Trying not to fall into the tourist trap
“The traveller sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”
― G.K. Chesterton
I love good travel writing.
Find someone like Bill Bryson — who takes you along on his wanderings, sharing his observations with vivid descriptions and wry humour — and you’ll feel like you’re right there with him.
What I don’t like are travel writers who make only brief stops in tourism hotspots, their carry-on luggage jam-packed with cherry-pickers, clichés and stereotypes.
Reading that kind of reportage, if you can call it that, gives you only the broadest of strokes about the character of a place.
STEREOTYPES
Those are the articles that would make potential visitors to Newfoundland and Labrador expect to be met at the airport in St. John’s by a band of salt-of-the-earth, kindhearted semi-pirates and immediately whisked to the George Street bar district — no matter the hour — to kiss a cod and toss back a quart of Screech.
Next thing they know, they’re in a taxi with an Irish-sounding, fasttalking, rapid-winking cabbie who calls them “my love,” asking to see “Jellybean Row,” Signal Hill and Cape Spear, with a few accordion tunes as their soundtrack, before calling it a day.
In P.E.I., all hands have red hair and are called Gallant, and are never too busy boiling lobsters to give visitors a tour of the nearest potato farm — singing snatches of songs from the Anne of Green Gables musical all the while — and then sending them off with a bottle of Brackley Beach sand as a souvenir.
Plenty of redheads in Nova Scotia, too — that Scottish blood, you see — where people like to unwind by
quaffing Alexander Keith’s ale and eating late-night donairs to get rid of the hiccups that are hampering their singing of “Barrett’s Privateers” down by the Bluenose II.
Or so I’ve heard.
ITALIAN EXPERIENCES
I’ve been writing about Italy lately because that is where I am and what I am experiencing, but I don’t think for a moment that a month in Puglia makes me any kind of authority on that region or the city we’ve been staying in.
I can only describe what I’ve seen and heard and smelled and tasted and felt, not what anyone else necessarily will.
I can hope that, in doing so, someone else might feel inspired to visit this lovely part of the world.
I certainly can’t tell you how Italians are in general, or what matters most to them. I won’t paint you a picture of suave and genial men strolling through the streets in wellcut suits and flat caps singing “O Sole Mio” as they make their way to their mama’s kitchen for a home-cooked, 16-course luncheon.
KIND AND GENEROUS
What I can tell you is that I’ve met some kind and generous people here. People like the Italian-born, English-speaking graphic artist who helped us understand tipping etiquette at a café.
People like the pharmacist who understood my fragments of Italian
— “mal di testa,” “mal di gola” — well enough to deduce my husband’s symptoms when I didn’t know how to ask for acetaminophen.
People like the kind older woman in the grocery store who, on my behalf, asked an employee in Italian whether they had any decaffeinated tea and then explained the soothing properties of the package of herbal tea I had in my hand.
And people like the older gentleman — a total stranger — who heard us speaking English in the street and stopped to ask us where we were from and why we had come to his city, offering a “God bless you” as we parted ways.
CITY OF CONTRADICTIONS
Those people and many others went out of their way to make us feel welcome and at ease in a city new to us.
A city in which, as in many cities, I’ve witnessed contradictions: immense wealth and great poverty; elegant buildings and overflowing dumpsters; awe-inspiring cathedrals and fascist architecture; crude graffiti and grand theatres.
These are some of the things I’ve found here.
I know enough to say with certainty that I haven’t seen the half of it, but also that what I have seen and experienced will stay with me, always.