Seeing as we have Dopers living all over the world, we almost certainly have a number living near major tourist destinations or other hotspots. Let’s share stories about trying to get through our everyday lives whilst battling the horde! I’ll start:
I’ve lived in and around Washington, DC for five years. (Hurray!) I came here for law school, and spent my first three years living two blocks from both the Israeli embassy and the new Chinese embassy. (DCDopers: I’m referring to the PRC embassy in Van Ness, not the old one in Dupont). You can imagine that things got … interesting … at times. I remember one winter in particular - I was cold, and hungry, and there was no food in my house. So I forced myself to put on clothes and a coat, got out of my room, and walked out the door -
Chaos. Utter, absolute chaos. A pro-Palestinian demonstration had started in front of the Israeli embassy and looped entirely around the block, both sides of the street. Reductionist rhyming chants abounded - “Palestine is occupied/resistance is justified!” was popular. So were Hamas flags. I shrugged, thought as loudly as I could “Don’t notice the Jewish kid, don’t notice the Jewish kid,” and walked through the crowd in search of milk, cocoa, and pop tarts. And bacon. (What?)
Fun times. And then, of course, there’s a more routine aspect of life in DC: Whenever there’s a Presidential inauguration, and on every July 4th, public transit becomes exceedingly difficult to use. It’s not just that the system gets crowded - it’s that our ticket machines are admittedly a bit counter-intuitive, and unlike New York City, you need to hang on to your ticket to exit the system. So you get massive logjams of confused tourists at entrances and exits. (For extra fun, add broken escalators and aged/obese/exhausted tourists trying to walk up some of the longest flights of no-longer-moving stairs in North America.)
I grew up in the DC area but haven’t lived there for 20 years. I can’t believe I was accustomed to that traffic and driving. Yeah, the Metro system can be real fun when facing the logjams of ignorati. But it beats trying to drive in the District. My dad used the system every day: First the Ride-On bus to Rockville Station then the Red Line to Friendship Heights where he worked. Very convienant if the weather was bad because once he was on the bus he didn’t need his umbrella for the rest of the trip. I only drove into DC once and it was…taxing.
As a teen in the 80’s I remember touristy stuff before security took a lot of the fun away. Going to the Air and Space Museum one weekend, I saw huge lines of tourists pouring out of tour busses and waiting to get in. So I walked around the other side of the building, knocked on one of the glass doors, and a security guard let me right in.
I’ve since lived in small-town tourists areas: Boone, NC and now Fort Myers, FL. It’s funny because in Boone, we called the summer visitors Floridiots but now I’m a Floridiot living in the very place where they winter and I call them Snowbirds. They’re generally old and the stereotype is that they drive SLOW. Up in Boone this was a serious issue since there are few places to pass and once you get stuck behind the 35 MPH Winnebago, you’re screwed. I hear friends down here in FL complain about the slow drivers and I laugh because down here at least one can pass them.
I live in Chicago, about 2 miles from Wrigley Field. You learn pretty quickly to keep game nights in mind, even if you’re not a baseball fan, because the driving gets stupid, and the parking (which is already stupid) gets ludicrous.
What I know next to nothing about, despite having lived here for over 10 years, is The Loop. I can generally find Michigan Avenue without too much trouble (just keep driving east and you’ll run into it) and I know where to find the lake (ditto), The Field Museum, Adler Planetarium and Shedd Aquarium (which are conveniently located near each other on “the museum campus”) and the Museum of Science and Industry, which is further south on Lake Shore Drive, but please, don’t ask me for directions to anything else! I can’t keep the order of the bloody streets straight, not to mention remembering which are one ways and which way they go. I live *near *there, but I don’t spend time there, unless I can help it. And south side? Fuggedaboutit. If the street has no name, only a number, I don’t know it (until you get past 95th and into the 'burbs.)
Out of town visitors means it’s time to go to Giordano’s or Gino’s East for pizza, despite the fact that I don’t really like either of them. But visitors don’t want to go to some great hole in the wall they’ve never heard of, they want one of the big two, even if the product is inferior. I’ve learned not to fight it.
Protests here seem to be fairly small and well-mannered. I’ve never been bothered by them…and they mostly confine themselves to The Loop, anyhow.
I also live about a mile from Blago’s house. There have been a lot of helicopters (noisy!) and news vans around in the last year, which can be annoying if they block the road. I almost hit him with my car when he was out jogging once. I resisted.
I have a buddy who does this and it drives me crazy. He lives in Philly proper, and when I go down having known him all my life we go to this amazing hole-in-the-wall cheesesteak place. Anyone comes down who isn’t there all the time, though? Pat’s or Gino’s. With the crowds, and the admittedly good but not great steaks, and all that.
I don’t live downtown Montreal, and I’m on the not-as-trendy edge of a trendy neighbourhood, so most of the tourist stuff is further away from me. There are a few events that might close down nearby streets, like the bicycling Tour de Nuit, though those don’t happen all that often.
