P.S. The word "tourist" is really weird if you type or think it a lot.

My girlfriend and I dressed up as tourists. Fanny packs and a giant map, sun hat and a camera. We went downtown and asked people on the street in broken German-accented English to take photos of us, like a tourist.

We posed in front of the setting sun, of behind something, or stand really close to them. When they asked us to move or do something, I would smile and nod, then say "take picture?"

It was the best roll of film I have ever developed.

So that'd be one vote for hating tourists?

Oh, those tourists, long leggity beasties with the eyes on top of their head, yeah, they give me the willies! Especially when they get web in your hair.

I say, continue on being a contradiction. Works for me.

I think another post from Overheard is appropriate here.

I hate the tourists because they flew planes into the World Trade Center, but that's just me.

I like tourists quite muchly! I happy to change Canadian money for tourists to go to Quebec! Good deals! Only 2:1!

And for the record, yes, this has happened. My freinds and I gave them Canadian Tire money.

Yes, matildaben, that inspired my question :)

Tourist + moron = touron (courtesy of my cousin Wendy)

I tried to avoid acting like a touron but it can be a convenient excuse at times.

Such as:

Hey, don't honk/yell at me for going the wrong way down a one way street! Look at my vehicle license - it's from out of state/province/country! I'm entitled to be an idiot here!

Having grown up in one tourist infested place and moved to another, I do my best at all times not to be an asshole tourist. We all should.

I think there is a difference between acting like a tourist and acting like a stupid tourist.

Nice tourist ask for directions, maybe ask you to take a picture, may not speak the local language but will make some effort to be accomidating, whatever.

Stupid tourists get pissed when someone doesn't know their language and they can't use their native currency anywhere they want, and mock locals and/or their customs.

My family's from Niagara Falls. I've taken more pictures of foreign tourists in front of the falls, standing where Marilyn Monroe stood in the movie Niagara, by signs, whatever, than I can count.

I've also had more people than I can count comment to me about what a dump the city is, about how fat Americans are (or, more commenly "wow, you're all not nearly as fat as I'd imagined!") and so on.

"Stupid tourist" is so not limited to Americans.

If what you consider typical tourists do is truly objectionable, then if you do the same things then the obvious answer is to stop doing those things when you're a tourist while continuing to complain about that behavior. Otherwise, you should stop being judgmental about tourists and recognize that you're not doing anything wrong, either.

I'd bet that the real answer is somewhere between: that there's some touristy behavior that truly is objectionable and some that is not; and, additionally, what you object to and your own behavior are not exactly the same. So the most like answer is that you both should behave better when you're a tourist and be less judgmental about tourists.

I have an old Lynda Barry cartoon on my bathroom wall and it is perfect for your situation. Because my google-fu fails me (and it is very old,) you can't see the pictures. But I will type it out for you.

Poems for Travelers by Beat Poodle Fred Milton

Strange Toilet
I have to go! Wow!
But I am afraid!
Strange toilet waits behind the door!
Mocking me!
Wisely I have tissues! Hey!
This toilet is not so bad!
Wow! Good toilet! Yey!
But what about the next one??

I Feel Stupid
I want to be cool! Wow!
I want to blend in! Hey!
But. . .
I don't know where I am!
Hey! I look like an idiot!
Wow! I am nervous. I feel stupid.
They are staring!
Is this a vacation?
Yes.
Freaking out is normal, hey!
Wow! OK! Now I feel better!
Hey look! A bar!

A Last Haiku
Traveler's nightmare
Turns into hilarious
Story later on.

I loathe shortstopping, street blocking and visable nervousness around black and hispanic people, other than that tourists are welcome to the 90% of manhattan that I have already given over to them. I always give good directions and I always talk to anyone who is friendly in bars or on the street and wants to know about my town.

But motherfuck a shortstopper.

Wino, the one and only time I have ever, ever, ever yelled at someone (with swears, even!) on the street was a shortstopping tourist as I was trying to get to the subway station.

I usually put my mouth about three inches from the back of their heads and bellow, "MOVE!"

Not only does it get them out of my way, they sometimes shit their pants, too!

Divine_Wino in '08: I will personally fucking well flog the hide off of shortstoppers with a rusty bike chain dipped in week old coyote shit.

i do that too, Hugh. : >

There's one situation where being a dumb clueless tourist works really well--when you're somewhere cool you're not allowed to be. It happens all the time--there's an opera house or building that's gorgeous, so you just walk in, and enjoy--then when you're caught, play dumb--it always works in other countries--i don't know about here.

