We are located roughly half-way out from the center of our galaxy in one of its spiral arms. The few thousand individual stars we see with our naked eye are all relatively close to us, mostly within 1000 light years. Our galaxy is several times thicker than that. That's why, no matter which way we look with our eyes, we see pretty much the same density of scattered stars.
The situation changes when you use a telescope. Look along the plane of our galaxy and you'll see a huge number of dim distant stars. They are too faint to resolve with the naked eye, but together they form that band of ghostly light called the Milky Way. The Milky Way appears brightest towards the center of our galaxy, in the direction of Sagittarius.
Earth's axis and our galaxy's axis point in different directions. That's why the Milky Way's glow is tilted relative to Earth's equator.
People living in light-polluted cities almost never see the Milky Way. The 1994 Northridge earthquake in California knocked out the electricity in much of southern California. The suddenly brilliant stars and Milky Way actually frightened some people.
Not all galaxies are disk-shaped.
Over the course of a year, people living on the equator see almost all the stars. People living at the pole (a few shivering scientists I guess) see only half of them.