What does drive me crazy, however, is the bloody fireworks at La Ronde. The world-famous International des Feux attracts thousands of visitors twice a week through much of June and July, leading to a severe lack of parking for local residents, thousands of people lining the streets and sidewalks…including setting up lawn chairs in the middle of the road…to get a good view. The city closes down some streets for this purpose, but idiots will set their asses down wherever they damn well please. They actually close the bridge that goes over the amusement park in order to pack it with pedestrians, which is great for the view but sucks terribly for anyone who might want to get on or off the Island, particularly given as how most of the South Shore access bridges are currently operating with reduced lanes due to maintenance, emergency repairs and/or fear of imminent collapse. The traffic hell starts early - around 5pm, so if we want to go anywhere by car we pretty much have to plan to leave before then. I once made the mistake of trying to go to Brossard at about 8pm for a party on a fireworks night. It took me three hours and I was somehow routed onto the Decarie in order to get there from the Plateau/Village.
I love this neighbourhood, but after 5 summers of these fireworks, I loathe them and all the slack-jawed visitors barring my path and preventing me from going home or parking.
I live and work in San Francisco. Specifically, I work about a block from the cable car turnaround (Market and Powell), and in another direction about two blocks from Moscone Center (the convention/trade show site). Moscone Center is where Apple and Oracle hold their big shindigs, Apple a couple of times a year, and Oracle once a year. They block off the streets, block off the park and take it over, and attract thousands of people who have never, apparently, walked or driven in a city before. Worst, though, are the medical conventions. It’s amazing to me how many people I see where I can tell, just by looking, that they are pompous self-important twits.
The cable car turnaround is just good ol’ tourists who come here to escape from the heat. Sometimes they forget where they are and wear shorts, and we locals laugh at their blue knees. Anyway, they aren’t much trouble, because they confine their milling around to just a few areas.
Roddy
I’ve lived in Nashville for … oh … a few decades now. You just learn what times of the year (or certain event dates) to stay away from the downtown tourist honky-tonk zone (which borders the CBD). We also draw visitors who aren’t interested in country music, but are here for historical sites or business or sports events. It’s insane during one week in June when both the CMA Festival (formerly known as Fan Fair) and Bonneroo occur simultaneously.
It’s actually a lot of fun sometimes to go to a place and know that, other than the people working there, you may be the only local in the joint. I enjoy going to a couple of major BBs where visitors ask questions and answering what I can, and giving tips for things to do / places to eat outside the usual tourist circuit.
I live and work in a County that has 4 world class ski areas. Around Christmas time, the visitors can outnumber locals 3 to 1.
Gets pretty crazy. The worst part is that many of them don’t know how to drive in snow. And they are often in rental cars that they are unfamiliar with which makes it even worse.
This is way off the mark but I can sort of sympathize - I live next door to the local high school.
The high school has 2 entrances but they are both on the same road. My neighborhood has one entrance and it’s on the same road as the HS entrances. Oh yeah, the district bus garage is also right here, on the same road.
Since our levies keep failing, there’s no bussing to the high school so every morning there is an absolute clusterfuck of cars coming in, all on the one road. The road we use to exit my neighborhood.
Football games…forget it. People feel they are too special to park in the parking lots figure they should be able to park on the streets of our neighborhood instead. Our streets which are not designed for shoulder parking.
Last year some SUPER special people decided to park on BOTH sides of our streets. I called the cops - there was barely enough room on the street for an ambulance, and forget a fire truck.
It’s fun times here at the high school. But it’s such a nice neighborhood - nobody ever moves out of the neighborhood and there are 4 of us who grew up here and moved back to this very neighborhood. Perhaps we all like to complain about the traffic?
I live in NYC. I spend a lot of time in touristy areas because I love the theater and museums but from Thanksgiving to New Years I try my very best to avoid Times Square and other touristy areas (except for the one day I set aside to go see all the decorations and the big tree, of course.) Christmas in NYC is amazing and all but it seems like the entire world comes here and gets angry at one another for existing while paying out the nose for gifts from Tiffany’s and Sak’s.
I used to work at the Smithsonian in Washington DC. I had the coolest office in the world, in a turret in the old Arts and Industries building reached by a spiral metal staircase. The downside was that all through the summer getting to the staff cafeteria in the Museum of Natural History was always an obstacle course, dodging aimlessly wandering herds of tourists. It’s one thing to move through a crowd when people are moving purposefully in one direction, as they usually are on the sidewalks of New York, but when people are drifting around gawking it becomes much harder to pick a path.
