Comment by the_af
1 day ago
That's rich. You haven't proven any of your alternatives is any better. Like, none of them. They are all as artificial as sightseeing, but if it makes you sleep better at night...
Your "yoga retreat" is the worst of the Eat Pray Love kind of tourism, I cannot believe what I'm reading. It's artificial as fuck, please don't suggest it ever again.
I also do not want to visit friends and family, that's a different activity entirely!
You mischaracterize all sightseeing tourism as "damaging" and the equivalent of TikTok and Mario Kart tours, yet complain that I am mischaracterizing you.
Wow. The sense of entitled gatekeeping I'm getting from you is off the charts.
I have to follow your very strict and arbitrary standards -- you, who by your own admission have lived in "several tourist hotspots" (making you a bigger part of the problem than me) -- because... somehow my visiting several interesting parts of the world where I know nobody is "damaging"?
Wow. That's rich.
I think you kind of missed his point. The current era of tourism does to foreign cities what gentrification did to working class neighborhoods.
At first, people want a taste of something different and authentic. But eventually the place sells out and stops being a real place and starts catering to the new entrants, pushing out the natives in the process.
Florence is a good example of this. Not long ago it was a real place where real people lived. Nowadays everyone there is a foreigner, including the workers and the people who own the businesses and Airbnbs. A tourist goes there and feels like they've gotten to know Italy, but really all they experienced was a theme park designed to take their money by catering to their expectations of what Italy is supposed to be like.
Ok, I can get that. I've been to Florence and it does feel artificial to me. And it's indeed overcrowded with peddlers selling crap. But it's not the only city in Italy, and I don't particularly like it. Italy as a whole is an amazing country and a wonderful place to do tourism and sightseeing.
What I could do without is the sanctimonious attitude of "tourism is bad unless you do it exactly like I tell you to, which also happens to be a way that 90% of the middle class that can afford traveling cannot do, but hey, I can, and I've lived near many tourist hotspots anyway [sic], so I guess it sucks to be you!".
The backpacker that can go do volunteer work or rock climbing or living among the locals for 6 months is a tiny minority of those that can travel; saying it's the only valid way of traveling abroad is gatekeeping, plain and simple.
You can be a tourist and simply not be obnoxious, but apparently that's not enough for some people.
The moralizing aspect comes in when we admit that we all made Florence (and Rome and Venice) the way they are, and that this is the inevitable end of any tourist destination.
Therefore an alternative is needed, that lets us visit a place without destroying it and stealing it from the locals. I think that's what was being proposed.