Tourism reconsidered considered again

 

What better time for a repost than when I am heading out on the road! And I have found one that came from the perspective of an occasional traveller some years ago (the traveller being ME) providing an interesting (to ME) perspective now that I am a person who sort of lives in the situations described below. Though with more time than I have now I might have a few small notes and plenty of embellishments on this, I happily enough am willing to stand behind it. 

I think it was called something like "The Disneyfication Venice":

When the cry goes up that some storied vacation destination is being ruined by its visitors I have some sympathy, but I am also skeptical. My sympathy for the residents of said places, Florence, Bruges, Venice, Barcelona, is tempered by the fact that those people do get to live there. Those are beautiful, interesting places! I am also wary of this impulse to blame the visitors to begin with. While visitors have a huge impact on these cultural wonderlands, they don't actually have very much power as to how they are run. That power lies more with the local government, which, hopefully, in democracies such as these, are chosen by the people who live there. The tourists don't get a vote. The impact of visitors is, I believe, almost entirely controllable by the cities themselves.

Now the elephant in the room is that there are some people making an awful lot of money in places like Venice or Florence. And if there are dire problems with the disappearance of Venice as a real city it probably comes down to them far more than to their largely goodhearted and well-heeled tourists. But for the sake of brevity and simplicity I am all for setting that aside here. Perhaps we'll revisit it some other time. But today we are simply taking a practical look and are making our first steps towards fixing problems.

And as our test city we will use Venice, as it is the most impacted, decultured, and Disneyfied city in all of Europe. Also the fact that it's an island works easily with our plans.

Before I go any further I want to say that this is probably going to horrify you. So brace yourself.


1. Admit that Venice is a Disneyland of sorts, and start treating it more like one.

Venice has long since been subsumed in its tourism. Instead of trying to manage all the greedy cash grabbing of businesses and the tourists seeking cheap and easy thrills all while trying to pretend Venice is a real Italian city, Venice needs to lean into what it actually is and leverage that to make it more what it wants to be.

2. Charge an admission fee.

I like a couple different scenarios here. On the one hand a flat rate of 100 euros per adult to enter Venice seems reasonable and especially effective with what might be Venice's biggest problem; day visitors. I like even better a larger entrance fee, 250 euros or so, that would make all transportation and museums free to anyone in the city, which would further benefit locals. A flat fee is essential, having the effect of encouraging longer visits and taxing short ones. Making the entrance free or cheaper for young people, students, and locals should be worked in as well.

3 Tax policy

This could get complicated and be applicable to a far broader array of cities than just the heavily touristed ones. But we can start with the more businesses a person or company owns the higher their tax rate should be. If an owner does not live in Venice they should also pay higher taxes. Air bnb's and partially unoccupied second homes should further be taxed at special, higher rates. The main goal here is a capitalism that hobbles big businesses and corporations and all that is generic, lowest common denominator, cookie cutter culture, but, in the best spirit of capitalism, invites small, unique, clever, and quality, local, mom and pop businesses to get modestly rich.

4. Spend all that money!

All of this creates a lot of new money for Venice while also easing the crowds a bit. This money still needs to be spent properly. Here are a few ideas:

     A. Subsidized high minimum wages and housing for people who work in Venice.
     B. Lots of very good, well tended, free public bathrooms. An excellent plan for any popular city that doesn't want to smell like pee.
     C. More civic employees working unexciting jobs at very good wages in an extraordinary place: garbage pickup, vaporetto drivers and mechanics, janitorial work, information kiosks, first aid, customer service, inspectors, and security. This will not only make the city safer, cleaner, and easier to navigate and enjoy, but it will help contribute to a local economy and community of people working and living in Venice.
     D. Longer museum hours. Spread the joy.
     E. Grants, opportunities, and tax breaks for both local craftspeople and artisans, and for more practical shops and stores.


And that's my plan for a start. What does it do? It makes Venice a little less crowded due to some people not finding the steep admission worth it just for a day or two. It creates or encourages a middle class local culture that lives, works, and is invested in the city. It encourages a more inventive tourism culture. It makes the city better kept, easier to enjoy, better spread out, and more like a natural city, even if it isn't one.

It's worth a try before it sinks.

Living the dream

 

As we officially put into motion in this coming week a plan to move from this famous city to perhaps another more suited to us, maybe Montpellier, maybe not, I can't help starting to wistfully reflect upon our time here. Much like when we left Saint Minneapolis a year ago, and I was wandering around like Frodo before he fled the Shire, constantly muttering "Lo, I shall never look down upon this storied river again!" and silly things like that, I am now looking at buildings and across at vistas with a similar early nostalgia. "Lo, shall I gaze upon this frilly Belle Epoque apartment building ever again?"

Well, yeah, probably. But at some point, no, never.

Life, eh?

One thing that crazily occurred to me today, which vaguely shocked me because I don't really think of us as people constantly making our dreams come true is, weirdly, we do have a tendancy to make our dreams come true.