Also in SF but in the Castro, 4 blocks from Castro and Market. Except for the Castro Street Fair and a couple of similar events, the block that I live on is out of the main traffic and parking mess since it is on a fairly steep hill. Mostly you avoid areas that are likely to have too much traffic or too many people at certain times. There’s a festival in Golden Gate Park? Avoid it. It’s Fleet Week? Stay away from the waterfront. Summer’s here? Don’t take the Powell St. exit from the Muni/BART station. Giants playing? Avoid SOMA/ATT Park. Since there are only two freeways into the city, most people have alternate routes worked out to get around.
I don’t live near any of Montreal’s big attractions, but what always gets me is when I’m downtown and I see someone who needs directions (poring over a map, arguing in English/Spanish/French from France, camera, etc.) and I offer to help, and they turn to me with big eyes and ask, their voices quivering with excitement, if I could direct them to the Underground City
I mean don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty cool that we have the world’s largest one, and it’s useful in the winter, but it’s malls. In a tunnel. Don’t you have malls at home? But they act, and the tourist guidebooks promote it, like it’s some kind of wondrous twilit subterranean mystical grotto, possibly staffed by Oompa-Loompas.
A coworker of mine arrived late today due to an event at his daughters school. Apparently the parking lot was full so many of them pulled up on the side of the road near the school.
When he was leaving every car had a parking ticket. He was expecting it to be in the $30 range so he was feeling kind of “yeah you got me” but when he arrived at his car - $100. He says there were at least 30 of them. His suspicion is that the cops and the school split the cash.
My county is spring training home to the Red Sox and the Twins. You always know when it’s spring because you’re always telling people how to get to City of Palms Park. I suspect that will go away next year when the Sox start using their new facility down near the airport.
i’m across the street from the art museum. nearly every parade in phila will have some part of it near or at the art museum. then there is a bike race, any and nearly all events, charity runs/walks, etc. will be around the museum. july 4th is usually a mad house.
the one parade i’m thankful is not around the museum is the mummers parade on new year. from friends who live where that parade marches bemoan the horrible hoards of public urinators that decorate walls and pavements.
Weird. I just had someone say pretty much the same thing to me earlier this week. Or did it come up here? I can’t remember, though I know it wasn’t you! Déjà vu!
When I was in college, I lived in a dorm that was an architectural landmark. The tourist buses would drive down the alley in back of the dorm quite frequently, which was fine. More disturbing was coming out of the shower to meet a horde of BU architecture students tromping down the hallway.
I live in Sydney, and work in North Sydney. I spend my weekends at the State Library of NSW, near the Botanic Gardens and Circular Quay and the Opera House and all that. I occasionally take myself off on nice days to study at Mrs. Macquaries Chair.
Tourists are just a way of life here. (The Matrix fans in front of the fountain at Martin Place? They crack me up.) You can play spot the American by they way they nearly always walk out into traffic. I did it, too.
I only get stabby when they stand there in front of the turnstiles blocking the way into the train station at Circular Quay. There’s actually NOTHING to see there. If you go in and actually wait for the train, there’s views of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. Why are you standing there looking blankly at a turnstile? If you’re lost, go ask somebody or look at the MASSIVE boards that are about three feet back. Ignoring the crowd milling behind you doesn’t make them go away.
Also, the queue in front of Burger King at Circular Quay makes me giggle. You came all the way to Australia to eat BK? Ditto for the McDonalds across the street.
My suburb has a locally well known Thai place, amongst about a million REALLY good Thai places. Everybody who vists wants to go to there. Ugh. Over priced and not all that.
I especially like when the American Navy is in. I just walk right up to them and ask where they are from with my American accent. They love it. I give them directions. That’s heaps fun. I try not to embarrass the ones lined up outside the brothels, though.
I live in Vermont. The whole state is a major tourist attraction. And by tourist, I mean either 1- young people in SUV’s driving like they are still in the big city, or 2-old people driving waaaay too slow trying to look at quaint things.
How do locals have fun? Act nice and give totally wrong directions to tourists. A trip to Bob’s Maple Shack may end up with a brand new Cadillac stuck in the local sand pit. Or oops, I hope they didn’t end up at the abandoned ski hill, heh heh.
Mud season (the fifth season between winter and spring) is nice. Nobody visits then. But, it sadly means most of the restaurants close and take their vacation at that time.
PS- All wheel drive doesn’t mean that you can go the 65 mph speed limit in a snow storm. The staties love to give big tickets for “failing to remain in control” after you end up on your roof in the median.
And then, of course, there’s a more routine aspect of life in DC: Whenever there’s a Presidential inauguration, and on every July 4th, public transit becomes exceedingly difficult to use. It’s not just that the system gets crowded - it’s that our ticket machines are admittedly a bit counter-intuitive, and unlike New York City, you need to hang on to your ticket to exit the system. So you get massive logjams of confused tourists at entrances and exits. (For extra fun, add broken escalators and aged/obese/exhausted tourists trying to walk up some of the longest flights of no-longer-moving stairs in North America.)