Living in Europe has its undeniable charms, and presents great opportunities for anybody with the travel bug. Being centrally located in Western Europe as we are is a pip: Paugue is a 3-hour drive south; Vienna is less than 5 hours away. We can also leave our apartment here at noon and be in Paris for dinner. So it goes to figure that the tourism advertisements will be slightly different for us here on the Continent than in the Oregonian's Sunday travel section. As I've noted before, we get the Euro/Internation version of CNN and BBC here, and I must say, some of these tourism commercials make a compelling case-- I never knew that Poland (city of Lodz pictured) looked so darn nice, or indeed is one of Europe's up-and-coming economic powerhouses. Other commercials need some work though, or at least need to polish their pitch to viewers. Here are some of the catch-phrases of the countries (or cities) aired daily on English language TV:
South Africa: It's Possible
Greece: The True Experience
Slovakia: Little Big Country
Croatia: The Mediterranian as it Once Was
Yemen: One Country, Many Destinations
Lodz (Poland): Where Everybody Feels Like A Star
Warsaw (Poland): Fall in Love with Warsaw
Gdansk (Poland): We Make Things Happen
Ghana: See The Passion, Feel The Warmth
Aberzijan: The Oriental Charm of Europe
Montenegro: Wild Beauty
Armenia: Noah's Route. Your Route
Kazakhstan: A Huge Country in the Very Heart of the Eurasian Continent
Man, those Kazakhstan guys really needed to use a focus group with that catchphrase, eh? While I must say I never gave much thought to spending any time in, say, Croatia or Gdansk, the commercials made me re-think that-- which is what they are supposed to do. Some of the smaller countries' ads noted above didn't do it for me-- with all due respect, the Montenegro commercial was shot on videotape and basically involved some middle aged dudes tooling around on their mountain bikes with a local folk song playing in the background. Yemen? To be kind, I'll say that while it has a lot of history, it's just too unsettled right now for my tourist Euros, plus some of the pictures I've seen really don't make me want to dig out the passport. We're still picking out where we'll go on our first trip (weekend or otherwise), but in my Yank mindset, I didn't realize all the possibilities available. The nice thing is that with the economy the way it is, a lot of these places (especially countries outside the European Union) are easy on the wallet-- your money goes a lot further, and they are throwing some crazy good packages out there in the scramble to pick up Eurotourists.
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