The Tourist, the Resident and I

Cambridge is a small place. Cambridge is an old place. Cambridge is a famous place.

No, I haven't had a stroke/converted to a career in teaching English as a Second Language (not equivalent, but may produce similar sentences at times). I'm merely providing you with three facts which, when locked in a room together with ample booze, devise a simple yet malevolent plan to make life in Cambridge difficult. Once their forces are joined, all they need for detonation is a drop of that widely available resource: the tourist. The plot is executed and within moments you're mowing down Spanish kids on your cycle-cum-deathstar, in one fell swoop ruining the photos of fifty Poles with an ill-timed intercession between Mikhails and the Harry Potter Architecture they're climbing over one another to capture. It's not even a ticking timebomb. It's a bomb that ticks while it explodes. For three long months.

Cambridge can feel crowded at the worst of times, especially during the gloomier term months where the students are in town and the academic machine is in motion. Town planners back in the day obviously had stuff on their plate which both affected their work, in the sense of killing them, and affected their view of their work, in the sense that they didn't feel long-term planning for increased population to be a priority. Wars, bubonic plagues n' stuff. The physical size of central Cambridge means it struggles to perform the role of regional hub which has landed in its lap after the technology revolution (whenever that was): high tech industry has flocked here, and the population is growing accordingly. On winter weekends during term, the centre heaves with students doing what they do: shopping, going to the pub, entertaining their parents in exchange for much needed goods and services. It also heaves with professionals from Cambridge and surrounds doing what they do, probably similar to what we do, much as we'd like to think it not. But then change seasons. Add the tourist packs and you have a town - at least for the busiest hours of the day - in pedestrian gridlock. To walk is to brave an obstacle course of moving objects, even with the streets reclaimed for foot use out of sheer numerical dominance. To cycle is to power your bike with alternate steps like a shambling tortoise, the modern equivalent of a Flintstones foot-powered mobile. Forget about momentum. And if you can't forget it, you'd better have a damn big bell. And a damn fine mudguard to protect your jeans from sloshed blood. For in the class warfare pitting two wheels against as many feet, there will always be blood.

I've never had to negotiate space with so many tourist bodies on a daily basis. Wait a minute, pipe my ever-vigilant critics. You're from Sydney; hardly the sewage treatment plant of world tourist destinations. Yes, I reply. Thanks for paying attention. But it's a simple matter of scale. Sydney is a gigantic sprawling metropolis, meaning inside escape is never far away: walk from the centre to Wolloomooloo and you're instantly rejuvenated by less bustle and more used syringes. Some kind samaritan may have left you something for your trouble, if you're lucky. And even in centrum, where the tourist hotspots are most concentrated, you never feel suicidally claustrophobic. The footpaths are adequate. The roads are wide enough to store stationary traffic in comfort. If it all becomes too much, you can sit just that little too near the couple who are themselves just that little too close to having sex in the Botanical Gardens. Or jump into the harbour after a thunderstorm has filled it with condoms and tampons. As I get grosser, you no doubt get the idea. In general, I find that the presence of water (i.e. harbours, the ocean) makes an enormous difference to a city's psychological landscape. As a camp interior decorator would say of a mirror in a room, 'it really opens the space up.'

None of that in Cambridge. The crowds scribble all over the romantic facade and swell the city to its ever-present potential to become what it is: a very flat prison. The funniest thing that's come from having to regularly deal with these herds is the primitive mindset of entitlement, rising up in me, without fail, almost automatically. A tourist, god bless 'im, in his whale-of-a-time-not-a-care-in-the-world-except-for-the-pressing-whale-problem laxity, unthinkingly steps back and forces me to get off my bike and walk over the bridge. Instead of slapping him on the back and saying 'it's ok, it's not your fault, it's just what happens when the people are too many and the place is too small; watch out for locals on bikes though; they can be cocks; have a great day, sir!', I roll my eyes, grunt ever-so-audibly, and scowl like Gollum. Look at him. Standing there in his white shorts and ill-fitting cap, bouncing a camera off his beer-belly as if he were playing some kind of spastic game of middle-aged totem tennis. 'Hey, juicy prune! Maybe if you thought a bit about where you were going, a) you wouldn't form a key obstruction in my mission to purchase digestive biscuits from Sainsbury's and hence retard my digestion by a crucial three seconds, b) you wouldn't leave the house because you'd be too busy thinking about where you were going, c) your flights of imagination would save the world by replacing your sooty carbon footprint with cleaner fantasies...you filthy Ryanair pervert!' - thus I speak, communicating not via words but through glare. And I stomp extra-heavily to emphasise the energy tax of walking over a hill from stop as opposed to gliding over it from a rolling start. Aah, the gestural eloquence of irrational anger.

