What does your home town have a lot of?...

[hunter]

134. Tour buses full of Chinese tourists stop at one of our larger Chinese Restaurants...

... but that's a novelty for them because it serves "Chinese Food" American style which is nothing like the food back home.

The menus are Chinese, many of the people working there speak some form of Chinese, but the food is something else again.

In the 19th century, Chinese in San Francisco operated sophisticated and sometimes luxurious restaurants patronized mainly by Chinese, while restaurants in smaller towns served what their customers requested, ranging from pork chop sandwiches and apple pie to beans and eggs. These smaller restaurants developed American Chinese cuisine when they modified their food to suit a more American palate. First catering to miners and railroad workers, they established new eateries in towns where Chinese food was completely unknown, adapting local ingredients and catering to their customers' tastes.

In the process, cooks adapted southern Chinese dishes such as chop suey, and developed a style of Chinese food not found in China. Restaurants (along with Chinese laundries) provided an ethnic niche for small businesses at a time when the Chinese people were excluded from most jobs in the wage economy by ethnic discrimination or lack of language fluency.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Chinese_cuisine

My parents will not eat in chain restaurants if they can help it. As kids traveling in Mexico or Southern Europe (very, very, inexpensively...) we ate some amazing food. Some of it amazing in very delicious ways and, rarely, some amazing in unpleasant ways.

It seems to me that being "safe" doesn't really reduce the chances of an unpleasant experience, but it does reduce the chances of an amazingly delicious experience.

I'm glad my parents taught me that.