Traveling broadens the mind, opens the eyes to new experiences and introduces the traveler new ways of life. Well, that’s what they say. But more and more countries are becoming all too much the same. I recently went backpacking around Europe, and while I acknowledge that it was only Europe and not the exotic distances of, say, deep Asia, I was shocked and rather saddened to see that all of the cities (all ten of them) I visited seemed the same. On each street there was a McDonald’s, a Starbucks, a H&M. English was spoken everywhere, restaurants catered to tourists (mainly British tourists) and the cities were slowly but surely losing their unique charm that made them such cultural hotspots in the first place. While I admire what globalisation has done for the business world, it has started to corrode the traveling world. Europe should be a patchwork quilt of cosmopolitan cities, where you can be transported, in sometimes under an hour, to a different country, city, culture, lifestyle. But as all the local coffee shops become the all too well known chains, all the restaurants serve the same old food, the high streets look exactly the same as those at home, I can’t help but wonder, is there any point in traveling? Is Europe becoming one big country? Where have all the countries gone?
But then I look at the Olympics, each athlete fighting to make their country proud, the flood of differing flags, supporters coming from all over the world. It inspires me to dig deeper, pushing past the Vanilla Lattes or McNuggets and all of a sudden Europe falls apart into it’s former unique, exciting, proud countries it once was before the invasion of chains. So maybe I’m wrong, maybe these chains are just disguising the unique countries that lie beneath. Maybe you just need to search harder to find the individual, original culture belonging to each country. And hopefully, it’ll always be there, hidden beneath a Starbucks Caramel Coffee Frappacino…with whipped cream.