But unfailingly, I plough down the back side of the bridge with guilty readiness to dodge, a weak compensation in the form of brief deference to this species. For I too have been known to wear shorts, hats and giant cameras, bumbling clumsily through new places that don't have half as many people to trip over as Cambridge. Tourist-hating, as fun a pastime as it might be, is actually a milder and more transient upsurge of that same feeling that makes tabloids rant against immigration, and people read the rants. 'This is our town, bitch. Stop taking our jobs.' Of course, tourists are actually giving people jobs. So maybe: 'this is our town, bitch. Stop taking our space.' would be better for our purposes. What interests me most is the seniority one instantly gains from being a 'resident' over a 'tourist' - as if one can claim ownership rights and high status for being unlucky enough to be born in the U.K., or stupid enough to move here (ouch...sorry). I ain't talking about public services; of course a distinction between citizen and non-citizen needs to be made in the case of limited resources. But tourists, at least in Cambridge, are literally second-class citizens wherever they go. They pay to enter the big sites and colleges. One could say that charging is a regulatory mechanism, preventing too many tourists passing through and disrupting academic tranquillity. To this I say: 'Oh, John, we've come all the way to Cambridge to see Trinity college - but it costs three pounds.' 'I'm sorry, Martha. I know it's your birthday. But we just can't afford it.' No tourist is deterred by having to pay; just lightly annoyed and marginalised. Does the fee help colleges with expensive maintenance? Yep, but definitely not the damage caused by shameless tourists with their walking habits and whatnot. How much can it cost to replace a scuffed stone now and then? If I were a tourist, I'd walk around St John's court with extra abrasive stabs of the feet, just to do my three pounds worth of damage. Confession: I do it anyway.

There's a fine line between 'respecting the people that live here' and propping rigidly against a wall to salute them every time they walk past. Though it happens elsewhere, the clear relationship of dominant resident/subordinate tourist is more pronounced in Cambridge because it's a town that has always thrived on exclusion: 'enter here, if you are rich and brilliant*.....*former is prerequisite, latter is optional'. As a tourist here, you're experiencing in miniature what the 19th C chimney sweep (resident!) must have done every time he passed the forbidding Trinity gate: sorry pal, no cash, no college. Chimneys could do with a sweep though. In a perverse way, perhaps that's what tourists come after in visiting Cambridge: to have your non-qualification thrust in your face. Cambridge. Pioneering exclusionary tourism for 800 years.

I'm all for the Lonely Planet low-impact 'tread on tiptoes and don't forget your manners' approach to tourism; but it just strikes me how much the advent of mass transit and increased mobility have changed the social status of the 'guest'. In Ancient Greece - well, the poems that I read - the guest/foreigner/visitor was nothing short of divine. When you played host, you gave your guest everything: you filled them with piles of meat, got them smashed on strong wine, clothed them in the choicest garments before you were even allowed to ask their name and nationality. The rules of engagement were clearcut: honour your guest, or Zeus god of hospitality will fuck you up. Now the tourist (for these generalisations read 'I as tourist') is so apologetic and embarrassed about his touristness that he'll be hesitant to remind the shopkeeper of his small oversight in shortchanging him by 26 Euro. I like to think I'm no slouch for courtesy when at home. But I become so paranoid about being a target of local hatred when I travel overseas that my politeness and tolerance blow up the considerate-o-meter. Sometimes I wonder what I would do if threatened with a knife in a foreign country. Projecting from previous behavioural patterns, I think I would take off my shirt and sketch out nice little permanent marker frames around my vital organs. Please sir, be my guest. It's your country.

'I'm just a tourist.' 'I'm just visiting.' As a professor over here pointed out to me last year after a revealing blunder in the seminar, 'just' is a big word. People tend to assume - people including tourists themselves - that there's something inherently frivolous about the very process of tourism. You're just a part-timer. You can't be serious. Sure, the concept of the lazy 'holiday' still presides in entrenched western rhythms of work/play. But people can be deeply serious about their travel. They save their hard earnt moola to visit a destination for which they feel some passion, or connection; about which they might even know a whole lot more than the locals, who thought that church was just a nice curtain to the periodic appearance and removal of graffiti. Tourism can come from real interest, real commitment. Naturally residents will chisel out the cynicism when some Johnny-come-lately comes along - lately, too! - and looks with earnest admiration at the same things for which they can only dredge up a numb apathy. It's just (!) a bite of the old green-eyed monster.

