Tourists are in the right place
Rob Long
On a particularly hot and muggy day last week, I was trying to get out of the Union Square subway station, but the top of the stairs was blocked by a family of tourists who had chosen that exact spot to gather and consult a map. Irritated subway passengers, sticky with subway sweat and city grime, snaked past them until one New Yorker (not me, I promise) exploded. “New York!” he shouted, with admirable economy.
Not “Hey! Geddoudda way! This is New York!” Or “New York is a busy town, people, don’t block the subway entrance!” Just a simple, loud declaration of place. And, of course, it turned out that “New York!” was all that was needed. The human corks looked up from their map, got the message, and moved to the side.
POLITICAL INCORRECTNESS IS KILLING COMEDY
August, in other words, divides the world into two basic categories: There are tourists, and there are people who complain about tourists.
The truth is, it’s possible to be both. Barely a week after I shouted at those poor tourists (yeah, it was me, but I think you knew that) I was blocking traffic myself. Navigating my way through a city in Spain, head down and staring at Google Maps, I was unaware that my walk had slowed to a near-dead stop and that people around me were becoming exasperated. It was one of those narrow Spanish sidewalks, barely wide enough for one, with cars and motorcycles zipping by at a deadly speed, so a singular slow-walking tourist can cause a major traffic jam.
People in Spain are more polite than people in New York — or should I say, they’re more polite than I am — so no one barked “Barcelona!” at me. But there were some audible huffs and puffs, and I quickly got the message and stood aside. I found my way and was back on the right path before I fully grasped the powerful symmetry of the moment. I had yelled at tourists in my home city and had been yelled at, in turn, by someone else in his home city.
People don’t give tourists a break, I thought to myself as I walked through Barcelona at a now sprightly pace. That’s what happens when someone treats you exactly the way you’ve treated others — you get philosophical. Aside from the economic benefits of tourism — and New York City and Barcelona must surely rake in some serious coin from all of those visitors — tourists milling around a city have emotional and spiritual benefits as well.
Tourists are funny! You get to see whole families marching around together, and that’s a reliably hilarious sight. There’s always a short-tempered child being dragged along to see the most boring stuff. Someone is hungry and cranky. There’s a cheerful parent pointing out irrelevant sights while the teenager silently notes the cool shops and hangouts to return to on his own when the family naps at the hotel. And there’s always someone saying, “My feet hurt.”
And they all look alike! Tall Dutch families strolling through Washington Square Park like giraffes. English families with pale faces and identically sunburned legs. Korean families with little backpacks with BALENCIAGA emblazoned across them. Middle-aged Americans in shorts and sneakers wearing straw hats purchased 10 minutes ago from a street vendor waiting for the Hop-On-Hop-Off bus. (That last one was me, but I think you knew that.)
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It’s glorious. If you look past the grouchy-lost-hungry-bored, what you see paints an optimistic picture of how things are going in the world in 2023. Families still travel together, still look up in amazement at the Empire State Building or La Sagrada Familia. Parents all over the world still feel obligated to pack their children up and take them somewhere weird and foreign, where the language sounds like gibberish and the food is problematic.
Families — the essential building block of world civilization, the only reliable engine of progress and prosperity — are still sticking together, bravely going on mini adventures, risking pickpockets and hotel taxes and irritable locals. A family of tourists in your hometown clogging up the sidewalks and slowing everything down is nothing to grouch about. It’s a sign that everything is going to be OK.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and he is the co-founder of Ricochet.com.