The differences between California and Alabama are still an order of magnitude or more smaller than between e.g. Portugal and Latvia.
I live in California. I’ve been to Alabama, Portugal, and Latvia (just this year for the Baltics, great places). I disagree.
Parts of the deep south are just fucking alien in a way I’ve never felt anywhere else.
Different places in Europe are, of course, different. But different in a way you can wrap your head around with an undercurrent of commonality. The same things being done in interestingly different ways by normal people.
The sense of dislocation and strangeness I feel in certain (not all) places in the deep south is far beyond anything I’ve experienced, not just in Europe, but also Asia, South America, and North Africa.
All you just told me is that you haven’t been to either. You couldn’t be more wrong.