In this way, tourists have sustained the heaviest casualties when it comes to the commonwealth's war on enthusiasm. I say commonwealth because I've now lived in centre and periphery of the old empire; and I'm pretty sure Australian cynicism is deeply bound up with the British variety. The other half of the dichotomy lies across the Atlantic: America. I was talking to an American mate of mine, and he proposed that one of the things that tells against you most as an American abroad is your pure energy, your culturally sanctioned keenness. Keenness is so not cool in Anglo-Australian terms. But cross the pond and you're in the land of milk, honey, peanut butter m+m's, and unadulterated positivity. This must have something to do with the fact that in my mind, the archetype, or caricature, of a tourist is...a Yank. 'Believing you can do stuff and then doing it' - that was the title of my submission for a new American national anthem, but the letter must have been destroyed in a rush of enthusiasm for one thing or another.

I've opened a can of beans prematurely with the question of how nationality affects one's reception as a tourist; so I'm going to cut before things get too windy. In conclusion, consider this: tourists are the poorest (most wretched) rich people on the earth. Their reward for wonderment and cash injections is ridicule and inflated prices. They are universally despised: not only by the residents, who assume tourists will range from ignorant to neanderthal unless proven otherwise, but - and this is the icy nail in the coffin cake - even by their own kind! As a tourist, there are few things you hate more than a fellow tourist. Look at her. Look at those eyes. Greedily snatching up the authenticity of MY EXPERIENCE. And you don't even appreciate it. You're just there, swilling your beer, chowing your feed, paralysed in your repertoire of basic conversational noises, like a parrot being electrocuted. Give me MY EXPERIENCE back! There is no solidarity between tourists, for every tourist perceives every other tourist as a competitor, battling for the finite resources of recordable experience and genuine 'difference.' The tourist is at her smuggest when she has found a restaurant populated only by locals. And she is at her most defeated when she sits down, orders her food in a mumble of badly pronounced pleasantries, closes her eyes, and hears: 'Oh look, Marge! This is perfect! So authentic! I knew it would be just great from the guidebook description.' She shudders once at the crude voice, but then again, and harder, when she recognises her own voice within it. The paradox of a Lonely Planet featuring an 'off-the-beaten-track' section comes a-flooding through her mind.

Tourists, you have my sympathy. You are fighting foreign and civil wars at the same time. You are hated, you hate each other, and above all perhaps, you hate yourselves. If you at any point feel my bike tyre on your calf, maintain some perspective: my scowl will mean 'I feel your pain.' As you dust yourselves off and shout after me with dignity 'don't worry, sir. It's your town. I'm sorry I obstructed your important business.', perhaps my callous bubble will burst. I'll help you up and orate: 'Sir, you are no tourist. You are a temporary resident. And what of us? We are but jaded tourists trapped as residents: excited mice grown into sluggish rats. Give me your hand. For we are all, in some sense, both residents and tourists of the one globe.'

It would be delivered with just the right balance of earnestness and cynicism. I'm an international student: the disfigured offspring of an illicit love affair, when tourist meets resident. We can't procreate; but we can flit between our maternal and paternal camps at will.

End of Tour.

Travels Incontinent

I pop my head back through the fine film separating blogosphere from activitysphere after a long absence, and what do I find? Nothin's changed. Particularly in regard to this blog. So to avoid charges of static and whiffs of ozone, I thought it time for an update. Before I drop the straggling metaphor, I'd just like to clarify that no globes were warmed in the non-making of this blog. Slightly more were warmed in its making, but that's a detachable story, not to be confused with the tale of how I came to write...

this. Since I left you, full of delicate dreams and fragile bank accounts, three related things have happened. Some of the dreams have been fulfilled, others have been shattered, and my bank account has been transformed into a blushing communist: heavily in the red and nothing to its name. First of all, exile update: I've officially passed the masters and been admitted to the doctor stream, which means I'm digging heels into the cow-pat sodden British earth for another three years at least. That's if I don't piss around. But the piss-around is the fiercely guarded prerogative of PhD students worldwide. The forms may vary over space and time - my dad fondly preserves his doctorate by recalling a sample average day in which playing cards and pure maths overlap like venn diagrams - but it's always paid procrastination. Relax, you're trying to become a doctor of philosophy. So-crates wouldn't have worn himself out. He would have taken some afternoon walks in the shade and left it to his good-for-nothing secretary Plato to transcribe the pearls of wisdom dropped orally and casually. That's what it's all about, I imagine. (Check out philosophy of leisure, according to a philosopher, here - thanks Slav for the tiptop-off. Only part I'm not in sync with is the second p'graph: leisure may have been a high good for 'Ancient Greek philosophers', but that was because it was the preserve of the aristocracy. Work was for chumps.)

