You Beach!

Everyone hates tourists. I love traveling more than most anything and even--or particularly--I hate them. It's not just a selfish desire to keep the prettiest views, the best restaurants or the special discoveries clear of the guidebook-toting masses--though that is a viable concern--nor just of accidently being identified with a group known for being (alternatively) culturally insensitive, poorly dressed, clueless, ripe for exploitation, full of money to burn, loud and obnoxious, or simply too much traffic. Being a tourist is just not belonging; you visit some town or city or country and look through the window at other peoples' lives, take pictures of things you don't really understand or particularly care about but Lonely Planet says you should, and buy terrible souveniers which no one wants which are cute in their ugliness and otherwise remind you of your vacation, for better or for worse. There are lots of pictures taken of buildings, attempts to capture the moment into something that may be printed up and foisted on unsuspecting relations or visitors in the form of a two-hour monologue ("and then we went to Notre Dame, and then we went to the Louvre, and then we went to..."). From the side of the tourist, I dislike feeling unanchored and somewhat slighted by the locals, I dislike needing maps and being expected to go to museums (don't get me wrong, I love museums. I just don't always want to go to them just because they are there). From the side of the locals, tourists are just in the way, clog up everything useful (try grocery shopping in northern Germany-- you have to wait behind the Swedes and Danes with their three shopping carts of booze in order to buy a kilo of tomatoes and some cheese), are sometimes obnoxious and the rest of the time just tacky, and (in Europe) require use of your English-language faculties which you are universally expected to possess.



Beach tourists are another breed. These tend to arrive in campers and motor homes, or live in any of a number of hotels and vacation apartments notable for their hideous architechture and their proximity to the beach. They build forts out of lawn chairs and their family structure seems to consist of several small half-naked sticky children burnt a nice sienna brown, running about and terrorizing the other tourists, one or more tired-looking women desperately trying to tan sagging breasts and cellulite away, the man of the house suncreaming his baldspot and surriptiously searching for any female (preferably topless, though we have more sense than that) above 15 and under 45, and occasionally a granny with burgundy-died or permed hair and a bathing suit at least fifteen years out of style. In Heiligenhafen they built a kind of tourist-town just for the beachgoers, with ice cream parlors, restaurants, a shopping centre and an activity place for the kiddies, bowling and bumper cars, and anything else the tourist's heart might desire.



Our beach vacation involved watching the lifeguards fish the jellyfish out of the water. The place is innundated with them, most of them harmless and some of them not. The lifeguard would wander off and return bearing a net and a blob of quivering red jelly which he or she would proceed to bury among a crowd of excited children, until enough of the stingers were found to close the beach.

Ask the oracle:
- tides in the Baltic
- why some jellyfish are red