You’ve been planning your trip for the last 3 months and possibly dreaming about it for most part of the year. All those guide books you managed to skim during your escapes to the local library or bookstore made it a real challenge to synthesize centuries of culture and tradition into a super-efficient, carefully crafted tour that will have you retracing the steps of millions of tourists that have been to the big city before you. I had already written about this common travel trap in I could live here:
One could argue that the splendour of any famous landmark is constantly diluted by the ongoing attack of mass tourism, misguided by a market saturated of travel guides that most of the times reference the same top 10 or 20 landmarks not to be missed, while telling us every snippet of knowledge that travellers must know about these places, cancelling every attempt to make that experience unique.
As if facing the prospect of getting a diluted version of Paris was not bad enough, a recent analysis of the way that tourists and locals experience the same cities reveals that your quest to “experience the french lifestyle” is way [...]
