Help a sister out. Rebloggable version:

michiamodiane asked:

Hey! It’s me, Diane from fuckyeahunitedstates (again).

I am so sorry to bother you, but believe me, I wouldn’t be doing it unless it were truly important. I’m currently several hundred votes behind in the EF Tours contest. I know you might see this and roll your eyes, but I would be extremely grateful if you’d help me out. If you’ve already voted, thank you! You can vote again (once per day until May 13th) at this address:

http://contests.eftours.com/contest/3/105

Thanks again for following and have an amazing day!

Guys, I rarely accept/publish promotion requests, but I’m going to promote the hell out of this one, and here’s why:

Diane runs fuckyeahunitedstates.tumblr.com, which I highly recommend you follow. There are a few subjects that you don’t want to bring up with me at a party if you’re not prepared to listen to an hour long radio program on the matter, and one of them is the United States.

Specifically, the unbelievable diversity and beauty that this enormous hunk of land and its inhabitants have to offer. I, like Diane, have been lucky enough to see more of this country than most. All 48 continental states, actually. But even setting foot in (or driving a path through) every one of those states, I barely scratched the surface of what’s there.

Now, I was also lucky enough to spend last September through December hopping around Europe, and when I was back at headquarters in the Netherlands, listening to the stories of the other American students, reading their god-awful travel writing pieces, it struck me how very little they know about their own homeland.

There’s this ethos surrounding Europe—that it’s a great mysterious land, full of history and monuments, stories and interesting people, adventures and perils. Don’t get me wrong, it is all of those things, but they spoke about Europe in this way in contrast to America, which was, in their opinion, boring, whitebread, flat, full of cookie-cutter condos and materialistic fools.

Listen…shut the fuck up. You really have no idea, do you? Get in your car. Go drive to the Everglades in florida, where you can watch alligators swim by your car in the canals along the highway. You want diversity? Fly to Portland, take in the flannel and denim garb of that culture, and then down to Dallas, and compare the two. Then tell me America is homogenized.

Motherfucking South Dakota…do you even KNOW what is in South Dakota? There’s Mount Rushmore, surrounded by desert and great coniferous forests. There are the Badlands—look them up. That’s in your home country. There’s the Crazy Horse monument, so big that Rushmore could fit in the bridge of his nose, and that’s not even finished yet. That’s history in the making. There’s Wall Drug, an entire town of trading posts that began with a single drug store offering free ice water. There’s the Corn Palace in Mitchell, which was built and then rebuilt in an attempt to challenge the city of Pierre and steal the crown of state capital. It’s a fucking palace made of corn.

That is ONE STATE. We have FIFTY.

There’s Las Vegas, there’s San Francisco, there’s the Redwood Forest, the Boardwalk in New Jersey (my home state), there’s Kansas—long, huge, flat plains full of sunflowers and farmland. There’s Yellowstone, Denali, Arches and Yosemite. Devil’s Tower. Philadelphia and Boston. D.C., New York City. The National Aquarium in Baltimore.

The terrain, the people, the architecture, the folklore of every region in the US are as amazing and diverse as any European country.

There are a million and a half tumblrs out there that post HDR photos of Europe. People reblog them like crazy and add things like “wish i lived here,” “someday i will see this,” “why cant these places be closer.”

Get your head out of your ass and look around you, friends!

Thank god for Diane and for fuckyeahunitedstates. Follow it, and as a personal favor to me, vote for her to win a European adventure (you can do it daily until May 13th), because she’s earned the right to move on and see other places. Because she’s explored her own backyard like so few people do, and it’s time for her to fly next door.