[Rusty]

Originally Posted by ricardo1968

Si yo fuera rico, viajaría a muchos lugares.
Viví en Europa cuando era joven.
Después del colegio, me unió el ejército, y me colocaron en Alemania por dos años.
Pero no viajé a muchos lugares y no aprendí alemán.

¡Qué lástima!

Fui a algunas de las ciudades mayores, como París, Roma y Londres. Todos me gustaron.

También he visto la Cuidad de México, Puerto Vallarta (dos veces), Ixtapa y Zihuatenejo.

Los lugares que querría ver incluyen más de Italia y todo de España. También yo querría ver la península Yucatán y Machu Pichu.

Rusty, you changed 'colocado' (colocar past participle) to 'me colocaron' ("stationed" to "they stationed me"), correct? If I said something like "era colocado" would that have worked? I was stationed. (Almost, you'd need to use estar instead of ser.) (I didn't change what you had, but wrote an alternate that made the sentence flow better in my mind. There was nothing wrong with saying "stationed," but I liked "and they stationed me" better.)

Also, I looked at unir initially and none of the dictionaries mention it being a reflexive verb. (There is a reflexive form of unirse, which is needed to say that you yourself have joined something.) Why are you saying to use it reflexively? (Without reflecting back on yourself, it just means that you have put two things together. It's the same thing as juntar. If you use the reflexive form, you'll communicate that you joined the army. You can use juntarse or unirse.) uní (here you have the verb ending spelled correctly - it is not spelled correctly in your story) Él ejército = I joined the army, correct? (No. Use unirse or juntarse. Both verbs are followed by a preposition. That is why the article is marked wrong. You changed the article to a subject pronoun and capitalized it for some unknown reason.)

Also, you said to use gustar instead of disfrutar? (I actually said 'disfrutarse de'. There's a difference.) Why is one preferred over the other? (Only because more people that speak Spanish prefer to use 'gustarle algo' instead of 'disfrutarse de algo'.) I used disfrutar to avoid using the reflexive gustar (gustar is not reflexive (a reflexive form does exist, though)) because, as you said, I don't really understand it.

There are many threads that talk about how to use gustar.
Check out this one. Perhaps that will answer your questions.

I wrote this in a thread:
In English, the sentence 'I like books' has a subject (I), a verb (like) and a direct object (books). Another way we could say the same thing in English is, "Books are pleasing to me." This latter structure is what you are using in Spanish when you use verbs like 'gustar'.

Me gustan los libros. -or- Los libros me gustan.

(The subject 'los libros' can either follow or precede the verb in Spanish.)

Students of Spanish are often taught that 'Me gustan los libros' means 'I like books', but that makes it difficult to correlate the parts of speech. This is mainly because there is no correlation.
'Los libros' is the subject in the Spanish sentence. They, the plural subject, 'are pleasing'. To whom are they pleasing? Why, the indirect object. That is the person who is pleased by the books.
So, I hope you can see that it is really misleading to say that 'I like books' is translated as 'Me gustan los libros." The better translation is 'Books are pleasing to me.' That way, everything has a correlation.

Here's a link to a web site that has some good information.