Guidebooks, you say?
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I think this book misses a touron chapter explaining how to survive:
- Balconies on Spain
- Mooses and Bears on US
It would be a single page in 72pt Impact with the words: DON’T APPROACH THEM
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Long article but recommended, about what is to live in a tourist infested neighborhood.
Summary:
The people living on the Albayzín (also spelled Albaicín), the neighborhood that faces the Alhambra, are fighting against the progressive destruction of their habitat, as more and more buildings are bought to turn them into touristic habitats. They organized a neighbour union to pressure the city council to limit the impact before the community fabric dissolves completely.
Some select quotes:
For Dieter, Albaicín’s soundtrack is the noise of luggage wheels against the stone streets, and he says suffers every day the lack of respect from the tourists that take photos of him against his wishes and tell him things like “get into your house if you don’t want to be in them” or tell them to “go to the countryside” when he protests against the noise. “This offends me because I worked all my life to buy this house, here is where I raised my kids and now they don’t want to visit with my nephews because coming to the neighbourhood is very inconvenient and this hurts”.
Paz remembers the drugstore, the haberdashery, the grocery shops that provided the day to day necessities for the neighbours. “All of this doesn’t exist anymore. They have completely broken our lives. Every three days we are surrounded by different people, sometimes you’re lucky but others, most of the time, the ones who arrive to the appartment they have a beautiful terrace with views to the Alhambra where they stay for supper and organize parties from dusk till dawn. It’s not that cohabitation with them is broken, it never existed to start with”.
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So sad and awful. Attack of the tourons indeed.
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I’m usually against lynching and defenestration, but can we please do a bit of both? Just a small bit? A tiny itsy bit?
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I know a place that sells pitchforks.
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Come my minions! Rise for your maaasteeer!
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Let’s be realistic here - some enterprising asshole would just turn that into another tourist attraction in no time, attracting even worse tourons.
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Oof, Dark Tourists are the worst
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I mean… back in the day at the height of Jim Crow, lynching WAS an entertainment activity. Hundreds of white people would gather, pictures would be taken, sometimes even turned into postcards, etc. But that was nothing new… prior to the modern era, watching executions was a generally acceptable pastime…
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One of the things I like to tell people going on about “the good old days”.
And that they’d be crawling under the tables of their “betters”, scavenging for scraps of half-eaten food. Or how they probably wouldn’t have survived that bout of whooping cough as a toddler. Or worker’s rights. Stuff like that, depending on the situation, and on just how pissed off I am at the time. Well, you know.
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I always think of that whenever I receive one of those emails or (more recently) memes that go, “Remember when your parents made you go outside? And it was OK to ride in the back of a pickup” etc. etc.
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I lost a 20-year-old cousin who slipped and fell out while riding in the back of a pickup. I remember him every single time I see one of these “remember when” or “we all survived” pieces of shit, and I just want to scream at the dumb fucks who sent it. 
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Or the “lead paint did us no harm” messages. I have a great-uncle who died from ingesting lead paint. Have also known plenty of kids who were killed or seriously injured by farming equipment.
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