this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
81 points (97.6% liked)
chat
8440 readers
108 users here now
Chat is a text only community for casual conversation, please keep shitposting to the absolute minimum. This is intended to be a separate space from c/chapotraphouse or the daily megathread. Chat does this by being a long-form community where topics will remain from day to day unlike the megathread, and it is distinct from c/chapotraphouse in that we ask you to engage in this community in a genuine way. Please keep shitposting, bits, and irony to a minimum.
As with all communities posts need to abide by the code of conduct, additionally moderators will remove any posts or comments deemed to be inappropriate.
Thank you and happy chatting!
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
even in the realm of travel/trips--i make a distinction between "tourists" and "travelers" in that tourists go some place and get waited on and stay in accommodations, travelers do shoe string stuff, engage in work-trade, home-stays, are in a community for longer--i find it difficult to talk to tourists as a traveler sometimes.
like, i traveled solo on a competitive grant i won (to pay for the $$$ flight) to get to the other side of the planet and took a series of planes, trains, and buses to get to a very remote place, a farming village in some mountains. for almost two months, i lived in some worker housing with a group of locals, only one other foreigner was there and they were from that continent and had emigrated to where we were like 10 years prior. my local language skills were cave man and illiterate, but the other foreigner had good english so it was ideal for immersion. i worked, quasi-not legally according to my visa, for room and workday lunches. it was hard physical labor in a hot/humid climate. over the entire summer, i took a single two day trip to an even more remote island with some unique ecological characteristics, hiked up a mountain on a sketchy forest trail, slept in a primitive cabin on top of my bag because there were monkeys, etc. i bought groceries, sent mail, went to the drug store, had a favorite convenience store snack, and was introduced to little restaurants in my community by my coworkers. aside from my arrival/departure airport flight back to the US, i saw one other honkey in the entire summer, and just on that little 2 day trip, across a quiet restaurant when i was on my little day trip. no clue if they spoke english. i learned an OK amount of the local language, ate my meals and drank after work with my co-workers every night sometimes using paper and pencil with drawings and pictures to communicate ideas. i was so wildly out of place that when i was running errands, little kids and old people would stop what they were doing and stare at me like i was from another planet. even working on the side of the road, random people would honk and wave at me with big smiles. or just look at me like they weren't sure they were hallucinating.
tourists will be like, "oh yeah, i've been there." by which they mean they were in that country for maybe part of a week, staying in an international hotel in the world class capital megalopolis and going to the big touristy restaurants and a few of the big international tourist attractions nearby, taking cabs or hotel shuttles. basically, an experience that might as well be london or nyc or beijing or mexico city. and they'll have spent like $4000 or whatever, and my trip cost me like $250 out of pocket.... which is why i could afford it, since i had about $300 at the time.
that was the most extreme example, but generally if i am making the effort to go to a place, i am going because i am looking to cultivate an intensive learning experience i can't reasonably simulate by watching documentaries/videos, reading books/articles. i am going to read books in advance. i am going to listen to conversational audio lessons of the local language. i am going to figure out a way to travel/live cheaply by staying with regular ass people and hopefully working alongside them. if i can't pull all that off, i want to do some kind of primarily educational slow tour through an institution or an institutionally affiliated fixer. and, because of all this, and finding external funding or connecting it to some kind of institutional/professional development trip, there is invariably a deliverable attached afterward. like writing a 10,000 word paper on a specific topic and/or delivering presentations about the trip to colleagues. and i don't particularly enjoy putting together these deliverables, but it's a reasonable, logical expectation for material support and in the spirit of why i would travel.
we live in a historically unique time that accommodates distant travel, but the material and environmental costs are profound. i think anyone taking advantage of the current infrastructure to go be somewhere and see some things in person should take the responsibility that goes with it. so people who just flit about to have a little treat-eating fancy-lad tour irritate the shit out of me. my traveling was already infrequent before covid. like maybe every few years i would store up the intellectual/emotional capacity to go through all this rigamarole right as some opportunity would open up, requiring me to commit right then. the irony is i am a homebody. there is nothing i like more than just chilling in my own space, lmao. i've only left the country once since covid, and that was because of a family obligation which i tried to resist but was unanimously overruled. and i did my damnedest to make the most of it without being irresponsible, epidemiologically.
anyway, if it ever comes up that i've been some similar place, rich tourists are always trying to relate their stories to me of sipping umbrella drinks on a beach somewhere while indigenous people wait on them and dance/sing for them. to me, those people don't travel. they tour. they're bullshit, it's all mickey mouse, and we have almost no overlap in our experiences or interests. they brag about haggling access to an exclusive lounge, enjoying an expensive treat, seeing an exotic animal from a car, or have their harrowing story of bothering some poor hotel worker to help them find a compatible phone charger or replacement medication. they are unworthy of my stories.
Travelers grindset with a tourists budget is my sweet spot for a trip
I wanna pull my eyes out listening to any of my international tourist friends talk about their trips, like I could show you how to have more fun lighting that money on fire visiting a small no name city one state over but you would rather burn it hanging out in over priced tourists traps in the most Americanized partition of wherever you're visiting
I'm ashamed to admit that I've done a tiny bit of holiday'ing before 2020, albeit within the price range that a teacher could afford. TBH, my biggest issue with it now is being forced into proximity with posh people. They're just more selfish, they let their kids run amok, and they're the last people to do any sort of respiratory disease precaution (although few are nowadays). Also I just don't give a fuck about any of the things they're talking about.
A long time ago I stayed a month with my friend in their small town in China. It was very hard but it was the best time of my life. My mandarin has never been so good. Never saw a single white person.
I feel like this is half of the convos that I'm exposed to with white acquaintances. Not that I've always been a communist, but it's been a real wake-up after I've started to read more theory.
Or seeing an exotic animal in a zoo by another name. Those "animal sanctuaries" that are anything but.
exactly. seeing how people are living is a big one. obviously, it's just one person or the people in a residential area, but that's real compared to staying in the Hyatt where the only locals you see are being paid to make sure you want for nothing while appearing happy.
after a while, rich tourists people equate the culture of a place with the quality of service they experience. "the people are rude" is usually code for "i wandered outside of the playpen and had an interaction with someone outside the tourism sector."