Stop being autistic.

>>1109546
I admit, it annoys me when people critique how a whole country is, or how it's people are, after only ever going to the tourist areas.

As somebody who lived in the US for a year, I honestly don't think most US cities are that different.

I thought all Americans I met were friendly enough to foreigners and didn't notice any huge cultural differences

>>1109602
I think that the differences Americans see between our cities is a lot like different ice cream flavors. Same culture and base and vastly the same, but different outcomes and processes that change how it comes about (actions, choices, history, tradition). Mint chocolate chip ice cream is not Mango strawberry ice cream, but it's still 95% cream and ice. But it is different. Americans aren't willing to admit we're more homogeneous than we claim we are, but foreigners aren't willing to admit there are more differences than what they notice (you can't look for cultural shifts; you have to look for other types of differences).

Anyways, >>1109546, I live in a state where the largest cities are on one border side of the state, but there is a vast area of our state that continues west for 400 or 500 miles. And every time I hear some "city" individual trashing our state, they almost always admit they've never been west. Not once, and these are people that have lived here their whole lives. I don't think it's integral to know the state, but the few who have traveled the state more and came back, well... their opinion changes. We're a hick state, and if you try to hold our cities up to other cities, then we don't hold up. But if you look at the state as a whole, agriculture and small towns and natural resources and different "country" attitudes, then the cities make more sense and you can get a better value for the area and see where things come from. You have to take in enough value that you're learning about the place, and not just comparing it to another place entirely.

>>1109587
Ya I hate the way people judge the whole Vatican just by what they see in Vatican City; often just St Peter's and the Museums. They don't get out of the tourist traps and meet the real people. Pathetic.

>>1109546
Shit, you can live in a state all your life and not truly experience the whole state. Are you so autistic that you want the "where have you been" threads to show the exact city someone was in?

I'm gonna be captain obvious but it depends on the country and how you experience it

To deny that most of a country's culture is shared by a big chunk of its inhabitants is just silly

>>1109546
I don't think I do this, but it doesn't really bother me. I wouldn't pretend to have experienced all a country has to offer after only one or two cities or regions, but I think it's absolutely legitimate to say you have some experience with the country--even if cities are not much like the rest of the country, they're still parts of that country.

I've only been to Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou (and Hong Kong), so I can't claim to be familiar with more than a tiny bit of China, but the experiences I had were undeniably Chinese.

And on an unrelated note, I'm an urban guy. I like cities and towns more than the countryside on general, and believe that a lot of the best parts of most countries are in the cities. Just because a large part of a population may live in smaller communities doesn't make those communities inherently better or more authentic.

>>1109546
This is why I like to devote my trips to exploring within a single country, visiting some smaller towns as well as the big cities.

But really it depends upon the city, some are more representative of the country as a whole than others.