I've been exploring related feelings in the related "For me, this is just a Tuesday" space. I had started to feel like a food tour group was stalking me personally. My usual Tuesday lunch. My usual Friday dinner. So forth. The first "gut feeling" was irritation. It's a lot of people showing up in a small space with random lectures distracting from whatever I was doing while eating (such as often reading a book).

It took a couple weeks, but I realized that I was the spoiled one and the other side of "For me this is a Tuesday" should be "I'm glad my local businesses are interesting to tours" and "It's easy to forget how impressed I might be with this lunch if I was visiting some other town, isn't it great it can be my 'usual Tuesday'?"

I started listening to some of the lectures. I could easily mock some of them and/or clarify/edit/fix mistakes in them, but also they can still be an interesting bit of perspective, including the way that tourists respond to them. It's fun to have that tourist perspective of the local area.

It's also a fun reminder to do and try more of the tourist things locally. When your "usual Tuesday" is someone else's exciting and desired vacation experience, what else are you seeing with the somewhat dulled eyes of being a local but would greatly enjoy if you thought like a visitor to your own city?

Tower of London is not a touristy thing its a culture thing.

I know quite a lot of all the cities i lived in. I have been a good tourguide to friends and family because you just learn stuff about your city.

I will not go to that one ferris wheel because some company build it, i saw them building it, its in a location which is weird, and why would i go on a ferris wheel in my city?

But everything else? The main castle, yes! The residence, english garden, white rose, german museum, Shirker's Alley, old michael, etc. yes! Have been plenty of times.

This comment resonnate with me and in the last few months that is why I have been working on a side project to "be a tourist" in your own town.

https://www.izeria.com/en

Where you can discover places near you and connect to their history, I have also added some check-in mechanics and quiz to gaming the experience and for to actually go see the place in person.

Think Pokemon go but for Wikipedia places.

I’m routinely surprised by native San Franciscans who’ve never been to Alcatraz, seen Pier 39, or gone whale watching. Yes, they’re touristy things to do. They’re also very interesting and lots of fun!

In case you don't know:

"Tower Hamlets residents visit for just £1

Local residents within the borough of Tower Hamlets can visit the Tower of London for only £1.00."

It's worth a visit being a tourist or a local.

Wasn’t this the original definition of staycation. That you would stay at home and make day trips out to local destinations for a week.

I've lived in London, various places within the M25, for about 40 years now and still walk around looking up and enjoying exploring both new and old places. We do the Hidden City treasure hunts which is a great way of finding new spots.

Tower of London is good, there is so much history in there and a number of exhibitions well worth seeing.

I've done most of the "tourist traps"[1] and really enjoyed them. The London Eye gives you great views, especially at sunset; The Shard (cocktail bar, not done the viewing platform) is a bit expensive and style over substance but still worth doing once; Buckingham Palace is a world class historical living building; The South Bank has a lot going on and also gives great views of London; The Royal Albert Hall is a stunning concert venue; most of the big museums are free.

The one place I've not done as it really doesn't appeal to me is Madame Tussauds.

[1] Compared to other cites apart from the pedal rickshaws and the find-the-lady on Westminster bridge I don't think London is inundated with rip-off tourist traps like many other cities appear to be.

I live in the DC area and it is kind of sad that a lot of people here haven't been to the various Smithsonian museums (which are free) here, or haven't been since they were children.

As a fellow Londoner I can confirm it's worth visiting and the crown jewels are also nicely presented. Don't be fooled into queueing for the bloody tower torture chamber, anything you can see seemed to be a Victorian fantasy.

They have been fracking oil like 15 minutes walk from my previous house since 1986… I just found out after seeing a curious sign on a fence around a pretty secluded terrain when taking a stroll. It only became public knowledge a year or so ago when the government announced publicly that they would continue operations for another x years. Protests are still ongoing. Take more local strolls!

I have a lot of friends from other countries so I've ended up doing a lot of tourist stuff together with them when they've been visiting.

It has been great, gave me another layer of appreciation for my hometown Gothenburg, Sweden.

My grew up on Long Island and not once did she go to a Broadway show. She's a bit regretful about it now that she's moved halfway across the country.

100%. I've lived in Paris well over a year and finally walked up on the Eiffel Tower and I enjoyed it. But of course not in July or August! But being local means you can go on an unexpectedly sunny March weekend.

> For example, despite living most of my life in London, I've never been to the Tower of London. Why would I?

Why wouldn't you?

Note: It's great, you should go.

I lived in Manhattan for a decade and never went to see the Statue of Liberty. And it’s not like I wasn’t doing lots of things and I would go out three or four times a week and I’ve been to all sorts of places in NYC. Just never been to the Statue of Liberty.

> Hiking in the splendid nature, lakes and mountains, visiting touristy places and the overall scenery was something uncool, for old people.

That is an amazing revelation to me.

In my country I can't visit some of the hiking trails I crossed as a child because they've become overcrowded since.

When I went to Switzerland for a contract the first thing I did when I had a free weekend was to go to the peak of the tallest mountain I could find.

I thought it was more of a thing in Switzerland.

That was my take, too.

The advice isn't to literally live a life in the day of a local, it's to ask the locals what the interesting things to do are. Nobody is actually suggesting that you go hang out at an office for 8 hours, stop by an affordable grocery store and then watch Netflix.

E.G. People in Seattle will not tell you to go to the space needle or to Pike Place Market (at best you might hear that you should go at least once). They will tell you to ride a bike from Lake Union to the Locks on a sunny day, and you will have more fun and see more than fighting the crowds at Pike Place.

There is a reason why touristic spots are touristic spots, even before the rise of social media and influencers. The reason is that they are usually the nicest spot in that zone.

