Part of my study abroad trip to London and Rome in September is a series of blog posts about the things we see and do while on the trip. This is the second of four final required posts about the experience, and is about a moment from the trip speaking about the larger experience.
Maybe it is just because I am a Oregonian by birth and have grown up being annoyed at all the emigres to the state cluttering up the road or the landscape with their McMansions, but I found myself at times really sympathizing with the natives of Rome who have to deal with the cities constant flow of tourists.
The crowds from the guided tours at the various places I went were annoying enough, a tour guide with some flag on a stick or such waving it in the air as if that gives them the right to stomp on anyone elses enjoyment of the site we were at. But my favorite parts of Rome weren’t the ones they were at (or maybe, hmm, the places were among my favorites because their weren’t tour groups there) so I tended to tolerate them while I had to and enjoy being away from them later.
But the tourists that really got on my nerves were the ones in line in front of me at the grocery store. High school or young college kids, no self-awareness, no awareness at all of how loud or obnoxious they were. I’d not often seen people actually do the “if they don’t understand English, just speak louder and then maybe they’ll understand” thing but watching them in a pay-by-card lane try to pay by cash, and then not have enough cash, so have to pull out different US credit cards to find one the store would accept, and then get grumpy when they find out they have to pay for the shopping bags.
There was an amusing, to me at least, transition between dread to wariness to confusion when I got up to pay for my groceries after them. I’d been in there a couple of times before already, and had taken the time to watch and listen to what the people in front of me did and said. The lady ringing up my groceries seemed uncertain what to make of me, I was clearly foreign (pale skin, red hair, badly dressed) but I seemed to know what I was doing and knew (at least by rote) the proper responses to the questions being asked.
It was one of the moments that had me feeling like I could learn to live there, to fit in there. Maybe not to be a participant in the culture, lacking family or community ties I imagine I would still be an outsider, but I could at least not be another annoying American tourist giving the rest of the world good reasons to dislike the US by their behavior.