Traveller or Tourist?

Well, I’m home. The weather is good: warm and sunny. I had a good trip and came home with a head full of thoughts. A few of them I’ll share here. (A note: I continue to have trouble with transferring pics I take from the iPhone to the laptop vis AirDrop and how they come out. I am trying to fix this.)

I ended up in Paris for five days. Paris is a fairly easy trip from here; it was meant to be included with my next trip for the memorials anyway; I didn’t feel like going some place in the UK (given I’d done London recently to see friends); and it was reasonably easy to organise with little lead-up time. There, you have justification. And I have friends living there which meant I wasn’t on my own the whole time. I am fine with solo travel but have come to the conclusion I like that being broken up with time spent with people I know.

So, yes, Paris. We’ll do a small selection of my fave activities, a bit of food, and at the end some thoughts on the difference between being a traveller and a tourist, and my conclusion that maybe really popular destinations should think about no longer accepting large tour cohorts.

Next week’s post will focus on perfume because, well, perfume and Paris.

Onward.

I liked my hotel which was in the first arrondissement right near the Tuileries gardens and the Louvre. It was a bit unique being located on the top four storeys of an historic building rather than inhabiting its own building. The bottom floors had a couple of lawyers and a company named International Perfumes of Paris. Which meant sometimes the lower floors smelled of perfumes that I thought I knew but could never quite put my finger on.

I metro’d and walked – even the first couple of days when it rained heavily for periods. The weather decided to improve half way through.

Standout experiences: the Lee Miller exhibition at the modern art museum; walking through a number of new to me covered passages and cobbled lanes (see pic); visiting the Place des Vosges park (pics below) and then Carette for hot chocolate, whipped cream and pastries (a saner and slightly less touristy place vs Angelina on the rue de Rivoli); travelling to the east of Paris where my friends live which is a proper neighbourhood inhabited by normal people; wandering around the centre of Paris and admiring the architecture; visiting the Bastille market which was full of glorious seasonal food (the prettiest strawberries I’ve seen in a long time).

Standout food experiences (note — I did not eat a lot of classically French food): black sesame ice cream; pastries (which I brought to dinner with my friends) from Seraphine in the 16^th arr, which turned out to be a very famous place I’d never heard of (it was walkable between the museum and the metro to get me where I was going), especially the airiest, best combo of flavours meringue I’ve ever had; chicken and fig gyoza for dinner one night (which the waiter told me French people eat with white wine); that hot chocolate with whipped cream at Carette – not sweet just lovely, viscous liquid chocolate into which you dumped the cream; the raspberry crepe at Laduree the last afternoon when I was totally starving.

I brought back chocolates from two different shops plus last minute Laduree macarons.

And so to the title of today’s post. I will say up front that my thinking is very jumbled and my writing here is extremely awkward.

So, what does it mean the difference between being a traveller vs being a tourist?

About a day into the trip I shifted to paying much less attention to the objectives I had set and more to just being in the city. I absolutely still had a list of things I wanted to see but the in-between, the getting from one place to another came to the fore. I stopped more to look and stopped more in cafes which meant that movement was verrrry slooooowed down.

One thing I took note of is that Paris, more than my recent experience of London, is a very economically divided city. Alongside high end shops and beautiful old buildings which are kept carefully in decent shape you have people living in tents – on streets like rue de Rivoli. One can choose to try not to see it but it’s incredibly, incredibly there. So, I’m not so sure in this instance that Twain’s comments can apply when you have loads of people following their google maps from the Louvre to Angelina without looking up much from their phones; caricatured, very well dressed older men and women cooing to tiny dogs while drinking wine on café terraces right next to those ubiquitous tents; influencers with selfie sticks recording themselves going into Hermes to be posted later for their subscribers; gaggles of tourists following a guide paying little real attention to getting where they are going – ie, just focused on the objective.

Also, I came away from the trip, as I had from the visit to Prague two years ago, thinking that tour groups should either be banned or severely restricted in size (like, under 10 members) in these old European cities as they completely alter the landscape of a place. Please don’t flame me but if all you get wandering in your group of 20-25 is moving from hotel to Louvre to Eiffel Tower, etc, in your bus/coach you aren’t likely to actually see Paris. It’s a bit like treating a city as a large Disneyland. And large groups of people block pavements without thought. Out in Belleville in the east, not a destination for tourists till quite recently, one morning I followed a tour group up the hill of rue de Belleville — around 18 people — walking in twos like a primary school outing, oblivious to the disruption to regular life around them.

Further, of course, you may want to see specific things as part of any travel but it seems that the destination can disappear under the urge to go from A to B to C so you can then say I saw A, B and C. For some reason I now get Rick Steves’ Paris posts on Facebook and that’s very much the tone of people looking for guidance on their trip (ie, ‘I am planning the Louvre in the morning, then the Musee d’Orsay, then Notre Dame, then the Arc de Triomphe — Is that too much for one day?’ People commenting frequently answer this type of question with ‘Are you planning to eat at all? Do you have any interest in seeing Paris rather than tick-boxing?’)

I can see how this sort of commentary could be viewed as being elitist. For many people they may only visit a faraway destination once in their life.

Also, since the start of the Iran war there have been a number of articles about how this sort of incident is going to negatively affect mass popular tourism, due to costs rising, meaning we could return to more of a situation where travel is mostly for those who are better off economically. But as with many things we as humans have over-done in the past, say, 40 years mass thoughtless tourism has become a problematic issue for many destinations. Something worth thinking about to my mind — but perhaps a bit hypocritical on my part as of course I do plan to continue travelling.

Anyway, there you go. As noted last week in this case a change was definitely as good as a rest and I came home feeling a bit more relaxed and like my brain/imagination had experienced a recharge.

Pics: mine, wiki