Where's the blank time gone then? What sort of 'doing' have I done to colour in the space between then and now? Experimenting with exile-from-exile, that's what. I'd never thought about it much before, but living abroad adds a second coat to the old identity. I was staying at a hostel in Krakow (Poland) a few days ago: a wonderful place where the young ladies in charge rise to make you a full Polish breakfast and clean up the remains of your pig-out as you digest. The hospitality and intimacy factor made it feel as if you were crashing one of a long-lost Polish relative's many spare beds. Anyway, the breakfast ritual took place around a long wooden table, long enough to house ten people, not long enough to let them avoid conversation with one another. Talking to my fellow travellers, above all I felt older than I did in my memories of similar situations hostel-hopping around Europe five years ago. The end of youth is indeed nigh. But the stranger sensation arose when I was forced to grapple with the 'explain yourself' question of the international traveller: 'where are you from?' My tagline response, I noticed, had thickened to double the size. 'Sydney, Australia' it once was - aah, the simplicity of youth! - but now it had accrued the cumbersome barnacle 'but I study in England.' This may all seem trivial. A literal snapshot of your living arrangements condensed into a terse sentence might have nothing to do with 'identity.' But in my head, it was bizarre. 'Australia...England' - the terms bounced around like flicked elastic. My homes multiplied before my eyes. I was a one man Ashes. I was Flintoff bowling to Clarke, I was Clarke hitting it back down Flintoff's throat, I was Flintoff dropping the catch, I was Clarke running down the pitch, I was Flintoff completely missing the stumps and conceding four from an overthrow. So I suppose I was still Australian. Like the Ashes, there was the ever-present (though slight) danger that it could go either way, combined with the overwhelming statistical probability that Australia would win. But I was still a little thrown by the threat.

As far as split identities go, you couldn’t get more training-wheels-level than ‘English/Australian’, so I’ll pay it no more angst than it deserves. Back onto the continent. My six days in Poland ticked all boxes of hedonism listed on the standard western ‘holiday’ form. I took loads off in the presence of my loveable Polish friend by putting loads in: delivery trucks queued before dawn through the outskirts of Krakow to feed our collective appetite for Pierogi (Polish dumplings), potato pancakes, stew, sausage, cabbage, beetroot soup and schnitzel. Buckets of schnitzel, single-handedly putting the abbatoirs back in, and completely out, of business. The best ice-cream I’ve ever had. The best beer I’ve ever had. The best glazed jam donut I’ve ever had; the best I’ve had which wasn’t that good. It spiralled into a mess of consumption bests, the stomach’s short-term memory constantly effacing itself as it expanded into eternal presents of more and better, carpe diem and carpe pierogi, a bulging feast of Trimalchio which didn’t know when from when in order to say it.

Actually the indulgence was fairly moderate, but it was a running joke between me and Marts that everything was the best we’d ever had, culminating in a sub-par Warsaw ice-cream, of which Marts: ‘This is the best mediocre ice-cream I’ve ever had.’ There were times of unrestrained sensory pleasure, but there were also some stone-cold sobering moments. Marts refused to accompany me to Auschwitz, so I went by myself – well, with four innocent but douchy Alaskans to be precise. They were nice enough, but I couldn’t help cringing a bit at their automatic douchy tourist reflexes, which they tried to suppress for my sake but failed, charmingly. I was bitching to one of them about people being disrespectful and taking photos inside the buildings (converted into museums) when it was prohibited, and he wholeheartedly agreed with me, until it came out later that he’d taken a few himself. Guiltily…but who could resist a pose with a tangled mass of spectacles which had been plundered from victims for reuse? Surely it was beyond Hitler’s wildest dreams that mass-produced, mass-culled monuments to murder would one day form the main attraction in a digital photograph alongside the camera's owner: to be explained with relish to his Alaskan friends back home, a pause in a slide show, filled by an oral caption which would omit the part about how he wasn't allowed to take a photo but he did. Or don it as a badge of honour.

