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How big of a role does a country's history play in your decision to move to or travel to that country?
My company pays me to travel to a country, so I don't have much choice.
For leasure travel - history is history - something that happened in the past. Something of interest to me as a student of history. But current events should be what matters, and even that I can seperate out the policies of a government from the practices of it's people.
I love to learn about the history of places I intend / hope to visit. Sometimes in researching this history of an area, I will learn something that makes me want to add a specific site to my "must see" list.
For some examples;
1) I am planning on going to Venice later this year. I have found out that the island of Torcello was one of the first inhabited back in the 5th and 5th centuries, when mainland Italians were fleeing the barbarian raiders. If we have time, I hope to visit Torcello and see it for myself.
2) Also, a few years ago, some friends and I took a vacation to Belgium. While there we made a day trip to Aachen Germany, burial place of Charlemagne and center of the Holy Roman Empire. Other areas we considered seeing were Waterloo (where Napoleon was finally defeated) and Lueven (where the last major viking army in Belgium was defeated).
3) When I visited London, I made a special effort to find a remaining section of the original Roman wall from the 3rd or 4th century AD.
4) On a trip to Hersey Pa., we made a side trip to Gettysburg, to tour the battlefield.
5) On a trip to Munich, we went to Dachau - the first Nazi prison camp.
I would love to see the Normandy beaches where the allies landed in WWII and the Yorktown Battlefield National Park.
History can enrich us, learn from the past so as to avoid making the same mistakes again!
I would love to see the Normandy beaches where the allies landed in WWII and the Yorktown Battlefield National Park.
After all the civil war stuff in VA and MD, and Jamestown, Yorktown is kinda a let down. BUT the berms build during the siege are still there and it's not all built up so you can get a decent feel for what it was like 235 years ago.
Most places that interest me have some sort of contemporary issue that stems from something that happened in more recent history. For example, I was really excited to visit Serbia and Kosovo during the winter to try to see and understand some aspects of the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
I would love to visit Kashmir, in India, which is always having some border skirmishes since partition in the 1940s.
Germany for the Cold War, WW2, and how now it's one of the most advanced and organized societies on the planet.
At the same time, sometimes it's nice to just go somewhere that is visually appealing in scenery, or if it's cheap, or there's some fun to be had. Then it doesn't really matter much to me if there's some sort of profound history there. But definitely, it's indeed a major draw. I tend to not really care about events prior to the 19th century, though.
What I should have asked is, does the negative aspects of a country's past, especially as it relates to your people, effect your desire to move there or visit.
I have been to both Japan and Germany for personal trips. I'm not going to let something that happened generations ago keep me from traveling there...and my grandfather took a bullet from the Germans in France. The US saw fit to invest in rebuilding both countries as soon as the war ended; let bygones be bygones. If you go far enough back into any place's history you are sure to find something very unsavory. Heck, some might even say that they wouldn't want to travel to the US from other countries b/c of our formerly oppressive laws allowing slavery, etc..., but it's impossible to move forward if people keep looking backwards.
How big of a role does a country's history play in your decision to move to or travel to that country?
Dude, you are asking two totally different things. "Move to" and "travel to" are absolutely and totally different.
I may "travel to" a country based on its history. Like visit Egypt for all the archaeological and historical things to see; or same with say many of the old castles in Scotland. Great places to visit, but I wouldnt necessarily want to live there.
If I were searching for a place to LIVE, the history of the location would not matter at all (unless its a centuries old vineyard in France). I would be more interested in what it offers CURRENTLY. You know, normal things like quality of life, how good are the schools, climate, etc.
Dude, you are asking two totally different things. "Move to" and "travel to" are absolutely and totally different.
I may "travel to" a country based on its history. Like visit Egypt for all the archaeological and historical things to see; or same with say many of the old castles in Scotland. Great places to visit, but I wouldnt necessarily want to live there.
If I were searching for a place to LIVE, the history of the location would not matter at all (unless its a centuries old vineyard in France). I would be more interested in what it offers CURRENTLY. You know, normal things like quality of life, how good are the schools, climate, etc.
I know I'm asking two different questions, that's why I used the word "or" instead of "and" ... I'm not sure what point you felt you were making in pointing that out.
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