Tourists

I travel to see the world, to see places, to see other solutions to life. Every country is different, the people are the same but different, and how much different, depends on your focus. Also here you go with Uber to your Airbnb and the gross of the population wails away their time on Facebook. It's not more challenging to travel than going to Spain or Greece - where one doesn't understand the language, but you always find someone with enough knowledge of English, and everything is either recognisable, or endearingly different.

A welcome surprise is that I learn also about my own culture. And the locals learn about our culture as well. With tourism not only I see the locals, but the locals see me as well. The world comes to them, as such, new faces, new ways of behaviours. And I see the other tourists, how they behave - how we behave.
And funny to see, that many of them are afraid. Alone in a new, unknown world. Where restaurant owners want them to come sit and we are offered a ride every six minutes, but that's the most "threatening" part, for the rest we are very much left alone.

The world has changed. The lady in the local Vietnamese breakfast joint, who tries to make you have your coffee there and all the tourists try to ignore, turns out to have a boyfriend in Rotterdam and goes there every year. It's just that global.

Tourists come from all across the globe, there are many westerners but just as many Asians. And they come from all walks of life, in the hostels there is no age discrimination, i have encountered many people well over 50. It is nice, that traveling now also means meeting a lot more people than ever before.