You have to know what you’re doing. There is no possible way you are just standing there, blithely ignorant of the fact that your khaki-garbed ass is taking up the entire sidewalk while you gawk at the pigeon deterrents on the condo balconies. Furthermore, there’s no fucking way pigeon deterrents are that fascinating. Therefore, I must assume you are doing it on purpose, just to piss off the residents of the very town you decided to drop a wad of cash to come visit.

There are three stages of tourism, and we who reside in tourist towns know them well:

1. The Kid On Christmas Phase – You arrive, flush with the excitement of being in this amazing place that you read about online, fresh from the thrill of telling all your friends about how you are visiting Beer Capital USA (or whatever other epithet said town has managed to earn). You plunge in, sweating and grunting, thrusting your nose into all the shops, monuments, and restaurants you can find as quickly as possible. You take pictures which you will never look at again. You are charmed by our architecture, beguiled by our buskers, and smile happily at all the residents you meet. We smile back. We even let you stop us on the sidewalk and tell you where to go when you’re lost. We don’t do this because we like you. We only do it because we recognize the incontrovertible truth of living in a tourist town: we need your money.
2. The World-Weary Socialite – This usually sets in by day 2. You’ve been everywhere you planned to go. You’ve seen everything you planned to see. You’re here for five more days. You could, of course, go sit in one of the small cafes or coffee shops, chat with the locals, find out about the not-so-well-known local attractions. You could accept a flyer from the sketchy looking guy on the corner, and go watch his spoken word poetry slam. You could go sit in the park, and try to get a feel for what this place really is, what makes it unique. But you won’t. Instead, you’ll go sit in the most over-priced, pretentious restaurant you can find (and thanks for that, we know it’s over-priced, we built it just for you) and bitch about how the food and the service sucks, how you had much better tapas in Barcelona, and how the art museum here isn’t anything compared to the Louvre. And then you’ll go back to your over-priced hotel and watch Pay Per View, while grumbling about how the locals make too much noise.
3. The Zombie – After a couple more days of bitching about everything in sight, you reach this phase. You stumble about our streets, mouth sagging open, eyes glazed, looking for one more hit of the euphoria you felt upon first arriving, but unable to feel it even when the local wildlife bites you on the ass. You go to McDonald’s, because you ache for something familiar. You stand in the hotel parking lot, unable to remember which car is yours, how you escape this hell of your own devising. You walk blindly into the residents on the sidewalk, shoving us out of your way unseeing and uncaring of the mauled babies you leave in your wake. You’re worse than an asshole: you’ve become the Traveling Undead.

I’m sure you’ve seen the bumper stickers which read: Don’t Move Here, or Give Us Your Money and Go Home.

There’s a reason they exist: people like you.

It’s clear you don’t really get much out of visiting here. So do us all a favor, stay home and just mail us some cash. You’ll be happier, we’ll be happier, hell…we can even scale back global warming and the rate of service industry suicide. Everyone wins.