Which of the following places will you visit if you want to know a city you visit for the first time and only have a short time to stay Historical sites Shop market Local restaurant cafe

With the invention of powerful passenger aircraft, long-distance travel has been ever more convenient. Many people could travel to faraway places during the weekend for a short vacation. From my perspective, if people only have a short time to stay in a city for the first time, historical sites can be the best places to visit.

First, the problem with visiting shops or local restaurants to have a good understanding of the city is that most people are familiar with them. Anyone living in a big city can readily go to restaurants of different countries within their locality, be it an Italian café or Japanese sushi house. This familiarity makes traveling to another place merely to walk into a shop or restaurant that shows pretty much little difference from what one can see at home pointless. However, for historical buildings, this can be different. Most of these buildings are highly unique, which means one cannot appreciate their true beauty without going there to see them in person. The reason is that culture diffusion happened slowly in the past. Many architecture styles did spread but were confined to a given area. For example, one can hardly see any genuine Eastern Asian Pagodas in the west, nor can one find real representatives of the Greek Pantheon or the Roman Colosseum other than in the Mediterranian. And this means that if visitors want to make the short trip worthwhile, visiting places of interest built in the past can be a rational choice.

Second, visiting historical places allows visitors to know the people there better. While modern architecture may be somewhat futuristic to have a good representation of a people, many historical buildings have embodied the cultural identity of people there. For instance, feeling the grandeur of the Great Wall of China with one’s own eyes can show the visitor that the Chinese are a peace-loving people; Seeing the Pyramids in the Egyptian deserts tells ancient Egyptians are fascinated with the star atlas. These one-of-a-kind buildings erected from the distant past carry the spirit of the people on those lands and can hence offer informative guidance for the world to know what the people living there currently are. Albeit sometimes implicit, this information is valuable in the modern era because globalization – a term that refers to how people are becoming intertwined with people in other parts of the world - is the general theme of international interactions. With a better understanding of people elsewhere through means such as visiting their historical buildings, one can know their characteristics to avoid conflicts and better collaborate in international governance to treat problems ranging from fighting poverty to environmental protection.

To conclude, visiting historical buildings during short trips allows visitors to experience exotic feelings and better understand the local people.