An Open Letter to: Indigenous People of 'Touristy' Towns

Dear all Indigenous People of 'Touristy' Towns,

Because I have now walked a number of kilometers in your mostly tiny shoes, I need to tell you that I'm pretty sorry.

For years, I took student groups to  - and I also travelled with a companion for vacations - to your hometowns, and I fear that we often got in your way.

We walked too slowly, stopped abruptly in pedestrian thoroughfares, and almost got ourselves killed or maimed by mindlessly stepping into heavy traffic.
We took up the entire width of countless sidewalks, entrances to sites, doorways, lobbies, ticket offices, gift shops, bathrooms and restaurants, heedless of your need to Get Somewhere.
And thus, we kept you - however temporarily - from being able to fully live your lives.

We flouted custom - often. Or we didn't bother to learn custom to begin with.
We concentrated so heavily on our selfies that we may have failed to truly see whatever monuments or sites you hold dear as distinct parts of your heritage.

We most likely took photographs of things that we were told not to photograph. We touched things we weren't supposed to touch. We wandered into prohibited spaces, and when you asked us to leave, we may have gotten unnecessarily touchy about it.

We could have neglected to honor your elderly or infirm on public transit by voluntarily offering them our seats...or we failed to put our bags in our laps to free up a seat for someone.
We probably left some trash in our wake.
And when we had the opportunity to place select items in recycling containers, we failed to notice them.
We were cranky and goofy with jet lag.
We often massacred basic pronunciations of your simplest and most commonly used words.
We were sometimes loud and abrasive. And were we guilty of upping the volume when we mistakenly thought our native tongue would be better understood that way? Yeah, probably.
We most likely wandered your nighttime streets, a little too tipsy from the drinks we had at dinner, singing and talking at the tops of our lungs - while you tried to get 7 hours of sleep before going to your 9-to-5 jobs.

We stopped and asked you for directions when we couldn't figure out the map.  And we still got lost. A lot.

We could have talked - within complete earshot - about some of you as if you couldn't understand us, our gestures or facial expressions.
We wondered aloud about your unique customs and probably sounded as if we didn't appreciate them. We reimagined the things that you love about your home with whatever 'improvements' we would impose, if we had our way.

We may have greeted some of your most treasured recipes with grotesque curiosity, or even horror.
We may have complained that your authentic dishes didn't taste enough like the corporate-ized facsimiles we expected to have instead.

We could have become huffy over the fact that you wouldn't take a credit card for a bottle of soda.

We may have mistakenly confused your dependency on the influx of tourist money with our bizarre "right" to behave badly.

Many, if not most or all, of us had never been where you live, before.

And if you are in possession of some of the great artistic/architectural/archaeological/natural wonders of the world - things that you pass by every day, and accept as your heritage, the ordinary backdrop to your familiar world - then yes, you got to witness our very first sightings of those things.
Our awe.
Our standing stock still in the middle of one busy thoroughfare or another, as we took in the vision of that amazing art/building/structure/pile of rocks/etc., is hard to accommodate when you have bags of groceries to carry home or an appointment to keep.
Your (perhaps grim, possibly exasperated) visage found its way into our snapshots.  How many times are you accidentally included in some foreign stranger's collection of souvenir images and albums, do you think? Over how many years of swarms of tourists do you appear in a fragment or in whole in their treasured memories?

Rest assured, whenever I traveled through your hometown, I thought about you (even if I didn't consider you, which is a different and more important thing).  I would see your shuttered windows, or you unlocking your front door or tending your garden, and I wondered what your lives were like.  I mused upon the notion of living next to or in view of things that are pictured in my art history textbooks.  I contemplated whether I would stop seeing - and stop regarding - what tourists gaze upon, anew, every single day.

And now, however temporarily, I AM you.  I am carrying those groceries.  I am scurrying to my appointment. I am sometimes forgetting that these masses of strangers are seeing something impressive for the first time, and that they are forgetting themselves and their literal position in space.
They are sunburned, even if they don't feel it yet. They are rumpled and a little tired and squinting in the bright Mediterranean sun.  They are checking off a series of boxes before they get back onto a bus, or onto a boat, or collapsing in a hotel room (with a sagging bed and weak air conditioning). They will review their photos of the day, and they will not notice me in them: head down, intently focused on weaving through the crowds...and not noticing That Amazing Thing, whatever it is.

I'm standing on the other side of this scenario now, is all I'm saying.
And I am humbled and challenged and intent upon doing better next time.

love,
Me