When I went to Japan, when I was 21, an American told me that I learnt more about America than Americans did. I'm from Australia, and an AMerican asked me if we had a direct flight, and I said that we stopped in Cairns, and he asked if Cairns was in Australia, but if you asked an American if a city was in the USA, they'd ask which shower you came down in!

One of the things that I have learnt is that, for many people, whether it's a family member, such as a cousin, or even hosting an exchange student for a week, is that it's a novelty for a while to have someone from overseas visiting, but the novelty wears off.

With family members, such as you describe, if you travel across to Italy every summer, because your parent(s) emigrated overseas, or if you had, say, a German parent and an Australian parent, and you went to Germany for every second Christmas, unless your grandparents were the "children should be seen and not heard" type, they want you to have a happy, carefree, childhood and have happy memories of your time there. But, if, say, you wanted to go and live there for a gap year after high school, your reality would be different.

I have to agree that European and Asian food beats US food, but the problem is, Italian, Japanese, Chinese and other foods introduced to the USA have been modified to suit US tastes.