modern man wanted "it's a small world after all" and now we are getting it, good and hard
This article fit's perfectly in the middle of the midwit meme explaining the cause/effect of tourists, with the dumb/big brain text being "(american) tourists are dumb and ask dumb questions"
In other words: nothing has changed since Henry James wrote about Americans in Europe.
I think ultimately the conclusion the author reaches is an interesting one, that the real "disease" of tourism is like sepsis. It comes not from without, the tourists themselves, but from within, the changes made by locals to try to capture the opportunities for wealth that the tourists create.
The paradox of the tourist is fascinating. All at the same time, a locality experiencing a flood of tourism will welcome the sudden wellspring of foreign currency pouring forth from the rock, and loathe the disruption the flood causes to the steady pace of life. Anyone who has been a tourist knows what the tourist wants, a break from the monotony of their own culture, a desire to know the other and tread in their footsteps, in some cases a wholesome longing to break down cultural barriers and prejudice. And yet anyone who has been on the other side of the interaction with a tourist feels the heady mix of emotions that comes with the experience of being the toured. The discomfort that comes from the wall being torn down unexpectedly. The inconvenience of disruption in routine. No tourist wants to do harm, but even the most sensitive and well-meaning tourist creates a breach in routine that is disruptive. Nobody likes change.
All the olds and the people who have succeeded in life need to offer better jobs to young workers than the tourism sector does, and then the problems that the author so pathetically complains about would go away.
But people don't want to do that. They want to put all their wealth into real estate and "guaranteed" profits with no risk and no need to bother your mind about it. Not investing in a small business or in industry, in your nation, in your youth. "Yuck!" is what the author and other very refined people think when hearing that. "No thanks!", naturally followed by "Let's tax anybody who does that!".
Another example of American Derangement Syndrome, where socially uncouth but generally well-meaning Americans (in the aggregate) are made out to be some sort of existential scourge. Many Europeans have this due to Americans seeming to have much more money than their taste would imply.
I would love for the author to interact with vacationers directly instead of making up this back story about them in their head. To let them know, no, this place doesn't have cold brew, but buddy, wait until you try a shakerato. Then maybe people wouldn't look for the The Borghetto di Merda.
The author wants to be a writer and we all have to suffer
In a sense "Americans" don't really exist.
The people the article describes are a very small subset of the American cultures: the ones with intellectual curiosity and money to travel to another country.
For each American tourist you see in Europe there are at leas a dozen, back in the U.S., that don't travel, don't have curiosity for a foreign culture or don't even have any curiosity at all.
And, then, what moral grounds do Europeans have to talk about "invasion" or "imperialism"? The golden eras of Europe where built on exactly that. At least they're conquering you with dollars, not guns. The 3rd world European colonies of 19th century weren't that lucky.
You know what this article smells like? It is typical European insularity. Europe is still a continent with people that spent the last 3000 years in wars among themselves. Actually, Italians only stopped wars against other Italians on the 19th century, after unification.
The author talks about the Roman and Renaissance eras specifically during this, so I don't think he would disagree that they have previously done the empire and colonizing stuff. He even says maybe that's why Italy attracts so many tourists on purpose, right?
> The cold brew order is no new behavior. We know what it is. The American empire is just the fourth incarnation of what started as Roman, became Christian European, and then predominantly British. We know what it is. We still have it in our veins, the disdain these tourists are showing. Their carelessness and abstraction. They are the rulers, the ones who believe they are giving meaning to reality for the first time.
When it's your time it's your time. And in comparison to the empires of old, the American empire is far more humane to it's subjects. The biggest mistake our nation has made in the last 100 years is being merciful to the war mongers; Perhaps if they received justice instead of undeserved tolerance they wouldn't be so insolent to complain of what is put in their bowl.
The American empire genocided the natives.
That was the express and public reason for nearly driving the bison to extinction. Said so by General Sherman himself.
To starve indians nearly to death, so that they would conform to American imperialism. Then we invented "schools" which were advertised to "Kill the indian, save the man" by erasing any remnants of their culture.
Your list is imcomplete I believe:
Too merciful to slaveowners before, too merciful to warmongers as of late and way too merciful to grifters for as long as this country has existed.
I learnt that you should never bet against the U.S but I don't know how much longer you will be able to waste that seemingly infinite potential.
Good times creates bored, ignorant men. Bored ignorant, men create bad times.
This is true, but remember, bad times creates violent, ignorant men who also create bad times.
This is just wrong.
The Marshall Plan was the smartest foreign policy decision the US ever made.