Five or six years ago we came on a vacation to this city. We stayed for a couple of weeks. We had a bit nicer apartment than this, but not wildly out of the range of it. We shopped in the markets in the morning. We explored the city, even once taking a train out to Menton to check that out. We went to cafes. And in the evening we tended to sit around a kitchen table eating things we collected, drinking, playing scrabble. 

This is mostly what we've been doing now since December.

As one does, we, at the time, on vacation, were all like: We should move here and do this all the time!

And so we did.

The active lifestyle in Southern Europe

 

Having been out in the hot Mediterranean sun during our grand burst of August adventurousness, with trips to Italy, 1,000 year old olive trees, small town festivals, and Roman ruins, I find myself struggling with how to tell you all about it all. And for each day we head off somewhere else, and I come back with another hundred pictures and twenty different stories to tell, I find myself then starting from scratch with a new plan and a longer list of things to prepare.

And then I remember.

This is clerkmanifesto: Where all plans fail and all plans triumph!

No, I'd rather not explain that at the moment, but thank you for your interest.

But that doesn't mean that I won't be showing you a hundred paintings of Genoa made in layers and through a process involving hours of hand drawing according to my original plan. Remember, all plans triumph here! Given the quite ample time we have left until the heat death of the Universe (which, with the heat of this summer I am not nearly so opposed to) there is plenty of time for all those vast pictures of Genovese Palaces and magnificently grimy alleyways I have been working on. It's just that I might decide to first tell you about what a revelation the focaccia is in Genoa, which is the home of focaccia and the home of pesto too. Or I may stop to tell you how much I despise Duolingo with my whole heart sometimes and why I still use it. I could talk about the terrible crowds in my city in the Summer, the women's tour de France, or, I don't know, I could suddenly get involved in making an AI video. At which point, bam! The heat death of the Universe will be here and I won't have finished those hundred paintings. Which, fair enough. After all, remember:

 All plans fail here at clerkmanifesto.

But then so do waves, eventually,

It doesn't mean we can't ride them.

Gathering for Genoa

We're not going to be in Genoa for a terribly long time, just a few nights. But it still behooves me to get ahead here on clerkmanifesto so your steady daily reading isn't interrupted for a single moment. For longer transitions than this I have come up with all kinds of solutions; for instance when we moved to France via a five week trip to Japan I made up almost a hundred posts ahead of time, and then when I was in Japan I added in content from my phone as I could. Once, on a month long trip to Rome for our 25th anniversary I posted fictional accounts of what I thought would be happening, but wrote them all before it happened. Unfortunately this was lost on some readers, and upon my return I found myself at work having to correct the record some. Although, and anyone who has ever been on some fabulous vacation knows, no one really cares very much.

I mean, other than you. Which does you credit.

Of course, a four day trip hardly merits all this fuss. I have often been many days out ahead in my clerkmanifesto postings. Just not lately. Lately I do my French practice every day and write my post. Which is maybe why I'm talking about this now.

Also, I mean, I have to talk about something. And as noted I'd like to do it five or six times today, if I could.

Fortunately too, to help it all along, I have various photography projects to pull from, so they might be able to come into it too. 

For instance, check out these flowers!

Going to Genoa!

 

After a lot of back and forth about it, we finally decided to go to Genoa, Italy for our anniversary.

We weren't sure, maybe because it sounds great but a bit skeevy.

Despite having been off on small and large trips to more than twenty cities or villages here in the south of France (and once to Monaco, and once just over the border to Ventimiglia, Italy), we do carry around a small sense of "Weren't we supposed to move to France and have all of Europe right at our fingertips?"

But at the risk of being on the one hand obvious, and on the other hand crass, Europe is big! And going places costs a lot of money! This trip going to the nearest big city in the absolute nearest country to us for a few nights is pretty reasonable, but we are old age pensioners now! Which means we could go on twenty trips a year timewise, but even modestly done those would add up to being a ton more expensive than one annual, lavish saved up trip of worker bees maximizing our precious days off.

So, there's some balance to it. And our best trick so far has been going for the low hanging fruit. Thus the day trips to everywhere interesting we can on the Cote d Azur, with an overnight here or there, scouting places to live, and even a little visit with the darling cousin and his darling dog in Montpellier.

 And now we stretch our legs just a tiny bit: Genoa.

But it's not much of a stretch being just round the coast from here. Our round trip trains for two come to about 120 euros and we can get there in a few hours.

Genoa is the type of city we never would have gone to. There would always have been something more appealing to people flying across the Atlantic. It might have caught our eye with its rich history, palaces, possible Caravaggio (its provenance is questioned) and saucy accolades of being the best rarely visited city in Italy. But still, Genoa?

And yet now it is the equivelent of our taking a nice trip to Des Moines, Iowa.

I love Des Moines. But isn't Genoa Italy more interesting and exciting than Des Moines?

Probably.

I guess we'll see.

After many fits and starts we finally booked this trip today. So I looked up some interesting things about Genoa to spark your interest:

It has a huge Medeival city center, possibly the largest in Italy. It is filled with fascinating winding streets, fecal matter, elaborate palaces, and drug addicts.