Same reason why rich people buy (and inflate its value) land for holidays homes in certain places and not others. Because those are nicer places, where the landscape is beautiful.

The point is that the locals tend to think that spots which are actually generic and uninteresting are great because the mediocre imported cuisine they serve is different from the local food or their friend works there, and that spots full of influencers which are actually great aren't that interesting because they'd personally never consider taking a bus to the centre to queue up with tourists to enjoy a rooftop with a view when they can have coffee with their friends in their own suburb at a chain they've got a loyalty card for. Sometimes seeing what banal stuff people think is amazing and what beautiful stuff they take for granted is educational in its own right, but it's not necessarily a better way to plan a holiday than a guidebook.

You say that, but I’ve more than a few times found myself scratching my head when a local person has not known basics about where they live - everything from not knowing that there’s a supermarket one block over, to having never heard of the culture whose ruins litter their city.

I think the worst local advice I ever had sent me on a 3000km detour and got me interrogated by the FSB - basically it was “oh don’t go south of the Aral Sea, the road is terrible, you will die” - turns out that the road north of the sea had already been demolished so a new one could be built, and the one south had already been completely rebuilt.

Honestly, most locals don’t know shit about where they live.

The reason people use "When in Rome..." or "do as the locals do" is because that's how you get an accurate taste of what life in <place> is like. If you don't want to experience a glimpse of life in Paris, then sure go eat at a tourist trap. The quote below from TFA is an inadvertent own goal, I think:

>But today I imagine you visiting my hometown and spending a day with the locals. You’d probably end up watching reality TV, ordering some ‘New American’ food on Doordash (it’s a cheeseburger with Korean Kimchi Glaze™), and sports betting from your phone.

Perhaps TFAuthor hails from a place that isn't interesting enough for tourists to visit. Lots of small towns across the USA and Canada don't offer any compelling reason to visit unless you have relatives there.

There's a reason tourists flock to New York City and not to Schenectady.

> spots that are actually great but not hyped up

One phenomenon I noticed is that unpaid things (even if they're world class museums) often get left in the shadow of others that sell tickets - these get packaged in "city pass" cards, etc. and get more exposure from their selling.

That could well be my town. Much of what you say is true. The main street, which was hard hit from a shopping center taking all business away from the city centre, has two nice (non chain) coffee places. There's also a (non chain) Italian place which is excellent. But there's also, I think about 5 pure tourist tat shops. One with a very prominent AI generated moose. Those are what make money. They extract the value that the actually good places create, and in return they drive up rent for the good places.

One of the reasons the shopping center did so well in the first place, was that they could charge lower rents for shops which bring more value to the center than they capture themselves (such as cafes) and higher rents to shops which make money but whose social contribution is low or negative (like betting shops or tourist tat shops).

Yeah, I felt this was obvious as well. I like to "do what the locals do" when I travel, but by that I don't mean work during the weekdays of my vacation or spring clean an apartment. And if I say "do what the locals do" no one else would think I mean that I worked or did house chores.

No fair! I live in a place with lots of tourism and the roads are terrible.

While the folks like Bourdain did romanticize tourism, and TV shows are known to regularly kill businesses that don't know how to manage the increase in customers, they did at least project the proper attitude of embracing the differences in other cultures when they traveled to places.

The current issues with tourism are significantly more to do with "influencers" and social media. Many places are overrun by people that are just there to get their photos and have zero interest in engaging with the culture or treating locals with respect.

Its shocking how different some places have gotten due to "influencers". Last year I was in Kuala Lumpur for a few days and took the person I was with to a bunch of the places I had visited when I was there a decade ago. It struck me when walking around a couple places that there are photos I took during my first trip that would simply be impossible to get today because of the number of people in the way.

I used to live in Bologna, Italy and the variety of "foreign" restaurants there is amazing.

Quotation marks because there's always a (not exactly obvious) Italian twist to these places.

The quirkiest example of this would be a small chain of restaurants named "America Graffiti" (yeah). Overall theme is a 60s diner. It's not present anymore in Bologna, but there are several in neighbouring towns.

As someone who's traveled quite a bit, I love doing this but I should also warn everyone to make sure they're in a place where it's safe to do so. While most tourist destinations are mostly fine, you don't want to end up in a random shady neighborhood in certain cities - even touristy ones (Barcelona, Paris, etc). It doesn't matter that 20 years ago you did it and it was fine, things have changed.

I did that once about twenty years ago. I was in Seoul for a few days for work, and I had the last day free before my plane out in the evening. Without checking a map or guidebook, I got on the subway, rode a few stops, went up to street level, and wandered around; I repeated this four or five times. Other than one nondescript office district, every area I emerged in was interesting: a wholesale textile market, an upscale residential neighborhood, a lively commercial district. Though I don’t know the names of the places I visited, I still remember them all these years later.

What are some of your experiences with this?

I can say I've had good and bad - I've wondered through cities with no direction and found -- nothing, two that come to mind are Paris and Barcelona. I'm sure there is interesting stuff to be found here and there but mostly, outside of the main attractions, I found the rest not much more interesting than American suburbia. Yes, I'm glad I saw it to basically see that "life is life". There's the interesting coast, or the restaurant row that's already on the tourist map, then there's the living areas where every block or two there's a convenience store, another non-descript cafe, a hair salon, etc... Maybe once in a while something sticks out but mostly not.

To be clear, I found both cities amazing. But, the "this city is amazing" parts are the parts listed as must visit. The "get lost parts" less so, with a few exceptions.

I've had more luck doing things further down the list. On 3rd or 4th visit, I'm not doing the top 10 most popular things. I'm down on 40th or 50th or 100th.

This is one of the only sensible comments in this entire thread. Just go wander, talk to and observe people, etc... I've traveled extensively and all of my best experiences are from this sort of thing.