To be a tourist is almost as bad as to be a terrorist, some smart people say. Tourists are eating, swallowing, consuming zombies who visit attractions and leave a place without understanding a thing about it. A traveller, on the other hand, will drink in the local culture like a connoisseur.
Recently, I was a tourist in New York.
Believe me, a piece of sea foam, à la the end of The Little Mermaid, is all you can be while floating with the crowds on Times Square. Usually all you see are other tourists watching, like you, the jaw-dropping skyscrapers stretching up and up into the sky, the man walking around with a pineapple on his head (see the picture above), and the woman boasting in only a G-string, an ‘N’ on her one um… “cheek” and a ‘Y’ on the other… (unfortunately no pictures of that).
If you fork up $35 for the seventy floors with the elevator in the Rockefeller building, you are still only a tourist. With American efficiency (‘stay two