Blue jeans are from there! The very word "Jeans" comes from "Genoa"

Hmm.

That's about it.

It actually sort of reminds me of Des Moines, just a bit bigger, with more focaccia, and thousands of years older.

We'll probably manage to have some fun.

St Laurent du Var with bathroom pictures

 

It has been too hot to go on any real adventures here in France. I hope that hasn't taken too much of the spice out of clerkmanifesto for you. I've tried to make up for it by converting my pictures of flowers into Dr. Seuss versions for you.

I have now done this 3,748 times.

And then...

AND THEN!

We had a doctor appointment in St. Laurent du Var!

I know it's not far away, but...

1. It is an out of town adventure!

2. Maybe I could take some pictures of it and convert them to Dr. Seuss versions?

3. I'm almost certain this Dr. Seuss thing is just a phase and eventually we'll work our way through it. This may help us work our way through it!

4. It's still in the nineties mostly here so this was probably our biggest chance for advenure anytime soon.

And what an adventure!

Actually St Laurent du Var is only two train stops away from us and is not... great. More than once on this trip I thought "What a pit!" But! 

It has a large mall on a beach. 

And after we walked endlessly, half lost on pedestrian unfriendly, baking hot streets to find an eye Doctor who had mysteriously moved her office there, we finally made our way to their ratty beach on the far side of the airport from us. This beach was conveniently in front of the mall. So after the beach we went into the mall, which is always a bit like going home for us. It was also, mildly, air conditioned! We shopped in it unsuccessfully for a while, and then we had a drink that spilled over into a really nice lunch.

Oops, I think I just gave away the whole story.

Fortunately I have pictures. These pictures have naturally been Seussified, and though they are hardly comprehensive as an account of the journey, you already know the whole story of the trip, so these with a bit of commentary ought to fill you in the rest of the way.

Feast your eyes:

I did not take pictures of the more private and often ugly Doctor going part of the trip, except, there was this figure on a shelf behind the reception of the opthamologist that reminded me of Doris the Alien. So here's one for you.

We made it through the hot city to the beach. Here's my shadow on the beach:

And then from the shore this is looking back at the Cap 3000 mall.

Looking back another way from the beach was what looked to be an enchanting old hill town. I really want you to know that this is NOT indicative of the charms of St Laurent du Var. In fact, these pictures are making everything look way prettier. Though the town did look intriguing, though far away.

On the (hot) beach I saw what looked to be swans! In the ocean! I walked down towards them and found the prettiest area of the beach was closed to access because it was a bird nesting site, so I just peered in longingly.

Then I took some pictures of swans from a legal distance so as not to have my French visitor's visa voided.

We're almost at the end now. What a journey! I didn't know that you would want to see pictures of everything on this trip, so much of our mall wandering will have to go undocumented. But when we made it to "The Garden of Crepes" or "Le Jardin du Crepes" inside the mall, to have beers, it turns out, at the bar, I came to my senses and snapped off another photo of our restaurant. It gave us fond memories of The Rainforest Cafe in the Mall of America, but with better food, which we decided to eat some of after the beer.

And that's about it, except for one last thrilling surprise...

Pictures from the bathroom:

Sometimes you're on one train, sometimes the other

 

I'll show you the pictures first for a change. 

They're really both the same scene, trying to get it right, two versions if you will:

I was thinking about how it is here in this city, living in a vacation wonderland. I remembered an old Woody Allen movie that made a tremendous impression on me: Stardust Memories. In one particularly magnificent scene, the main character is on a grim train, full of disconnected, strange people in a bleak and worn setting. He looks out the grimy window of his old train and sees into the train on the next track, going the other way. Richly lit and luxuriously appointed, this train is full of beautiful people, celebrating, partying, and drinking champagne.

My unfortunately Eeyorish disposition has always been prone to feeling like this, that somehow I am on the far worse train, but I think the feeling comes up a bit extra here. People are having a good time here! With the false richness of vacation they have entered into a starrier version of the world, and my city invites it. They have no obligations, plenty of money in their pockets, and no concerns for the future.

 There is so much made of how unhappy locals in popular European tourists towns are getting. They are increasingly displeased with tourists' loud, disrespectful, and drunken behavior, with the way that the proliferating airbnbs they stay in have blown up the local rents, and with how their foreign tastes erode the local true culture and cost of their city. And while I think there is real merit to their complaints (though even within that there is the usual misdirection of blame that should be levelled at the local rich, the ownership class, and their local government more than the tourists), I think there is also a certain amount of understandable jealousy: "Who are all these people coming to the city where I work, am sick, have plumbing problems, keep to a budget, etc, who get to do nothing here but have a good time!"

We're retired, as you know, and it is hard sometimes to separate out how much we are tourists here and how much we are simply everyday residents in this city. It comes and goes. I think even for people born here there can be a little of both sometimes.

Sometimes we are sipping champagne on the beautiful train and, sure, it can be wonderful.

But sometimes too, I'm just looking longingly into the light, on the way to the Carrefour Market, to get more toilet paper, and maybe a toilet plunger, if they have one.