Turned enemies into allies and got the world acting in our interests without the overhead of running actual colonies.
Operation Paperclip sure was great at bringing a bunch of fascists to the US.
On formatting: having the big-text snippets occur before they do in the main body was jarring. I think it's more normal practice to lift out specific quotes after they have occurred in the text, not before.
On content: if it's any consolation, America is doing this to America as well. Locals everywhere are wringing their hands over stylistic homogenization, Instagrammability-driven design choices, and rapidly increasing prices.
Quite a few publications do this and it's really annoying, yeah.
As an American who likes to experience new things, this makes me very sad.
I'm at a point in my life that I'm able to travel and see the world beyond my town. I don't like being a jerk and try very hard to not be a jerk. This piece makes me feel like a jerk for being curious.
However, this does remind me that people in other countries kind of suck just as much as Americans. We're often led to believe that Europeans are enlightened and superior to the illiterate, xenophobic, simpletons in the US. It's a good reminder that intolerance, prejudice, and willful ignorance are universal attributes.
Go travel and enjoy it :)
I bet you wouldn't even hold up a line of regulars with your curiosity.
If you try very hard to not be a jerk, that's already better than baseline. This piece wasn't aiming squarely at the American Tourist but aiming a bit at everyone including the writer.
Yeah the author is annoyed by tourists trying to learn and asking questions and by those expecting everything to be the same as back home.
I bet the ones who never travel or leave their own country annoy him, too.
Of course at the end he confesses he’s the annoying tourist when he travels, too.
> When Americans analyze a small shop in a foreign country, time stops counting itself on clocks and pondering its own dull finiteness. Now it can pleasurably yawn into the holy hollowness of the 30-plus questions the tourists are asking. Now, everyone around the American family is swamped in the buttery goo of the present, stretched. The other people in the gelateria can’t name the feeling that wraps itself around them. The feeling that time is purring, that time is on the American family’s side.
This is absolute art.
> Their job of giving value and meaning to our city is so important to them; they don’t seem to realize we are not as excited as they are about their discovery of gianduia.
And this
So how do you feel about the ending thesis that now you are also this American family?
I'm not sure if I like this piece but it's interesting. I just come away with the sense that the author feels something is off and did the best he could to articulate it but didn't quite put the finger on why things are off.
I'm not sure I can do so either. Something about cultural and monetary pressure, how people respond to incentives for better or for worse. People crave the new and different and authentic, they find it, then too many people find it. Some kind of Goodhart's Law for tourism: once a place is deemed an authentic experience it ceases to be an authentic experience.
I was just on my phone in an Italian gelato shop in Belgrade not too long ago, looking up what "stracciatella" means in the context of gelato so I didn't sound like an idiot or struggle to communicate with the employee. It's not just a Pinterest fever dream for people? People do want to experience different cultures but of course there's really no way to do that without some kind of friction.
I think there are two distinct type of "touristy" experience.
1. Culturally important experiences lean towards the prescriptive side. You enter, you are observing or being challenged in something, and it leaves an imprint on you. It is usually a bit discomforting in an exciting way that transforms a part of you in a infinitesimally small, but distinct and permanent way.
2. The unimportant experience is the conforming one, where zero friction is the preferred method of interaction, but it is universally loved in the way high-fructose corn syrup is; it's an economically sound decision to at least try and profit from it.
Or "there's really no way to do that without some kind of fiction".
I was just on my phone in an Italian gelato shop in Belgrade, looking up what "stracciatella" means in the context of gelato so I didn't sound like an idiot or struggle to communicate with the employee.
I understand the latter, but just as one datapoint, I would not think you sound like an idiot for asking "what exactly is this that you're selling?"
I get that, but the opening paragraphs of the article go out of their way to point out that the Americans are in the way by asking 30 questions about gelato!
I think I just have a hangup in general about "acting like a tourist".
You were in Belgrade looking up italian ice cream, so who cares? Just point your finger at it. You weren't reading menus in cyrillic trying to decipher the difference between regular and cheese filled pljeskavica while an overweight shabby guy was playing acordion to a couple at a neighbouring table and the waiter was trying to remember the English word for krastavitsa. Actual experiance in Skopje.
Nah, turns out a lot of people in Belgrade speak English well enough, Claude translated Cyrillic, and, the last night I had dinner on the Danube in Zemun, a live band was playing American classic rock. Apple Pay or my Visa card worked in about 75% of the situations I found myself in; Apple Maps and international roaming meant I'd never get lost.
