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Explain to me why I'm wrong and why those 5 cities I have mentioned do not represent American cities.
Every American city is a mixture of those 5 cities.
Easy.
The OP stated this:
If you were a tourist from somewhere outside of North America and you wanted to spend a month in the United States touring and visiting the country in an attempt to get the most authentic understanding of what the United States is really like, what cities would be must visit cities for you?
Crime, urban decay, racial tension, or car dependency is nothing that is a unique thing to the US.
One could for the most part stay in whatever country one lives for that.
It like asking where in England should I visit to get an authentic experience and offering as answer.
London for the crime.
Stoke on Trent for urban decay
Kingston upon Hull for Council housing
Birmingham for racial tensions.
If you were a tourist from somewhere outside of North America and you wanted to spend a month in the United States touring and visiting the country in an attempt to get the most authentic understanding of what the United States is really like, what cities would be must visit cities for you?
And just like what OP said:
Quote:
I ask because for better or for worse NYC is not an accurate representation of what the rest of the United States is like, but NYC is a highly visited city by foreigners. So if a tourist wanted to get an accurate representation of what the country is really like, what Five Cities would a tourist have to visit??
Those five cities I've mentioned are far better representatives of the US than NYC, which is what the OP was looking for.
Boston (alternate Philadelphia)
San Francisco (alternate Los Angeles)
San Antonio (alternate Dallas)
New Orleans (alternate Atlanta but I wouldn't put Dallas and Atlanta in the same list)
Chicago (alternate - well, maybe Detroit or St. Louis for a midwestern feel)
It's not like Detroiters live in the Arctic Circle. I get that we can brag that we live "north" of Canada, but we live close to Windsor, not the Yukon or the Northwest Territory. (Geography is odd sometimes!)
Yes, I'll grant that we are extremely north of a lot of Midwesterners, but 94 goes right into Detroit, just like it goes right into Chicago. 94 also does a nice job of linking up Milwaukee and Minneapolis. So, does that make Chicago kind of fringe too?
Detroit is 4 hours away from Toronto. 5 hours away from Chicago. 4 hours away from Cincinnati. It takes about an hour to get to I-80, depending where you start out from.
Now, if you wanted to make the same argument, you could use maybe Green Bay or Minneapolis or even the UP.......but Detroit and Southern lower Michigan, still very suburban and populated with small towns that are "easily replicated across the rest of America."
There's really not much of a difference in that culture until you get up towards Mt. Pleasant or other areas of Northern Michigan - when it really starts turning into "Up North" or "the boonies" or "hicksville USA" or "damn - where'd my cell phone signal go?".
That culture is more in line with areas of Minnesota or Wisconsin which also are on the fringes of for being Midwestern States. Once you get out of Milwaukee, there's just a whole lot of nothing unless you are heading back south to Chicago. Minneapolis/St. Paul is kind of the same way. There's the city, but once you are out of it, then you are definitely in the country and there's nothing but trees.
So,no need to pick on just Detroit in this instance.
Detroit is the extreme of the Midwest not based on its location, but instead its economic situation is what I believe the other poster was getting at. If you're going to pick a normal Midwest City, it shouldn't be Detroit, because most of the Midwest is very different from Detroit. Has nothing to do with its proximity to Canada.
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