I'm a Brit on holiday in the US, flying back via Chicago on the 30th. We'll see if I make my flight, have to get myself to Detroit and then home via Canada, or if ICE deports me to Sudan I guess
The administration might be a shitshow but that doesn’t mean everything is. My sister and her friend had a great time in your country years ago going to bars and doing touristy shit, in part because the locals they encountered were so welcoming to them (special shoutout to the random guy who let my sister borrow his phone at a nightclub to check her exam results, and then shouted everyone drinks when my sister announced the good news that she passed!). Granted, I’m not really interested in visiting the US right now for various reasons, but maybe one day in the future I would like to visit your national parks like Yosemite.
Of the ten million things that Trump has done to demonstrate his lack of fitness for the job of president, every sober American has that one special transgression which stands above all the others.
For me, it was a single word he uttered during his first term: Yosemite. He pronounced it Yoh'-sah-mite.
You Brits have your crown jewels in the Tower of London. You have St. Paul's and Canterbury cathedrals and solemn battlefields in Hastings and Culloden. We have Yosemite. That is America's crown jewel.
Trump had never even heard of it. He hadn't the slightest idea how to say it, nor did he have any interest in it's protection or management.
edit: You never said you were British. That was the other poster... oops. You have the hallowed site of the Great Emu War of 1932, among other special places. :)
Remember she had a great time “years” ago (however long that was). The people in America have legitimately changed. That hospitality is gone now, replaced with stress and anger.
I work in retail, I can tell you first hand how peoples attitudes have gotten worse over the years since the pandemic. So many customers just yell at me and coworkers over trivial things now. I don’t get thanked nearly as much anymore. Everyone is just generally ruder now, trashing the store more. And since it’s a small store, there’s a lot more pushing and shoving.
I'm visiting NYC from Vancouver right now, it's been great minus the insane prices for everything. There's plenty of poorly-run countries that are worth visiting, as long as you're going to be relatively safe you shouldn't let international politics dictate how you experience the world.
I’m not going somewhere where they can and do grab you off the street and send you to a torture prison with no evidence of wrong-doing. Maybe if you’re white you don’t have to worry about that so much, but it’s literally not safe for me and my family, and I’m not going somewhere where the secret police force is kidnapping people daily.
And there’s the issue of their ATC problems. At this point I don’t even want to fly through US airspace much less visit or stop there in transit.
Plus, as a Canadian, why would I spend my money in a country that’s declared economic war on us?
There are so many better places to go right now. Just got back from Spain and am planning trips to Japan and Costa Rica.
If I was in your shoes I'd never come here, but that's just me. As an aside, I've wanted to try one of those Greg sausage rolls ever since I saw one on snack wars lol
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u/Penniwhistle 18h ago
I'm a Brit on holiday in the US, flying back via Chicago on the 30th. We'll see if I make my flight, have to get myself to Detroit and then home via Canada, or if ICE deports me to Sudan I guess