Plenty of places have smashburgers instead of pljeskavica now, and I had a couple of moments where I thought I had found some authentic cultural thing only to realize that young, progressive Belgradians have the same kind of regard towards historical stuff that plenty of young Americans tend to have as well.
All of that informed my reading of this article. The author laments the kind of changes that came to his land but we visitors don't necessarily want them either!
I think we're all wrestling with the downstream consequences of a shrinking world.
> I think we're all wrestling with the downstream consequences of a shrinking world.
You should totally visit Skopje if you get the chance. Belgrade is a bit too cosmopolite. The bad is that they still allowed smoking in hotel rooms back before 2020 but otherwise I liked it a lot. Also I don't get the big statues and the anti Greek animosity. Should be anti Bulgarian by now.
For the confused: gelateria is some foreign word for an ice cream shop.
Not exactly; gelato is different than ice cream.
Yes, once it’s called gelato it becomes much more expensive.
What the hell did I just read.
Around 5000 words on the impact of tourism on de-industrialised cities and how property prices and rents drive new businesses. Some of it seemed reasonable to me (we have some of the pastiche 'experiences' being built in my city and I actually rather like the new mock hutong with the glazed green roof tiles and lions), and some of it seemed a bit clumsy and patronising.
I gave up a few paragraphs in, partly because of the formatting, partly because the author seemed very impressed with themselves for being the nth person to articulate this sentiment in a particularly ostentatious way.
But seriously, why is it such an impossibility to get an iced coffee over there. You have affogato! You can take a caffe americano and pour it over ice!
You can ask for Caffè in ghiaccio and will likely get it, let alone something fancier like a shakerato.
(FWIW, The author did say cold brew, and not iced coffee, but still...)
What a bunch of drivel. The author should come observe how the Chinese are when visiting the US, its the exact same situation just different nationalities playing the various roles.
I regret I have but one upvote to give you.
It’s humorous in its own right. It’s almost as if they’re on safari or visiting another planet. They arrive in a caravan of coach buses, disembark, walk around in a crowd lead by a guide, take their pictures in front of whatever the attraction is then load up and disappear at once.
In a way it’s not really that different or unusual than any other tourists, but there’s something that feels so choreographed about it that stands out to me. Maybe it’s just how large the tour groups are.
If you're taking offence, then you might be missing the point:
> The American tourist used to be regarded as the most obnoxious creature in the world. Loud, naïve, ham fisted, needy. The reason I told you about the opening of this borghetto di merda is that it made me realize: Now we are all American tourists.
The author seems to agree with you.
The conclusion of the piece is that this is no longer a uniquely American phenomenon.
I kinda disagree with the general sentiment of the article. IMO the author mistakes a low context social style for imperial tastelessness. I, a Korean, lived in the US for a decade so I do have experience with this "imperialism" the author tries to illustrate.
However, the American behavior the author is describing is more attributed to how American social norms don't force anyone to "read the room" and "know your place". At least, not as much as Italians and Koreans. Americans have simple rules they abide by, like general etiquette and the constitution. And Americans are brought up to neither refrain from nor judge others acting within that boundary.
So I don't agree Americans are "tasteless". I find Americans to be more tolerant and accepting, at least compared to cultures with longer history. And that is the American "taste" in my opinion. This has its cons, one of which is someone from my culture thinking they are oblivious to others around them.
Did you read it to the very end, where we all become American tourists, metaphorically speaking.
Actually I do not find American tourists obnoxious and ham fisted at all. Demanding? Maybe. That other word is specifically reserved for the drunk English bachelor partying in Southern Spain and Zakynthos. The American tourist is a bit naïve, like Twoflower, albeit without the sentient pearwood Luggage.
Failure to read the room might explain why the tourists persist in the questioning beyond politeness, but not why they embarked on the quest to interrogate the worker to begin with.
My family does this and I can barely go anywhere with them for the embarrassment. Everything is an interrogation. They actually take delight in the waiter not knowing the answer to where the seafood was caught, and then lecturing them about the importance of knowing such things (this is the most common one they pull). That's not just failing to read the room.
> the waiter not knowing the answer to where the seafood was caught
It depends where they ask. An Eastern European waiter would probably answer "in the sea" to that, although the correct and mundane answer would probably be "the supermarket freezer". Relay that to your folks the next time they ask. Most fish that you order in restaurants is probably farmed, except for small school fish and big ocean fish. So unless they eat sardines, ocean caught tuna or sabre fish, the supermarket freezer or the fish market if you are lucky is probably a good answer. Of course, the Greek might tell you that their grandfather caught the fish that very morning and even show you his foul smelling fishing boat.
