...travels well?
When traveling it’s important to remember that your vacation destination is someone else’s home/work/everyday life.
Make sure to maintain some dignity and a sense of decorum.
You don’t get any points for blocking sidewalks while you take a hundred photos of the same point of interest. Besides, who wants to be an obvious tourist?
We do.
Americans, that is. Well, we may not want to be awful, but we sure do think we are. In a recent international, self-ranking poll regarding who has the worst tourists we put ourselves in the number one spot.
What’s worse? Canada and Australia agree with us. I’d make a crack about American pride, but I think our willingness to bash our own traveling skills makes that a moot point.
This is a surprisingly humble national moment that I think needs to be acknowledged…and we’re done.
Don’t we know that we’re supposed to be tooting our own horns…literally… in the faces of the people whose country we’re visiting, while we butcher their language, and make them take pictures for us, of us in front of sites older than we can comprehend of historical significance greater than our young nation can possibly understand?
My goodness, what have we become? Where are the ugly Americans of yesteryear? What would they say? After they made sure we removed the lens cap of course.
Perhaps this new-found capacity for, dare I say, self-analysis could be applied to other aspects of national discourse? But how?
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“World’s Worst Tourists? Americans Say…Americans”: MSNBC
…bi-daily smile…
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