this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2026
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I've spent some summers in Europe over the past few years. Americans don't know what you are missing:
Greece:
Italy:
Spain:
Why are all the exits in Spain Italian cities?
For the same reason most cars in the "Italy" photo have Spanish plaques
i think the last two got mixed up
Oops! How could I possibly have mixed up Barcelona with Rome?
Your pictures are not from Barcelona or Rome. They're from highways between cities. OPs pictures are from stroads within American cities. Anybody that's set foot within Thessaloniki, Barcelona and Rome can instantly tell those cities apart.
Other European cities might be less easy to tell apart, but you chose some of the most iconic cities that truly are unique and easy to distinguish.
I mean the same can be said of the cores of American cities as well. The stroads are generally out on the edges where the city grew just in the last 75 years or so, just like how the highways in major European cities generally won't be in the ancient city centers.
Sure I can find plenty of nearly identical stroads around New York, Minneapolis and Chicago but if you look at the very center of each of them they'll all look very different and local culture and history will shine through
A stroad and a highway is not the same though. A highway doesn't take you to stores or services, it takes you between cities. Stroads are a part of a city.
I'd also note that the Italian highways (which was showcased in two pictures) are pretty infamous in Europe.
I Wikipediad a picture of Leavenworth, Kansas and this is the picture:
But really I was just trying to be funny.
Looks like any random mid sized American city.
Were you just another car in a lane?
Stock photos because I didn't photograph getting around from the airport into the cities.
But many of my actual city photos are shockingly similar all over Europe. Outside of a few streets it's mostly fake styling. Like in Zurich where the building might look older but then you walk close and it's poured concrete to look like stone and the store itself is a Starbucks or Sephora.
Edit for the downvoter:
This is a view very close the the Acropolis that I walked past several times. (Again not my photo because I photo the "interesting", not the realistic.)
But no one shares these photos, it's always the glamour shots.
Buildings that look like this are usually much older than the chains in them. In European city centers, big international chains just set up stores in historical buildings.
It's not the chain store inside. It's the fake poured concrete facade to look like stone. It gives the illusion of being old like a castle at DisneyWorld.
They're mostly missing the motorcycles (and scooters!) lane splitting.
Not in LA where lane splitting is legal!
So just like home, then.
It's just bad timing, it's usually not like this most of the time (at least in Italy), summer is especially full of tourists and people going from a region to another so it clogs a lot but is usually not that much of a problem except in some periods (eg: august is an HELL)