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A Perpetual Tourist
Contemplation.It’s amazing how touristy Florence is; even now in late October. And now that I’ve been living here for the last two months, I would like to believe my role in this particular society has gone from being a tourist or “sightseer” in the front region to a participant in the back region. One way that’s helped me feel a bit more immersed is by doing a home stay and actually living with an Italian family. Still, I can’t help but feel sometimes like an outsider still. An uncultured American who could never truly understand.
If I reflect even more on my life and my “nomadic existence” I think I’ve been a perpetual “tourist” of sorts. With each new place and each new community, I’ve been able to experience a vast range of lifestyles of which I couldn’t say one was necessarily mine. Though I was born in the South, I couldn’t say I understand Southern ways at all. I’ve lived on the West Coast in both Colorado and Washington and have never felt entirely at home there. With the East Coast, I’ve lived in the remote parts of the Pocono Mountains, the suburbs of Virginia, and now in the greatest metropolitan in the world, New York City. Having lived in Germany at one point and Korea in another, I know how it feels like to be the “American” who doesn’t quite fit in but isn’t just a visitor set to leave in weeks or even months.
Reading Dean MacCannell’s article made me a little sensitive to my own plight for true authenticity and intimacy. And perhaps that’s why traveling as an actual tourist has always been such an exciting thing for me. Even though I realize that it’s all fairly “fake” when I visit a city and all I really see are the major tourist sites, I still feel a strange connection to the place. That at some point in history, those sites were made to offer some insight to society and culture.
It's so interesting to read
It's so interesting to read about your experience living in so many different places. All that travel seems exciting to me, but I think it's easy to forget sometimes that it also means not necessarily having one comfortable, familiar place (even if, in my case, that place is New Jersey). I guess being a "tourist" for a little while is a way of accepting the unfamiliarity of a new place.. I was in Florence for a few days this summer, and it was packed with tourists; it wasn't ideal, but at the same time, it made me feel more comfortable going sight-seeing and pulling out a map in the middle of the street and being a tourist myself (which of course I was, whether or not I wanted to admit it). Also, have you eaten at Il Cantinone? It was my favorite restaurant in Florence.