#tourists

I began to think of myself as a perennial tourist. There was something agreeable about this. To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event. ↗

— Don DeLillo

#freedom

I am leaving the town to the invaders: increasingly numerous, mediocre, dirty, badly behaved, shameless tourists. ↗

— Brigitte Bardot

#badly #behaved #dirty #i #i am

To supply people for ages in camps makes no sense... you have to rebuild that cabana that they rent out to tourists on the weekend. They need help getting their fields repaired and their boats repaired. ↗

— Sam Worthington

#boats #camps #fields #getting #help

We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars. ↗

— Anatole Broyard

#history #irony #tourists #wars #win

David Attenborough has said that Bali is the most beautiful place in the world, but he must have been there longer than we were, and seen different bits, because most of what we saw in the couple of days we were there sorting out our travel arrangements was awful. It was just the tourist area, i.e., that part of Bali which has been made almost exactly the same as everywhere else in the world for the sake of people who have come all this way to see Bali. ↗

— Douglas Adams

#tourism #tourists #travel #beauty

In winter I go skiing on Saturdays and Sundays when the slopes are quieter due to changeover day for tourists, and in summer I hike up into the mountains at sunset, just as the village is settling down to dinner. ↗

— Vanessa Mae

#day #dinner #down #due #go

The People's Republic of China has not yet reached the military might of the Soviet Empire. It requires a little more time and a little more infusion of Western aid, loans, technology and the hard currency of our tourists. ↗

— Barbara Amiel

#china #currency #empire #hard #infusion

With everything it has to offer, Las Vegas is an obvious destination for tourists, as proven by the over 40 million visitors the city welcomes per year. ↗

— Jon Porter

#destination #everything #las #las vegas #million

In the middle ages people were tourists because of their religion, whereas now they are tourists because tourism is their religion. ↗

— Robert Runcie

#because #middle #middle ages #now #people

The world does not need tourists who ride by in a bus clucking their tongues. The world as it is needs those who will love it enough to change it, with what they have, where they are. ↗

— Robert Fulghum

#change #does #enough #love #need