Traveler’s Paradox
Saturday, September 29th, 2007Siena’s beauty is easiest to appreciate late at night after the endless herds of tour groups have had their way with the tiny mid-evil town. One night we went out with two Swiss girls, Laura and Nathalie, who we met during a wine tasting at a vineyard in Crete. We entertained ourselves by chatting our way around the narrow maze of streets and getting very lost. Thankfully Siena is a walled city, so we couldn’t stray too far. Eventually we found a place for dinner and drinks where we swapped facts about of our respective homelands and laughed about the selection of American TV shows that make their way over to Europe; the most popular being 90210, 7th Heaven and ER. We suggested they try Seinfeld and Arrested Development for more quality American television. It was nice to show them that at least 2 out of the dozen or so Americans at the wine tasting were capable of communicating something beyond crappy jokes about how drunk they were going to get (or how drunk they were last night.)
Siena was the first place where we encountered tourism gone overboard on such a ridiculous scale. I’ve come to think of the frustration we felt as the “tourists’ paradox.” Essentially Lauren and I are nothing but conceited tourists who hypocritically resent tourism itself. However, it is important to keep in mind the difference between a traveler (what we would like to think of ourselves as) and a tourist (what we are annoyed by.) Travelers try to appreciate a certain culture and really experience it, while tourists just want to look at it as if it were an attraction at the zoo. From the sound of many loud and imposing conversations in Siena, it seemed like most middle-aged Americans thought of Tuscany more as an extension of Disneyworld rather than a real place worth respecting. The tourists we resented were the ones that acted like they were just there to cross Siena off the list of places they’ve been and kill a few days by shopping in the meantime.
Maybe this theory amounts to nothing but the worthless rant of a smug, young, wanna-be adventurer who’s too busy complaining about the over-commercialization of an otherwise quaint Italian town to see that he himself is the cause of his own scorn. Or maybe I am justified in insisting that people should either act like they care about wherever they are visiting or stay at home on the couch. That’s for you to decide, but at least I got it off my chest.
Anyways, despite the aforementioned distractions, Siena was very beautiful and interesting. We bought some ceramic pieces from a local artist whose “contrade,” or neighborhood, had recently won the most important Sienese event of the year – The Palio. Horses from the 17 neighborhoods of Siena bring their jockeys to the central square (Il Campo) for a race to decide which part of town deserves a year’s worth of bragging rights. Her horse had won, so she bragged.
seanaboots