Shame that people think this way or rather that people focus so much on the negatives they miss out on the positives.
I travel quite a bit and always encourage / force the people with me to visit museums and cultural highlights of the location because the truth is that only by being in a new city/state/country can you expand your horizons. The only thing I see coming from this anti tourist attitude is more xenophobia from residents and ignorance from would be travelers.
I honestly can't imagine people learning history just by scrapping wikipedia pages and not actually going to the sites that history happened.
I went to Venice during the Winter and the reality is that if it wasn't for tourists the city would be half empty outside of hyper wealthy individuals who own a vacation home there, it's a shame that every other store was a souvenir store but the only other stores there seemed to be Luxury Brand stores that probably wouldn't exist either.
I don't know, I come from a country that thrives on tourism and I definitely understand the hostility, but in the end of the day many cities wouldn't exist without this new wave of low cost tourism.
The thing is, you can't go to most of the sites where history happened. They don't exist anymore.
Want to see where the French Revolution happened? Sorry, Haussmann blew it up and built today's Paris on the rubble. Venice? OK, a few bits of St Mark's basin were there when the galleys came back from the crusades. Dare you to say which bits. Cromwell and the Glorious Revolution? Nup, their Palace of Westminster burnt down in the 19th Century. Imperial China? It fell down and was rebuilt with every earthquake.
Archeologists can go to these places, but they have to work hard for it.
One of the essays in Parkinson's Law turns this into a law of nature. When the grand parliament house was built, parliament no longer mattered, and the country was really run from a dingy shed out the back. That shed was later demolished and a well-appointed cabinet room built in its place, but by that time cabinet no longer mattered, and the country was run by a king.
On the other hand, visiting exotic places makes me curious about how they got that way, which is one way to discover history.
I travel quite a bit and always encourage / force the people with me to visit museums and cultural highlights of the location because the truth is that only by being in a new city/state/country can you expand your horizons. The only thing I see coming from this anti tourist attitude is more xenophobia from residents and ignorance from would be travelers.
I honestly can't imagine people learning history just by scrapping wikipedia pages and not actually going to the sites that history happened.
I went to Venice during the Winter and the reality is that if it wasn't for tourists the city would be half empty outside of hyper wealthy individuals who own a vacation home there, it's a shame that every other store was a souvenir store but the only other stores there seemed to be Luxury Brand stores that probably wouldn't exist either.
I don't know, I come from a country that thrives on tourism and I definitely understand the hostility, but in the end of the day many cities wouldn't exist without this new wave of low cost tourism.