What’s the hardest thing about being a local? It must be having all those tourists (and travellers) trying to do what you do, eat where you eat and party where you party. Every move you make, someone is probably watching and taking notes so that they can be more like you. It makes me glad I don’t live in a city overrun by tourists, otherwise there might be several of them spying on every local.
Joking aside, if you read many of the travel blogs and guide books offering advice on how to make the most of your travels, a consistent theme is to ‘go native’ and follow the locals. It’s a sobering thought; I’m a local in my own town of St Albans and if someone followed my lead I reckon they’d be in for a journey of disappointment.
In fact I often like to do the opposite and follow the lead of the tourists, both here in St Albans and more so in nearby London. In my ‘local’ mindset I might print off a voucher and wait along with the other locals for a plastic seat at a chain restaurant that’s offering 2 pizzas for £10 or a free glass of water with every main course. But the days out that I enjoy the most are the ones where we head into London (or elsewhere) and do exactly what the tourists do: watch the crowds in Trafalgar Square, wander along the Thames Path or chow down in Chinatown. It’s me, the local, who is doing what the tourists do.
I’ve been to New York several times but two times stick in my mind. Our first visit, where in a long weekend we did so many of the main sights that our feet were sore and we could almost justify the crazy portions we’d eaten by the calories we burned walking around; and the last visit, where we stayed almost a year and saw many things but missed a whole load more (New York is like London in that way: you can never really say you’ve done it). Why did we miss those places? Sometimes we had laundry to do, sometimes it was raining and most of the time we just didn’t feel like it that day. It was always there after all.
So should we follow locals’ advice on our travels? They can certainly offer valuable advice on matters such as personal safety and can share their choice of restaurant or bar. But to follow them blindly is not always the best policy. For example we were dissuaded from taking a township tour in Cape Town by a local friend who had lived there most of her life. I can fully understand why the idea of such a tour might not have tempted a resident of the city, but for a one-time visitor I wish I’d done it. Similarly friends from Liverpool suggested that our American guests didn’t waste their money on the Beatles bus tour as it was tacky, but we booked the bus tickets anyway and they really enjoyed it.
As locals we see our town through very different eyes to that of a visitor. That’s natural; we have to live, work and carry out our daily chores there. What visitors see as unusual or quirky can become normal, tired or cheesy to us. We don’t bother walking 15 minutes to visit the same things that others travel hundreds of miles to see.
So perhaps when we consider how, as tourists, we should observe the locals and follow their lead, it may wise to remember that locals see their own world very differently to the first time visitor.
After all, we are all locals somewhere.
