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March 06, 2003
tourism
When I first moved away from home and went to College, I found out that my hometown was quite a star among my fellow New Jerseyans at Rutgers. At freshman orientation, the first question asked was always "what exit?", which I found quite strange. I found out later they meant what exit on the NJ Turnpike. It seemed that was the way most folks from north Jersey communicated where they were from. And farther south it was the parkway exit. Since I never knew what my exit was, I would just tell them my hometown's name, never expecting anyone to have heard of it. And even though I am from a very small town, they always knew immediately where I lived. Indeed most of them had been there. Their families took them "down the shore" as kids for the summer, their family might have even rented out a bungalow there for the season. Pt. Pleasant is just one of hundreds of seaside resort towns along the NJ coast, but I started liking the fact that people knew where I was from, even though, growing up, I wasn't always happy about the tourists coming down and taking over my town every summer. (The local negative stereotype tourist from NYC/North Jersey was known as a "bennie", people used to have bumper stickers that said such charming things as "bennies go home", although I doubt they still do.) As I got older I realised how much money they brought in, and I knew just how much money by waiting on them in restaurants and bars. It was pretty much the best paying job you could get.
So as I walking on the beach in Sarasota, enjoying a beautiful balmy morning before I had to begin the laborious trip back to London, I wondered why my mother chose to move to such a place, so similar to a town she has just spent over 30 years in, a touristy seaside resort. Why not live someplace quieter and less over run with tourist-based businesses? Well, one of the things I always like to remind myself of when tourism becomes annoying, is that if people want to visit, if must be a nice place. If there's no tourism at all in your town, chances are it's probably a shit hole (sorry!). Hey, it makes you feel a little better when you have to wait for a table at your favourite restaurant. And really, it doesn't seem like there are too many places left that don't have some kind of tourism anyway. Even when I was living in West Virginia, not the most bustling locale, there were little bed and breakfasts and outlet malls that catered to the big city people looking for a quaint county weekend getaway.
But growing up with tourism also means I have a home grown taste of tourist-itis. In San Francisco, they were easy to avoid for the most part (anyone wearing shorts), they stuck to the theme park aspects of the city and rarely strayed. In London it's pretty much the same thing, I don't live in the town center so I'm fairly immune from seeing them everyday. I still manage to run into a family with a cam corder and limited English skills while walking the dog in the park every now and then. I can't say my dog minds being the attraction of the moment. In Amsterdam I hated being mistaken for a tourist, and I tried to learn some Dutch to add a little distance from them, but being that my Dutch was atrocious it didn't work too well.
Its kind of a love/hate relationship most places have with tourism. On the one hand they bring in loads of cash, and keep many industries running. Places all over the world with limited natural resources are beginning to cash-in on eco-tourism. It's very easy to have a cynical view of tourism, because for the most part the majority of people really don't want to travel and experience new cultures and landscapes. They want pictures to take back of them standing in front of landmarks, they want to eat the same food they can get back home, they want to see the sites through the top of an open-air double decker bus. They don't want to have to work too hard while they are on vacation, and there will always be companies that cater to them. But tourism also brings a sense of civic pride, however easily attained, to the citizens of the place visited. The fact that ordinary people want to be driven around your town and see things that you see everyday can be uplifting. People will pay extra money to dine in a crappy restaurant with the same beautiful view that you take in on your morning run can make it all the more beautiful. Maybe that is why my mom is drawn to such places (or maybe the tourism is just a symptom of a beautiful place, as I said earlier), because you only have to live there a short while before you start feeling glad you do. If only there wasn't so many tourists!
I started writing this on my laptop at the airport in Tampa, Fl while enjoying a lovely junk food lunch of taco bell and krispy kreme. I never finished it because when I got home my laptop's hard drive started making loud noises in its final fight for life. Because of that I am now the proud user of a shiny new i-mac*y, as my loving husband couldn't bear to see his beloved go without a pc for less than a millisecond (bless him!). And he also managed to recover almost all of my data from said dead hard drive (bless him yet again! I know there are other reasons I married this man, but right now him being a computer god is coming in quite handy), but since we have decided to "switch" I don't have use of Photoshop (and other software) so I won't be posting any photos until such things are remedied. I didn't take that many photos in Florida anyway, as I was too busy relaxing on the beach getting a nice sunburn.
Posted by shannon at March 6, 2003 04:15 PM