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What gets lost in the “don’t be a tourist” thing is the simple fact that if you’re not a tourist most cities are pretty boring. I have lived in Seattle, Chicago, and Phoenix over the last three years. All are remarkably different cities in theory, but when you’re just a resident life really isn’t much different between the three. Ya the restaurants and event locales are a bit different (and Phoenix has hiking), but they are all just normal-ass cities. Tourist draws are interesting because they tell the story of the city that residents don’t want to or need to hear. They also provide a fun exaggerated stereotype of the city culture and environment. Like if you come to Phoenix you 1000% should hike Camelback, visit Sonoran National Park, and see the Grand Canyon. A saguaro cactus may be super normal to a resident but to someone from New York they are among the most insane and beautiful plants you’ll ever see.

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I am so charmed by this depiction of your father that I am struggling to take away anything else at all from the essay, which is fine because the portrait of your father was more than enough. He sounds like an utterly delightful man, though probably rather difficult to live with. I re-read the opening paragraphs just to enjoy reading about him all over again.

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I take this a step further and encourage people to be tourists in their own city once in a while. I live in a touristy town and there are things I’ve never done after decades of living here but every time I do they torn out to be fun and to deepen my knowledge of the place I live. Most of the stuff I do in my home, the grocery store, my workplace, can be down pretty much anywhere. I do understand that some touristy places are just deeply unpleasant because of the sheer numbers of people massed in one place but if you are the type of person that otherwise doesn’t mind being in a crowd, no reason to avoid them just for some made up “traveler” or “true local” cred.

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This makes a beautiful companion piece to Friday's, helping to fill out a Unified FdB Theory of Aesthetics.

My theory is that a lot of this phenomenon is driven by insecurity. When you go some place you want to experience the things special to that place. When I went to Colorado I did mountain stuff (for I have no mountains). When I went to San Diego I did ocean stuff (for I have no ocean). Why would I travel those places to do things I can do here?

If I were able to do NYC as a tourist, I would prioritize the touristy things. Because I have no need to go to Central Park (again) since I live in a place with green space. I've tried your bars, and they're cool, just like every other place in this country. I've been to cool bars in Amarillo and Wichita and Florida. Everywhere has cool bars. It doesn't make you special.

Times Square makes you special! And Broadway! And those beautiful buildings from when we knew how to build things! That's what makes you worth visiting!

It's certainly not a wholly NYC thing. I've met countless people from Philadelphia or Boston who say "there's a lot more to the city than just history." Sure, window dressing. Because without it, there's no reason to actually visit.

For whatever reason, I think a lot of people don't want to acknowledge what makes their city actually special are things like Times Square, the Liberty Bell, Paul Revere, etc. But those things are cool, so just enjoy it!

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To take this one step further, you see this sort of snobbery from people who travel to other countries and refuse to even say hello to their countrymen. I was going on a day hike in Romania and waited at a bus stop and up come two hikers that were obviously American and very much hip. As we had nothing else to do I tried making light conversation and they quite literally ignored me. Maybe that ruined the aura for them. We got on the bus and I overhead them talking about the same hike I was going to do. Half an hour later, all the Romanians got off the bus, the Americans looked around and got off hesitatingly. They looked back at me as I remained seated in my hiking shoes and small backpack. I knew this wasn't the stop but the one two towns over. They just couldn't bring themselves to be seen as tourists and ask for directions from me or a Romanian.

I saw them several hours later, starting the hike much later as I was finishing and gave them a big smile and said hello. They ignored me again.

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I've lived in New York for 5 years and a few months. My mother visits me every year from the suburban South, and she demands to go and see Times Square every year. She loves it, which I find pretty cute. I usually wind up in the area if I'm trying to see a show, personally.

In general, some of what you are describing feels to me as very specific to New York. For a certain group of people, especially those who moved here in their 20s, living here becomes something of an identity. The people I am describing become irrationally over-protective of the city, resistant to change, and frequently a little snobby. If you can't tell, I am also criticizing myself here.

I don't think this dynamic is necessarily exclusive to NYC, but of all the places I have lived, it feels the strongest here. Move to New York from the Midwest in 2016, and by 2018, you're acting like Fran Lebowitz.

So many of the New Yorkers who whine about tourists are themselves part of the crowds in Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Bali that are "ruining" those places. One of the other things I noticed after moving here from the Midwest was that all of my friends traveled all of the time, and there was a mild social expectation that people should be exploring new places and leaving the city as often as possible. This was a bitter irony because I was already spending more money to live here..

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For some reason, two nights ago, when I was falling asleep I dreamt of an old Airbnb ad that I saw, which showed a bunch of hapless tourists on a glass bottomed boat in Paris, then contrasted them with a fashionable young American couple being shown into a Montmartre apartment by a toothy-grinned Frenchman, and the adventures they then enjoyed, which seemed to revolve around visiting produce markets and then chopping up tomatoes. To take nothing away from visiting foreign markets, especially those in France, and eating freshly-cooked meals... you can do all of that at home, minus the toothy Frenchman, and even then what was he in this equation but a personal tour guide? Perhaps the line between tourism and The Authentic really isn't that broad in the first place.

It was just a very obnoxious ad which was bred in a lab to appeal to a certain kind of American tourist, one who sews a Canadian flag to their backpack and rolls their eyes at the McDonalds while all the locals pile into it. (I remain convinced that no country in the world loves their McDo more than France.)

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founding

I love this. And good lord, some of those “guides” made me vomit on my phone. It’s so embarrassing when Americans move to NYC and then sneer at everyone who doesn’t live there. NYC is a cool place, but you didn’t build it with your hands. You moved there. Congratulations. Get a life.

