On being THAT person

Embracing my inner tacky tourist

Have you ever been an obnoxious traveller? I remember once in Toronto Pearson, I was already exhausted and cranky after a bargain-basement patchwork of homeward-bound flights from Europe, now having to fly back eastward to get to St. John’s. I was in the crowded security area with a full water cannister. When the agent suggested I go pour it out in a washroom, I stared her defiantly in the eye and tossed the entire water bottle into the trash can. Back then, passive aggression was my superpower—too bad it really only worked against my own interests.

Do we still have “tacky tourist” parties, or was that just a quirk of church youth groups in the 1980s? Any excuse to don a costume, am I right? And now, as a grown up, real-life travelling person, I’ve come to see the value of a wide-brimmed straw hat and loose linens. If I were going to create a more authentic costume now, I’d add sweat stains. Authentic costumes, even better than the real thing.

“No tourist escapes cliché.” Michael Crummey says that a couple of times in Passengers. I was given that book in February while I was in Spain. It’s apt that I was travelling at the time, as these poems are about being a stranger in various places. The first half is a series of poems Crummey imagines might have been written by the late Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, had he ever been a tourist in Newfoundland. What a cheeky bit of defamiliarization on Crummey’s part, to write about his home in a foreign persona, using words he imagines were translated from a foreign language.

The line about no tourist escaping cliché appears in one of the “Tranströmer” poems and again in the poem called “Stockholm.”

I guess we all want to be respectable travellers rather than odious foreign consumers. A quick Google search will give you loads of advice on how to avoid being a tacky tourist. Here are the tips in a nutshell: