Fucking tourist

If one has ever lived in a mega-city, or some cute little village famous for a miracle, a cheese or an exceptionally local breed of butterflies, even if just for a month one has had to deal with the tourists. They are the annoying breed of people who come to another country and do all sorts of stupid things... or as Oxford Student's Dictionary puts it:
a person who visits a place for pleasure.

After all you only have a few days to take in everything and decide whether the place was worthy of your visit. If the food is good enough. If the locals are pleasant. If the public transport is reliable. So little time so much to do. Of course you are going to act like a complete moron, because it is not possible to see every famous museum in one day, even if they are on your checklist.

They are the irritating people who stand on the wrong side of the escalator, who walk on the wrong side of the stairs or don't keep up the pace in the underground. They are also the sort that clog the pedestrian crossings, because they decide to check their maps as soon as the light turns green, and God forbid if they may let anyone else get across the street. They are also the boring kind who think that taking their latest facebook update pictures in some stupid location i.e. London Bridge is a brilliant idea and has never been done before.

Yet almost all of us have been tourists at some point in our life. We save up, we travel, and we feel entitled to act as complete utter idiots because, well, do we really need a reason to act like complete utter idiots sometimes? This left me wondering whether everything is opposite in England to other countries and indeed I think it is. Forget that you always need to look right, you have to walk down the stairs or up the stairs always on the left (that is if you do not want to turn into a fucking tourist) and stand on the right side of the escalator while keeping the left clear for the impatient locals. I think the escalator thing is definitely opposite in Paris but I am not sure. It's just one of those unwritten rules. Apparently the train goes on the opposite side as well...

If you are just trying to get around minding your own business you are most likely to run into one of those people no matter how hard you try to avoid the tourist hotspots you will always, always, run into them and that is when every tourist becomes a fucking tourist, because you just had enough.

No matter how many guides there are out there, no one ever pays any attention to the important detail of the do's and do not's. No one cares, they are on holiday, they want to fit in and pretend to be local but they always get it wrong. They stand on the wrong side, look the wrong way, and drag their feet in the underground. They also annoyingly start pestering the ticket offices with their endless questions during the rush hour and they also act funny on the double decker bus. Oh well.

I once had a tourist approached me while sitting on a bench in a park just to take a picture with me, aparently it was because, he liked people...

Though surely to become a local firstly you have to go through the fucking tourist stage yourself...