Your father sounds awesome. I can see where you got your dislike of pretentious gatekeepers. (Genetics)

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A lot of the touristy stuff in NY is great: Bronx Zoo, Yankee Stadium, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Central Park, Chinatown, Little Italy (in the Bronx), Guggenheim, walking the Brooklyn Bridge, the Cloisters, Grand Central Station, NY Public Library, etc etc etc

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I agree that tourists should be tourists - that's the POINT - but I always thought that the advice to avoid Times Square was because it sucks.

I lived in Manhattan for just shy of 20 years; I live in the suburbs now and work in Times Square. It's kind of a daily nightmare, or was way back when I used to have to actually go to work to go to work. It isn't the tourists who bother me, though. Like Freddie, I've always found that New Yorkers mostly LIKE tourists. If you live in a place you're usually proud of it and want to show it off. And tourists are typically in a good mood! What's not to like?

It's the New Yorkers in Times Square that make me glad I don't have a gun. Every dick that blows pot smoke in my face or impatiently pushes ahead of me on the street because it's so much more important that they catch their train than it is that I catch mine really makes me yearn for the country. We didn't move nearly far enough away.

This post got away from me real fast

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I grew up in and live in a very rural part of Michigan that is also a tourist destination in the summer (and increasingly year round). The thing about people that give out the advice about avoiding touristy places is that it makes things worse for the tourists and the locals alike. The tourists have to go somewhere! And when they start avoiding specifically touristy places (like sleeping bear dunes) they miss out on the most obviously beautiful parts of our area, and the places where locals normally go and hang out, whether its a bar, restaurant, or hiking trail, become more crowded and less pleasant for everyone, local and vacationer alike.

There's a weird tension in living in a tourist destination, in that you recognizer your dependence on the tourists and the income they bring, but that dependence itself creates resentment. No one likes depending on people they don't know, who are much richer than them. A whole book could be written about the class dynamics of tourist destinations in America (it probably has been). But I would say that it works best when there is some separation between "touristy" parts of an area and the more local parts.

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I have...mixed feelings about all this. I generally agree with the sentiment of "when you're a tourist, just be a tourist." And I certainly think it's dumb to make a huge effort to pass for local, or whatever. On the other hand, I think a lot of the mentality this post is critiquing (and the way much of the travel industry markets itself to this mentality) is understandable.

One kind of tourism--maybe a more "traditional" approach--involves checking off the things you're supposed to do as a tourist. You go to Paris, you see the Mona Lisa, you go to the Eiffel Tower, you go to Versailles, you drink some wine on an evening boat ride on the Seine. And that's totally fine! Nobody should be made to feel tacky or unsophisticated for enjoying that trip!

However, there are also people who find traditional touristy box-checking unsatisfying. Some people go to Paris and think, "I'd like to try to understand what it's like to actually live in this place." That's also a perfectly understandable approach to tourism. It doesn't have to be everyone's approach, but it's totally valid. The problem (to the extent there even is one) is that many of the people in this latter group are easy marks. It's actually pretty difficult to go to a foreign place and find a way to see it through a more local perspective. So a whole segment of the tourism industry has developed to sell people on the idea that "these are the things you have to do to experience this place like a local." And then these "authentic" local experiences themselves become touristy cliches, but a new website supposedly has the real "local" recommendations, and so on.

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I have disdain for people who disdain tourists while they themselves are one. It's such a particular trait of the affected who want to broadcast their worldliness. But this piece also brought back the sadness I felt when I recently visited Seattle where I'd lived for a long time before moving about eight years ago. So much of what made Seattle special are distant memories now, but it occurs to me that my feelings must pale in comparison to whose who lived in San Francisco decades ago when the city was a beautiful jewel by the bay, even during the drug filled hippie years.

It's not just crime that ruins the vibrancy of a particular place, though that's a big part of it. Cities now resemble one another similar to the way shopping malls now have the same stores. They lack a distinction of being that particular place. Areas that have preserved local "charm" tend to be high wealth neighborhoods and thus lack the vibrancy of an integrated, working city. I think the best of urban planning cannot lift up a city when crime and economic segregation is rampant. All of this is to say, yes, do the touristy things. They highlight what that city makes it what they are. BTW, I enjoyed your remembrance of your father. He sounds like he was different from the rest in a good way.

Lastly, I've cancelled just about every non-essential things in my life in order to make an earnest attempt at saving money but I'm coming back to you because I really love your writing, a lot. Your style yes, but also the breadth of eclectic subjects you tackle such as this.

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Favorite Times Square memory: Crossing the square late at night during Snowmageddon (December 26 2011) in knee deep snow, only one other person was visible and hearing thundersnow. Eerie, but so beautiful.

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I dunno if I'm with you on this one... most tourist traps are bad, not because they're tourist traps but because the experience itself just isnt very nice.

For example, the London equivalent would be Trafalgar Square. I would tell people not to go there cos it's like Angus Steakhouse and The M&M Store.

There's plenty of super tourist trap stuff I would tell people to do, because it's actually fun/interesting: Crown Jewels, London Eye, The Prime Meridian etc.

I haven't been there personally, but if it's anything like most of the similar tourist traps I've been to the experience you get in a place like Times Square doesnt doesnt seem fun, not as a snob but just like "lets go to a super busy place where I can look at some billboards and eat expensive chain-resturant food"

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Oct 13, 2021Liked by Freddie deBoer

You could fall in love with Times Square

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krpcRnxVCmA

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