[Skybird]

According to some here on this board, why should any american wish to leave the most fantastic nation on earth and to visit places where people are just jealous on and look with envy at america.

Don't crucify me, I'm serious. it's a phenomenon you see in the hsitory of empires very often. In the heart and centre of the empire, citizens think that the places in the periphery are not worth to be interested in. It's just the inferiror "province". Stay in the centre, where the heart of life beats loud and heavy - or so you think.

Social behavior patterns, personal financial status, also play a role, of course, as well as education encouraging or discouraging such travelling. And here the circles closes and you are at the centre-versus-periphery thing again.

If you think other places do not have something to offer for you, why going there, then?

I will never forget the small TV spot in a docu magazine that was broadcasted short after the Iraq war 03 broke out, a group of american tourists on a german riverboat. they got interviewed and some of them said their group were surprised and they did not expect to be greeted "so extremely friendly" in Germany and being met with so much hospitality (that was in easter Germany, I think, where these things still rank higher than in socially colder western germany). They said that they even had planned to cancel the journey.

We people in the room watching that TV - were all laughing about that, in a well-meant attitude. You shouldn'T believe all and everything you read and hear about european anti-americanism: political disagreement must not always and necessarily translate into personal antipathy. For the most that is a thing of the 60s, 70s and 80s: first there was Vietnam, then the student revolts, and then there was Reagan and the (Germany-initiated, if that is not ironical) stationing of Pershing IIs and Cruise Missiles, that's why.