For instance, in Ottawa, CE and i went into a big arts centre, and he asked if we could look around (big mistake), they said no, so we just walked away, and then turned the corner and looked around anyway allover--it turns out someone was practicing violin in one of the halls--beautiful. : >

God damn, Divvie, that's some rough shit!

Shoulda previewed, amberglow.

I have a long history of sauntering into the forbidden zone.

In Egypt my traveling companion and I walked blithely into some live archaeological digs near Karnak temple and breakfasted with the workmen before they took us to see some breathtaking and off-limits halls.

When I was a kid in Maryland my parents would take us to the museums in DC all the time. My dad would sneak us into unauthorized places or into galleries through the exit all the time. It always made my mother uncomfortable but for me it added a frisson to visiting art museums that I don't think tykes usually feel.

I mean, it made it downright exciting to go look at the impressionists for the umpteenth time before the show moved on if we entered from the exit without a ticket.

I'm sure it was on purpose, to keep my brother and me interested. Duped!

It would be a pretty poor platform to run for president on anyway.


My moms and I once accidentally went to the top floor of the museum of natural history and spent an hour opening pretty normal looking file cabinets and looking at skulls and fossils.

Shoulda previewed, amberglow.

By that I meant I shoulda previewed.

Obviously.

I'm just wasting bandwidth now.

Tourists bother me only when they're taking up too much room and seems oblivious to the fact that not everyone around them is on vacation and some of us have places to be and can't always wait until you finish setting up your forty-person picture and actually click the shutter because we're VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE.

Forget blending in. It's usually not possible. But being unnoticable that's the trick. Be a secret agent. Be a bunnypin conspirator. Carry an onion in your left hand as the recognition sign.

when you're somewhere cool you're not allowed to be.

I did that at the SkyDome in Toronto with my ex-wife. She's from there, so we weren't entirely touristic. Anyway, we walked over there and nothing was going on but the doors were unlocked, so we just walked in. It was all dark and stuff. We wandered around for awhile, sat in some seats and watched for anyone else (we didn't see anyone). Didn't dare go down on the field, though.

I've always thought it (and the subway) were good examples of the differences between Canadians and Americans. If a downtown stadium in one of the US's megalopolises were left open like that, it'd be about thirty seconds before there was graffiti and trash and a couple of shootings on the premises.

graffiti and trash and a couple of shootings on the premises.

My first thought was teenagers fucking, but isn't it always.

What is "shortstopping"?

When you go through an exit, or get off an escalator or stair, and simply stop, causing the people behind you to lurch around you ar whack into you or shout "MOVE," possibly causing you to shit your pants.

Hugh Janus is an idiot. Ar!

Basically, when you stop short.

And I don't think it's just after going through an exit, etc. I've had lots of people do it in the middle of the street, either because they just realized they're going the wrong way or because their phone rang or because they're awful human beings with no concern for the people around them.

Yeah, that's true. People stop short everywhere. I just think of exits because my office has some particularly dangerous short-stoppers lingering near the door.

A related nuisance is folks who don't know how to use a revolving door. If you expect to enter from the left, you can expect to be trampled by the person exiting. All revolving doors spin the same way; it's not that hard.

And they have the gall to give me nasty looks when I clatter into them.

That's okay, though, because I put Ex-Lax in their coffee.

I think you're partly in the wrong.

For the optimal use of a revoling door that is your expectation, the door would need to present two full partitions avalailable at the same time so that an entrance and an exit can occur simultaneously.

However, this not being the case, the door will function more like a single door where people are taking the same path in and out and thus you should make way for the person exiting.

Granted, your idea that both parties will exit/enter with the door at the center and, given the rotation, everyone will move to their left would probably work and be optimal. But in places where the tendency is to be to the right, as I think is the case in the US, then you really can't blame people who approach a relolving door from their right and exit to their right. It's what comes naturally to them. And, I think it would be reasonable for people in the UK, for example, to move to the left as you expect.

Really, the door should turn clockwise, to the left, in a right-tending place and counterclockwise, to the right, in a left-tending place so that people's natural tendencies match what is optimal for the usage of the door.

