Good save, bunny! USA: 1

OK....Brits have a very high passport holdership - a link on the web puts it at 81% of adults over 18 - that's more than I thought, but as a UK citizen needs a passport to leave his/her country for any reason (even to just hop over from Dover to Calais, buy a case of cheap wine and then catch the next ferrry back again) and you definitely have to show your passport to immigration at the UK Border control every time you come back home again. All other EU member states don't have thi requirement. When you arrive in another EU country from the UK you generally don't need to show your passport, but you must cerrtainly do so when coming back home to the UK again as I say.

Plus the fact we Brits are so much nearer to "everywhere else" than is the United States of America - not only Continental Europe (parts of which you can actually see from the Kent bit of the coast of SE England anyway) but also Africa (just a stone's throw from Gibraltar) and Asia (just a hop, skip and a jump from SE Europe).

Going from the USA to Canada isn't much of a big deal anyway is it? They all seem to speak with a similar accent in a language which is the same, too....and the cultures are more or less identical in many ways....discounting Quebec.

The Caribbean - a lot of that is English speaking.

OK - Mexico is different - but there again Spanish is the only non-domestic, non US based language involved in an international journey from the USA, and from Mexico down again Spanish is the "lingua franca) - apart from Brazil.

I have used our local Edinburgh airport to fly to Amsterdam and Malaga, but have used Heathrow several times to fly to other places on the Continent. Coming back over London before descending towards LHR is always a great sight and each time I did it it was daylight with clear fine weather, as in this YT clip - filmed incidentally by an American guy from California who appears to be an ardent Anglophile who never wants to leave England even when he has to return home - he can now recognise Craven Cottage footie ground from the air - home to Fulham FC - on the banks of the Thames opposite Putney....clearly visible in this clip, along with many other familar landmarks. To me seeing London like this from the air is one of the greatest of sights after a trip abroad. From the air the UK looks greener and more orderly and neat than any other country I've flown over - even France just 21 miles away across a channel which looks not much wider than the Forth Estuary just a stone's throw from where I am right now.

I suppose the sheer physical size of the USA and it's comparatively very isolated position location wise, and the apparent belief of many of its people that there is very little if anything of any consequence or importance outside of their country, all goes to make them appear as "ignorant" as they do to many of us elsewhere on the planet. They really do come across as a wee bit of a race apart in many ways - maybe that's all a cultural thing which is all linked to what we've been talking about anyway maybe.

Arriving back home again:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Zobqleb8yU

Us Togoan are even more stupid... I have to use paper maps as GPS units baffle me ...

Hope this clip plays, can't access youtube at work to check it out. Basically CNN asking Americans to name a country begining with the letter U. USA anyone???

www.youtube.com/watch?v=opwFjGYaV2A

Well, even I knew that CNNN probably isn't *the* CNN.

Yeah but could you find it on a map?

Yes, look under 'T'.

I don't normally like to join in these kind of threads, but just in case surly happens to drop by, and because I thought it was funny:

my Mrs is doing teacher training and as part of the course she's been sitting in on some lessons at the local high school. Today she sat in on a 10th grade business class. They had been asked to get to know powerpoint by producing a presentation on a given subject. One group had the subject "European Cities": Slide one was Paris, with a big picture of the Eiffel Tower and some facts about population, etc. Slide two was London, with the same sort of facts, and a big picture which they proudly announced was the Houses of Parliament. Except it was this building:



That's the parliament building in Budapest, Hungary. When my Mrs pointed out that it definitely wasn't the parliament in London, the students were adamant it was (even after finding out my Mrs had lived in London and been inside the real thing), since it had come up in a google image search for "parliament". So she whipped out ther iphone to demonstrate that they had skipped past several dozen images of the London HoP and chosen the Budapest one because it apparently "looked cooler".

Just for balance here and to prove that not all British people are goeography whizzes, when I lived in Bristol I had a mate whose girlfriend (another teacher) was equally adamant that Wales was an island.

Of course it is - you have to go over a bridge to get there, duh.

The US (all of North America for that matter) is not exactly close to the rest of the world. There really is no cheap way to see the world from NA and for a family flying to Europe or elsewhere is likely cost prohibitive for the average family.

Less vacation in general and even when offered many don't take it, and that makes short weekend trips to nearby states more likely.

I grew up in California and we took a 2 week vacation by car every year, but we never left the western US, and I still have only seen a fraction of it.

Up until recently in the past few years there was no need for a passport to travel to most of the Caribbean, Mexico and Canada so why get one unless you plan to go elsewhere.

The US is huge, if in California Europe isn't exactly close, and Australia is even further, Asia not doing much better.

There are very valid reasons why so few have passports.

I enjoy other cultures and visiting other countries, but heck I'd like to see more of my country first. So much to see, not enough time.

Dooood! Just got to revisit the Trees of Mystery last year for the first time in ages.
Those 2 week car trips were torture and joy, all in one.

Where do all those 'Ugly American' tourists come from? and are they really Canadian?