Tourists!!!

I spent the last week or so in ITALY and checked all the good stuff off of my list: Roman ruins and Papal splendor is Rome, the Uffizi and the Duomo in Florence, bridges and San Marco in Venice. There is something very lovable about Western Europe: clean streets, nicely maintained buildings, cute and deliciously advertised cafes. It was in many ways meaningful to see all of the buildings and places that I've studied in various courses,  and to eat gelato on cobblestone streets. 

However, there is also something rather absurd about this sort of tourism: like seeking a taste of what it used to be in a place where time has flown by, and all you can do is capture digital images at a heart racing pace.  Herds of badly dressed tourists wear their sneakers and North Face fleeces, marching from one destination marked on the map to another, clicking away a with their cameras. It's nearly impossible to get a feeling for what used to be there, how things used to be, when hearing a school group of emo French high schools students joke while smoking their cigarettes, an Chinese tour guide bringing his group past the Duomo, and an American kid loudly complaining that he's bored. 

There is something to be said for tourism in Romania. It's harder to get to the places you want to see- the train from one side of the country to the other takes hours and hours and hours, the monasteries are located in remote villages not easily accessible by bus or train, there are no signs, no cute cafes right outside, no neatly organized method of lining up to get inside. While I am very relieved that we got to see EVVERRYTHING in each city, at once point I had this feeling like I was in some rat race, scurrying from one monument to the next, ooh aaahh click click, then the next one. However, I know the feeling of finally arriving at Voronet, or Dragomirna after trains, walks, hitch hikes, etc. It's satisfying. Also, you can still get a sense of how it actually was- nothing has changed in hundreds of years out in the villages. People are actually happy to see tourists. It's definitely not as cushy to travel in Eastern Europe. However, anyone who travels will ultimately get to the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum or the Caribbean for that matter. But, no one will get to compare notes with me on their trips to Bukovina. There's something to be said for that.

Not that I don't dearly miss gelato at the moment...