This advice is so unnecessary to the point that it sounds weird. I lived in a touristy place, and trust me, as a tourist you won't be doing what locals do by default. No special decision, no efforts needed at all.

On the other hand, too many tourists is a thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMYbYuhKFdw

Okay, okay, but Slay the Spire 2 is a fantastic game though and I've had an absolute blast playing it.

Do what you would do at home on a week off.

I spend summers in Central Portugal after enduring the winter of Canada's North. Sometimes my Canadian friends want to spend a couple of days in Portugal and ask me what's for a good place to visit, or a good attraction to go to, etc. I always answer the same:

I have no idea. I don't go as a tourist. I go to live in my family's home town for 6 or 7 weeks and not think about work. I don't have any recommendations for a checklist. I avoid the touristy places if I can.

I then turn it around on them. If someone was visiting Canada for 2 or 3 days, where do you tell them to go? I dunno.

This article kind of misses the point - of course everyone’s average day is … average. But locals don’t spend all of their days like this, sometimes (once a week/month/year) they would do something fun, or they want to.

You asking them for advice or for them to show you around might push them to do something fun themselves, which they haven’t done in a while. But they have a lot more local context about what _might_ be good to explore or not.

They also know people - they themselves might have average days, but everyone knows that fun person that is the social glue that does all the fun stuff they can direct you - 7 degrees of separation and all that.

And lastly sure - treat the locals ideas with a grain of salt - I never do _exactly_ what the locals tell me, but it is another data point to make your own plans.

When I travel I like to make huge holes in my plans - uncharted time for me to fill in when I’m at location - from local sources or just doing the research then and there. It has always been more natural and interesting to do the sight seeing planing at location, so you can adjust and correct anyway. I guess have adopted the startup mentality of start small and iterate even for my travel experiences :)

Basically human "interesting-ness" is a very wide spectrum, skewed with a very long tail.

The average person may not be an interesting model for getting the most out of life in a short time in any particular place, but the top 0.1% of people measured by the texture, quality and interesting-ness of their lives exceeds any metric of "noteworthy events per hour" by a factor of 100.

The phrase "do what the locals do" is very vague. Like, think about your own life - the "local" places that you go to hang out, drink, eat, have fun etc. differ very much depending on:

- your means of transportation

- how wealthy you are

- who you're with

- whether it's a special occasion or just a random Tuesday

There is one tourist trap I have seen often, and that is thinking one needs to do a certain list of things to see everything in your one visit of the place.

Check the lists of tourist traps, see what interests you and fill your day there with whatever excites you.

OT, but I didn't know that .com allowed domains with a double-dash.