the European tours. A lot of the tours for europeans around the US are much longer than I expected, three weeks and longer. This was not expected. Unfortunately it is true that Europeans do get more vacation time than Americans in similar places in their careers. How I would love to travel Europe on a 65 day tour like I saw going through the US!!! Anyway, other differences included that when tourists are coming to the US, they seem to be interested in very different things than Americans going to Europe. Many tours included the National Parks System: Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon to name the major parks, as well as Las Vegas, LA and of course NYC. Other tours were "coast to coast" tours spanning the entire country, these were mainly the longer tours two weeks and up.
In a nut shell, it seems that visitors from both sides of the pond like to see what they don't have when visiting the other continents. Europeans who have at home an amazing amount of art work and history are looking for the open road and natural wonders while Americans are looking for history and art work that is not available at home. As I have been to the MET the MoMa and the Guggenheim in NYC as well as Albright-Knox, I have also been to the Reina Sofia and Prado in Madrid. There are very many differences between museums from either side of the Atlantic where there is just so much more to see over there. I'm not trying to knock our system of museums here in the States, it's more just a matter of history and Europe has more of it.
Here's another little side note. Back in my blog of the tour of downtown that Carl and I took, I mentioned a building designed by Yamasaki that was a prototype building. You guys from NYC should have gotten this one, it's the prototype for the World Trade Center.
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