Salon.com has an interesting article on what constitutes “visiting” a country? If you go to the Iguazu Falls and move from one side to the other, does that mean that you've been to both Brazil and Argentina? If you land in Frankfurt in transit to Malaysia, does that mean that you've been to Germany? The article (found via Vagablogging) by Patrick Smith, gives some similar examples and asks what does it mean to visit a country, and should it really matter which countries you’ve visited.

I'm all in favour of making lists of the places I’ve visited. I consider travelling as a hobby and most people keep lists of their collections. Birdwatchers have their birding records, beer fanatics have their beer logs, probably even stamp collectors have their stamp lists, so why shouldn’t a traveler have a places list? Travelling is like collecting experiences in different areas, so it’s no different from any other hobby in this regard. (I’m also a bit of a sucker for lists, and lists will be really handy when the good old Alzheimer’s starts settling in.)

Now to the main point of the question, what does it mean to visit a country? Well, for starters if you never venture beyond the airport’s perimeter that doesn’t mean you visited anywhere except the airport. By certain airport naming conventions, you might end up in a different country than the airport name. For example, Ryanair’s idea of Vienna’s airport is in Bratislava, which isn’t even in Austria.

Probably the commonest way of attributing a visit to a place is to attribute the visit to being physically in the place, and maybe visit some of the most representative sights of the place. For example a visit to Paris would mean seeing the Eiffel Tower, Louvre etc. On a deeper level, one can immerse himself in the ambience of the place, try to interact with the locals, eat their food, and learn about the culture. There are many different levels you can visit a place, but there needn’t be a clear cut judgment on what a visit should mean.

Any country is living organism, always evolving and changing. In some countries the change is more visible than others. In places where there has been war, poverty, oppressive political institutions, the change tends to be more drastic and more visible than the more gradual change happening in more stable countries. This added time attribute to a visit makes each visit unique.

As for what you’re going to write down on the list. I list cities in my “have-been-to” list. I find cities more manageable in terms of size and more representative in what you have really seen. If I visit Moscow that doesn’t mean that I’ve visited the whole 6.5million sq miles of Russia, but I can still say that I’ve been to Moscow.