Given that, I’d say the opposite is true: Complaining about tourists makes sense. They commit more social errors than the rest, due to a combination of ignorance and preoccupation. It’s the complaining about the subsequent complaining that seems silly. If you want to say that there is no valid complaint there, then you’d have to show either A) tourists don’t do that, or B) it’s not annoying. Of course, you could always shoot for C) it is annoying, but you shouldn’t say so. But that’s ridiculous, this being the internet and all.
But these arguments go round and round in this place. The next guy will go “Oh yeah? Well, why are you complaining about the complaining about the complaining?” and someone will respond “Is that a complaint?”
How many tourists do you really come across in a big city? I live half my life in a town with 15,000 permanent residents and at any one time about 30,000 tourists (in the tourist season), I can’t say they cause me any trouble apart from making the roads busy.
Plenty. Of course, I do also use a major train station to get to and from work every day, and have for over a decade. Same said train station also has Amtrak service, so I see a whole lot of tourists.
I just thought of something - one type of tourist/traveler I see a whole lot of is Amish people. (I’m pretty sure it’s Amish versus similar groups; the style of dress matches closely.) And I never have issues with them standing around gawking and blocking the path for people trying to get through. You’d think if any group would be confused/lost, it’d be someone who’s Amish coming into a big train station in Chicago, but nope.
(It probably helps that they don’t have cameras. )
I lived in DC, and for several years I worked right down on the Mall among the museums. There was only one way in which I would not accommodate tourists – I wouldn’t stop to keep out of the pictures they about to take. If I did, I would never get to my next gig. So I am probably in the background of about a hundred million pics snapped on the Mall.
You know, while I always try not to block people having their picture taken, I never consider it my responsibility to stay out of the picture’s background. I’m local color, damn it!
That’s true. But on DC’s mall there are so many tourists stopping to snap pics, and so many other tourists stopping to try staying out of the way of other tourists’ pictures, that on some days they they block the pathways every few feet. I had to constantly navigate around these knots of people to keep moving, and eventually I gave up trying to figure out how to stay out of the shots. I just went the most direct route I could.
)