Week 6 Prompt II

When you finally arrived it was nothing like you had imagined....

Sometimes, I know that how I imagine a place is not at all what it will be like when I get there. Yet I still entertain these fancies. For me, it is often not "When you finally arrived, it was nothing as you imagined", but instead, "Someday when I arrive there, it will be exactly as I knew it had to be though nothing as I imagined."

Namely, this for me is with foreign countries. The real appeal for me to foreign countries is just that. They are foreign, they're exotic. They are everything Maine is not. Don't get me wrong, I love Maine, and could not imagine living anywhere else but Maine. In the U.S. Besides maybe Vermont or New Hampshire. But anyhow, foreign countries are really the x factor for me. I don't know much about them besides what I have seen in pictures or heard about, and I have always wanted to really experience them.

Eventually, I started reading books from the early nineteen hundreds, and though I love the books, something else in them appealed to me, which was how alien the culture and such seem to me. Most of these books I read are set in Europe, and I read of the fancy clothing, the different cultures, and they just fascinate me in how different they are. And in my mind, I picture these places as exotic and foreign.

Unfortunately, there also is prominently in my head the knowledge that even Paris has probably dozens of McDonalds. And really, who would go to Paris for McDonalds? And my reason appeals to my logical self that these places would be dull and exactly like all the places over here that you've experienced, and you don't even have to cross over any oceans to go to McDonalds here. I respond that I have never been to McDonalds anyhow, and even though I know that these places are most likely to be typical of all places, overseas or not, it is too much like crushing a wonderful daydream to admit to myself that these places would be like that.

So forgive me for anticipating the prompts somewhat, but eventually I will go to these places I have imagined so much about, and even though I know that they likely won't live up to my standards of "exotic", I can still hope that I can locate some small place untouched- unsoiled, by the uncleanly and avaricious fingers of our unwholesome society.