It also might be possible that my theory of why people don't act optimally is incorrect. Rather than it being an issue of local traffic tendency, it may be because of the psychology of moving through a door. That is, while it's the case that the optimal movement through a revolving door is 45 degrees relative to the in/out path, it may be that people think in terms of a straight line through the door in agreement with the rotation such that they'll tend to choose exactly the wrong direction to approach and exit the door, regardless of direction of rotation. I'm thinking this might be more likely than my other supposition, actually.

I love tourists. What with their different diets they take on deliciously different flavours and tones. Hard to find a good wine to go with them sometimes if you can't figure out where they're from or if they stopped someplace along the way before getting here.

Well, American tourists are a little different - too squishy and bland for me, generally. Sometimes you have to stew them for a while so you can skim the fat off. Just too much work, sometimes, after a long day at work.

As for stupid, well, it makes it easier to herd them into the shed to render them down to more manageable cuts.

I dunno, kmellis. I'm not sure I understand. The revolving door presents the compartment so that if you leave it as soon as you can, the one you occupy is ready for the next person to enter when it gets to them, since you are pushing the glass. And the way the door spins (counterclockwise), you are exiting to the right if you exit then. And if it turned to the left, wouldn't someone still be in the compartment? I need pictures.

Anyway, I've seen a lot of people use a revolving door correctly; I have to think the people who do it wrong are merely unfamiliar with the concept. And any New Yorker who habitually exits a subway where the slice & dice gate (like at the zoo) is the only exit is definitely down with entering a small gap at high speed. (You should see it; the speed and co-ordination are kind of amazing. Like a beautiful commuting ballet.)

And you don't exit 45 degrees from where you enter. You exit at the same place. You just walked in an arc "around" the person you are sharing the door with, divided by glass. My best guess is people are unfamiliar and sccared by the speed. That's why hotels have those appalingly slow & large ones.

You may be right, dame. If people are very accustomed to using a revolving door, then they could probably use the same partition (if the door isn't turning too fast) and enter/exit the optimum way.

But, for example, I'm not that accustomed to revolving doors (shouldn't it be "rotating doors"?); I'm always a little bit daunted by them. I wouldn't say that they're extremely rare in cities in which I've lived, but I think they've been rare.

On Preview: "And you don't exit 45 degrees from where you enter."

What I meant was direction of motion as one enters and exits the door, relative to the general motion one is moving. Best way to think of it would be a mirror-image "S" motion for counterclockwise doors where the top and bottom of the "S" are straight up and down. See? Because of the rotation, ideally you'd get onboard at the 90 degree tangent to your desired motion. That's not quite possible, of course, so what is practically optimal is my 45 degree suggestion. But what people may naturally do is attempt the tangent parallel to their desired motion thus doing the least optimal regardless of the direction of rotation.

Maybe I should make a diagram?

I don't really see that many people shortstopping through entrances/exits or exiting stairs or escalators. Since the conversation seemed NYC-centric, I assumed shortstopping meant people stopping on the sidewalk, which I know really irritates New Yorkers and is a problem with tourists because they don't often know where they're going or are sauntering while New Yorkers have somewhere they need to be and a sidewalk is exactly like a street or highway to them.

I suspect the most common and most reasonable reason pay would shortstop in the entrace/stair situations is to get oriented so as to decide which direction to go now that they're in/out or whatever.

My "s" example doesn't really help, does it?

The "s" example doesn't help, no, but I think I see where our point of discussion is: the question of being daunted by the door. I can see why it would be extra bad here where many people are used to it and used to going fast, but it is extremely annoying.

As to the shortstopping, yes, people often do it to orient themselves. But why it doesn't occur to them to step to the side first, I will never understand. I mean, when I was new in town, I still moved out of people's way. (Actually it's the escalator that is the worst. I always want to be like, "There is a machine dumping ever more people behind you assholes!"

Also appalling: mall walkers. You cannot walk four abreast on the sidewalk. It is finite.

I don't hate tourists where I live, but when I'm travelling I absolutely loathe other tourists. Especially the elderly Italian tourists who, as a pack of bloodthirsty septogenarians, crowd the tight streets of Central Europe forcing me to dodge both dogshit and small meandering adults while cussing like a Spanish sailor.

I think Hugh Janus is lying about yelling at shortstoppers.

*decides not to meetup with porpoise next time i'm away*

; o

C'mon now, amberglow. I'm mostly straight - what are the odds of me eating you out?

But from pics I've seen of you (I think it was pics of you), you're kinda lean and, uh, freerange looking so...

;)

yup--i'm all gristle, with just one or two juicy parts. ; >