Touristic Ground Zero

Someone asked me yesterday if I would like to live permanently in Edinburgh's Old Town.

Hitherto, I thought I would like that very much. The Old Town has much to commend it. It includes the University, my favourite hipster cafe, excellent bakeries, and good shops. It has Blackwell's, probably Edinburgh's best bookshop. Cinemas for discerning grown-ups are within walking distance.

However, it also has clouds of swarming tourists.

To be honest, the tourist traffic is heavily concentrated between the National Museum and Princes Street. Although tourists do occasionally reach the Brew Lab, they are usually outnumbered by students. They are also largely absent from the upper reaches of Blackwell's, too. However, they choke the George IV Bridge and the Bow and other places where I need to walk to buy groceries, visit the post office, and get back to shelter when it rains.

I never realised that there were this many tourists in Edinburgh in March and early April, time of horrible weather. I thought that the city's appeal to tourists was mostly between May and September.  In August the city swells to double its size. In August about half a million tourists--mostly from England, I believe--turn up for the Edinburgh Festival(s), and I avoid the Old Town as much as possible.

Not usually misanthropic, I found myself today wishing the hoards of foreigners to blazes. For the first time I felt a deep sympathy with an ex-pat acquaintance in Italy who screams "Get out of my way!" at tourists blocking her path when she is in Rome. The first time I witnessed her rage, I was shocked. However, I now understand the motivation although not its underlying cause.

Why be angry with tourists? I'm a tourist myself once or twice a year. I was a tourist in Krakow in January, for example, in my foreign tweed coat  accompanied by my similarly tweed-coated foreign husband. Like  all the other foreigners we ambled through the Old Market and down Ulica Grodzka, went to Wawel Castle, and frowned at the restaurant price levied upon a bottle of water. Did some harried housewife hate our guts as we unknowingly impeded her way to the post office? Has she had enough of the endless procession of Brits trudging through her neighbourhood?

Normally I find it comical to fly from one of Europe's tourist hotspots to another: Edinburgh to Rome, Rome to Edinburgh, Edinburgh to Krakow, Krakow to Edinburgh, Edinburgh (once) to Paris, Paris to Edinburgh. The Edinburgh-Krakow flight at least has the honour of taking Polish workers home to see their families. The Edinburgh-Rome-Edinburgh flights are simply packed with tourists, British and Italian, either on holiday or coming back from holidays.

This is undoubtably good for the economies of all the cities involved. It may even be good for the architectural treasures of the cities themselves. Who knows what buildings have been spared the ravages of time and progress because foreign tourists love them and pay money to see them? If you love your town, it is illogical to dislike its tourists--unless, of course, they are prone to getting drunk and using public fountains and other monuments as urinals. And that would be the British abroad, not the relatively pacific crowd from the Iberian peninsula shouting outside my window right now.

Possibly the problem is that human beings don't like being crowded off their pavements by other human beings standing around gawking and exchanging remarks in foreign languages, the reptile brain being unable to distinguish between harmless travellers and occupying armies. Or possibly the problem is envy, as the tourists are obviously on holiday whereas the residents are not.

I recall one elderly Italian lady outside the St. Peter's railway station in Rome watching the steady stream of us foreigners emerging from the station and babbling past her.

"Che stronzi!" she shouted, an expression one was not taught in Mrs Angelini's Grade 10, 11 or even 12 Italian class.

At the time B.A. and I merely giggled and concluded that la signora was not entirely sane. However, it is possible that fifty years of mass tourism had finally got to the old bird, and she simply couldn't take it anymore.