I feel like in countries which are mostly ethnostates, there is a tension around remnants of tradition and the business world trying to open up the culture to gain some new market opportunities (Unsure how to state this more neutrally). I think this tension is interesting and I think that in the U.S it feels like the market systematically has the upper hand.
I am not sure this holds scrutiny so I'd love to read a counter
I agree with you. Fundamentally, this is an article about the effects of market capitalism. Everything can be converted from cultural terms into economic terms.
As an Italian, I feel the exact same.
This guy just doesn't know how to seriously talk about imperialism, globalization and over-tourism from a geopolitical and economic prospective, so instead he talks about things more at his level: gelato, coffee, and quirkily decorated restaurants. With a bad, paternalistic attitude as well.
BTW we all hate those hipster burger places (which now turned to doing smash burgers), and they've been popping up everywhere even in totally non-touristy places. There are fashions and trends in the food business, and many Italians look at that with disgust and take refuge in tradition, but it is often not the tourists fault, it's Italians spending their money there.
“No one goes to those hipster burger places making smash burgers now, they’re too crowded.”
- Yogi Berra
Well cheeseburgers taste really good haha
Italians are posting about it on TikTok, and Italians are watching it on TikTok. It's not complicated.
I think the last part was touching on how Italians are also doing this and coming to tacky restaurants or etc? It feels like the author is guilty about being complicit in it to me
Yes, the big reveal is that he understands perfectly well he’s one of the asshole tourists in another context, too.
The homogenization, and subsequent impoverishment (at least with regards to the quality and diversity) of the world appears to be, sadly, inevitable. It takes real, constant effort to maintain "the old ways" while tradition is so easily erased through globalization and, ultimately, technology.
I don't think we'll lose _all_ diversity of culture, as there will always be stalwarts to uphold institutions (even espresso bars) but as generations transition I think we'll be shocked at how much we've lost just a few years from now.
This isn't strictly a bad thing, as there are many traditions which have been laid by the wayside over the centuries, but I have to admit: I am not impressed at the things we've been replacing them with. Phones, social media, selfies, a constant sense of connectedness, influencer tourism -- it all feels so terrible, and it feels like only now are people around me recognizing that we may have dug too deep.
It seems to me that 2020 was the turning point (do you remember what it was like to be a tourist before then?) and that we're deeply nestled in the jaws of the Balrog now.
I'm really not sure what it looks like to climb back out.
The Italians are some of the very best at preserving those traditions. They have strict regulations around what can be labeled prosciutto or parmigiano reggiano and many other products.
Which ironically is why they are being inundated by tourists looking for something “authentic”.
By the way the “Ugly American” tourist was a thing many decades before 2020.
This homogenization is merely a continuation of a trend since the beginning of human history.
Tribes homogenize into villages, villages into cities, cities into states, states into nations, and now we’re witnessing nations beginning to homogenize.
The whole way, it’s being driven by technology (farming, writing, metallurgy, printing, telecommunications, and so on).
I haven't been to Europe since before 2020. I assume we're not nearly as welcome over there now?
We know not to equate the governments' policies with people. Of any country. Don't worry about it.
Seems to me most Europeans are sincerely torn between the flood of dollars Americans bring into their economies and the staggering crowds making it difficult to enjoy their own cities and vacation spots.
Which is the feeling this article is trying to capture.
Not everyone voted for Trump or is waving a shotgun in your face. If you don't visit, the Chinese will. And then they'll be making a replica of the Colosseum somewhere in Zhejiang for the unfortunate ones that couldn't.
I'd say as about the same kind of unwelcome as before. Fundementally the US traveller is the same kind of US traveller as before
But then I don't live in eg Portugal where the effect of US immigrants has been felt more strongly
Most Europeans can separate Americans from their government, but a person's views and behavior matter. Paying customers are always welcome but obnoxious ones, regardless of culture, might get an eye roll or worse.
Yeah but that doesn't mean we also don't dislike people from the US. It's a shock to many but there are Europeans who dislike both US politics and the average US citizen who flashes cash, doesn't learn the language, doesn't research where they're travelling, shouts all the times, spends 1 night per city, and is the kind of traveller in the article, etc etc.
Loudly proclaiming you're anti Trump is not a skip-the-line ticket to acceptance with us all. We also know a lot of people lie about their politics
I understand some people are jerks, but that also includes those who monolithize an entire class of people based on a stereotype.
The Americans traveling to Europe are usually not the Trump voters. There are exceptions of course.