> OK, I had forgotten about the Americans. The main thrust was about the Chinese.
Normally I would agree with Alan Rudy that exposure to other cultures via the usual method of traveling abroad is beneficial and for a number of reasons, but in this case I must object. Most Americans (and Chinese) were held to be backwards provincials, farmers with no outside ken (in the specific case of the Chinese) due to a failure to travel "outside the country." Because of what amounts to luck of the draw in where they were born, whom their parents are, etc. The quite ridiculous logical conclusion (spotlighted by your "amazing" comment re: your relatives in Germany) is that those who do not become "worldly" in that fashionably popular, western European sense you invoked are somehow flawed, perhaps morally. A number of Russians (and others) are similarly afflicted, supposing that this shortcoming is real and not your notional figment.
The conversation thus far has only concerned itself with the proximity of those "correctional" destinations, in this thread we have not begun to address differences in earned or awarded vacation time, ability to afford or other considerations that were glossed over.
For these reasons, your "widely traveled" comment about Americans (and Chinese) and probably the objection that brought it forth, can safely be dismissed as irrelevant hogwash.