jlh | On travelling and tourists (Reply)

folk is hosting a post about other people's perceptions of Americans—if you're a non-American go ahead and give him your thoughts. The original post, which was a guide to being a good British visitor for American soldiers in WWII got me thinking about general advice to travelers, which I would have replied to him but it got lengthy and a little OT.

I grew up in Maine, where we get a massive influx of tourists in the summer, a somewhat smaller but still significant pile of skiers in the winter, and a generous amount of "leaf peepers" in the autumn. (Maine in the spring is really just a lot of mud.) I don't know a Mainer that doesn't dread Memorial Day and pray for Labor Day (the unofficial beginning and end of summer in the US). I went to Harvard-Radcliffe college, which itself gets a fair amount of tourist traffic, and I now live in New York, unfortunately needing to walk through Times Square to get to the subway.

I hate tourists. I hated them as a child, when they would just make our lovely home completely crowded and treated the locals as 'local color' there to make their visit that much more quaint. (By the way, that's tourists, not the summer people who are a whole other kettle of fish. Also by the way, a lot of the tourists in Maine aren't Ugly Americans; they're Québécois.) If I had a dollar for every time someone stopped me in the Yard and asked if I was a real Harvard student I'd be able to pay off my student loans. It's all I can do now to shout at people, "The sidewalk is not for strolling!" as I try to get through crowds of people looking up in Times Square.

I hate tourists so much that my worst fear is to be one. I only travel to places where I know someone so that I can see the locale through their eyes as a local, be they domestic or foreign places. I never carry my guidebook with me if I can help it, or at least I try to read it surreptitiously. I admit that I am completely neurotic about this; one of the worst experiences of my life was getting glared at when I was with some local friends in a restaurant in Notting Hill, which certainly convinced me that I could never live in London and fit in and made me very wary of visiting again, though now I have friends there and feel a little better about it.

But all that said, I think that the perception you get of people when they are visiting your country, and certainly the perception you get of people from their TV shows, and maybe even the stereotypical perceptions you have of people, are sort of irrelevant. I mean, I'm a non-white woman, so you have a lot of expectations of me even without the American part. We all work against type all the time. Why should this be any different?

In other words, why do we care so much, particularly when it's apparently something that we can't even change by being the loveliest person in the history of the universe?