Insight

Travel globally, shop locally

The past few months of my life have been swallowed in traveling.

Throughout my travels, I have pledged to avoid tourist attractions like the plague. In childhood, museums and national monuments once had a certain entertainment value. Nowadays, I find nothing more depressing than visiting a location in another state or country that is completely devoid of native residents, aside from those working behind food counters or pushing brooms.

It is not the personalities of my fellow foreign travelers that I find so unnerving; it is their behavior. Witness Exhibit A:

In Washington last spring, I saw sequined purses spring up on the carts of street vendors downtown that later had a strong presence in the French storefronts of Champs Elysees (one of the few parts of France where everyone speaks English and wears fanny packs). These same bags dominated the storefront windows of both the Copenhagen Airport and the Bethany Beach, Del., surf shops. Last week, I spotted at least two dozen people snatching the same bags out of stores in Times Square at 2:00 a.m., in a last minute shopping spree after dining at the Olive Garden.

Everywhere I went, Americans were buying the same thing to hold as a memory of a place other than their home. I wonder if they realized they could just visit their state's tourist sites and purchase the same crap. No matter where Americans visit, no matter how many opportunities for completely new experiences call to them, I find my fellow citizens buying the same stupid things they do not need and eating the same mediocre food they could buy at home.

Any person in a new town already has an abundance of opportunities to make a fool of themselves in their journeys. People who have never used public transportation monopolize poles in subway trains as if there was one for each passenger to perform a dance on. Others butcher a new language in an attempt to get directions on the street. We fumble with our suitcases, block sidewalks staring at new sights and carry our belongings in parcels that enable convenient pick-pocketing. No matter how easy it is to look like a bumbling idiot, American tourists insist on making it worse.

Everywhere I have been the past few months, my goal has been to buy as few non-edible things as possible and yet take as much as I could home with me. I refused to buy things for the sake of having something and I nixed the words "photo opportunity" from my vocabulary in these travels.

I walked the stretch of the Brooklyn Bridge rather than SoHo in New York. I had breakfast on a hill top in Paris eating baguettes and drinking coffee surrounded by French poppies. In Delaware, I woke up at 5:00 a.m. and sat on the beach watching dolphins frolic in the waves. Washington permitted me an opportunity to stuff myself with baba ganoush and laugh myself silly with a flock of lovely girls.

Travel is for experience; otherwise we would just go to the mall. Next time you find yourself somewhere new, try thriving on the old caveat "Leave only footprints and take only memories."