Tourists aside - herded from our story like the obedient group they are - Auschwitz was the most affecting museum trip of my life. That's no idle 'best' claim. I'd had an average holocaust education: seen Schindler's, read Night, even been to Dachau, the other famous camp near Munich. But the familiarity of the stories didn't detract from inhabiting their setting. There were details I'd forgotten, or never known in the first place, such as the figure of the Sonderkommando: a fellow prisoner who, in exchange for better living conditions, discharged the grisly tasks of hauling the dead bodies from the gas chambers, stripping them of their gold fillings, their rings, their hair - anything of remote value - and putting them in the incinerator. On liberation, the Soviets found a mass of human hair waiting to be reused in pillows and bedclothes. It's now in a display case, behind glass: aged and dry, but unmistakeably hair. It wasn't just the mass slaughter, but the ruthless efficiency with which the resource expenditure of performing that slaughter was recouped by any means possible. In this narrow, perverse sense, the Nazis were the greatest proto-environmentalists of their time: they recycled everything. That was the emo part. But it also got a little more detached and academic. Thankfully I had the chance to talk to the tour guide on her own - a patient Polish woman whose eyes I could see swelling in exasperation every time she had to tell someone not to take a photo - about the afterlife of Auschwitz. She had done her MA in Jewish Studies on the symbol of Auschwitz and the fierce contests still surrounding it. Proportionally, of course, the Jews were dealt the worst hand. But so potent has Auschwitz become in contemporary imagination that it has completely eclipsed the appalling number of civilian deaths in wider Poland during WWII - a couple of million at the least. The guide talked of her problems with retaining the attention of Jewish tourists in the camp, who visibly lost interest whenever 'Polish' suffering came up. But she also tussled with other extremes: the American tourist who was offended that none of her spiels contained mention of German suffering. Along the paths of this still-overcrowded death camp, the politics run on, and refuse to die.

Far from the horrors of Auschwitz in distance and character - though only a paragraph of text away, and that's what an unplanned blog will do to you - was my Italian jaunt. Before meeting up with me mum, I imposed a bit of scenic purgatory-by-exhaustion. A silly idea popped into my head: I would walk a marathon 120 k's along the Ligurian coast of Italy, from Genova to La Spezia, in three and a half days. I trekked with a heavy burden of a rucksack on a hard back (the tent came in handy, the Hemingway didn't, but at least that was a softback), which made the steep ascents and descents fairly taxing at times. The first half stuck to the road, the only option on what must be one of the most densely holiday-settled stretches of coast in Europe. The villas never stopped, but only oscillated between compression and rarefaction as I moved from town to (nearby) town. Then, finally, I hit rugged national park, doing my best to navigate maplessly by the cheery proverb 'If the sea's on your right, she'll be right.' It's a proverb now. The coast really started doing spectacular things with itself at this point: growing pine trees, crumbling rocks, dropping away to the sea at an almost vertical gradient. Tiers of olives, citrus and grapes appeared every now and then, a living reproach to any farmer that thinks they have it tough on flat land. I walked the famous 11km run of the cinque terre on the last day, the sun flashing its pearly whites and breathing oppressive warmth as much as ever. Each of the five towns, evenly spaced along the stretch, is encrusted on its own bit of rock in its own way. As the rock permitted, so the towns formed, until they froze in their current state: rainbow lego villages of pastel pinks, blues, greens, yellows, oranges. My shoes have smudged errant tracks over all, now visible only in my poor memory - a lonely life and death, but I'll keep them walking for a while regardless.

Having moaned about multiplied homes, it was nice to return to another place I'd 'lived in' (if only for a month) five years ago: Padova. Mum's longstanding friend Antonio, with whom I stayed last time, was in stellar form. Quite literally: he's a prof of astronomy at the university of Pads. But he's also the jolliest, plumpest Italian bawd I know. When he meets his male friends on the street, he playfully whacks them in the testacles as greeting. I'm all for it. But if I introduced it here, I'd probably have to get people to sign clearance forms. And then I'd have to tweezer out the fine points like the scale and frequency of whack; and destroying fun with tweezers is a decidedly non-fun way to do it. Anyway, I had great fun listening to Antonio discourse on every subject under the stars. Stuff he knew about (elementary optics, telescopes, obsolete measuring instruments from the fifties) and stuff he didn't (the historical roots of south Italian sloth). Five years older and I felt a little better equipped to pick him up on his good-natured bullshit; but I'm yet to learn how to fling it back effectively.

So there you are, punters: put that in your punt and punt it into the racing course where you can take a...never mind. Back in the Bridge, I'm poised to make a grab for the last shreds of summer: penniless. Paying the price for not enough continence. But content.