The Tourist

I’ve been thinking I’d like to be a permanent tourist.  Not only when I’m not traveling; I mean all the time.  I’d like to think like a tourist and feel like a tourist and look up at the world around me like a tourist and maybe even breathe like a tourist too.

I’m aware that the word tourist has come to have a negative connotation – or perhaps it always did.  People associate it with ignorance, with vulgarity, with a kind of superficial engagement with the world.  Of course, it’s true that tourists sometimes exhibit these characteristics.  The irony is, when sophisticated travelers insist that they’re looking for “non-touristy” experiences, what they really mean is that they’re looking for the ultimate tourist experience – something rich, deep and pure that gets to the heart of why we travel in the first place.  They are looking to forget how achingly cosmopolitan and jaded they are and to remember that first pure jolt of sheer touristic joy experienced by the novice traveler who stumbles upon the Coliseum at some odd hour and is convinced, for a few giddy moments, that he has discovered something new and wondrous.  (He has, of course – not new to the world, perhaps, but new to him, and of course that’s the main thing.)

The tourist is the one who stares in wonder at places and things that may strike the local as quite ordinary and even banal.  Not just churches and statues, but fruit markets, wheelbarrows, children playing in the streets, cattle being driven to pasture, women in bright clothing.  These things all exist where he comes from, but not quite in the same form – or perhaps it is only the jet lag that makes him see them anew.  It doesn’t matter.  He sees them anew, that’s the point.  This is why it isn’t necessary to travel at all to be a tourist.  You only have to open your eyes.