I'm A Tourist, Becoming

In the context of "modern tourism" I started thinking of my own evolution as the "modern tourist" and how not only the activities but what I hope to get from my tourist experiences has changed.

In Erve Chambers' Native Tours he makes mention of Boorstin's theory of pseudo-events whereby tourists encourage the banal rather than genuine experience and artifact. He uses as examples the tomahawks and headresses that can be purchased at so many gift shops across North America. This started me thinking about my own cumulative experiences with tourism - as a girl I collected many things, but my major collections comprised of porcelain dolls in their ethnic costumes, coins and stamps from around the world. Being unable to travel myself it was a way for me to appropriate these distant places and people into my life. But I suppose you could say that these were in fact only superficial tokens.

In Stroma's case he indicates that he was eventually accepted as "family" and you see that frequently - the transformation of guest into host, where tourists cease being tourists. As I got older I travelled quite a bit and experienced something similar after travelling through Gaspesie. I was invited into a family home and employed on the family farm after only a few days, and while I was not declared an official member of the family which is not a custom or requirement I was included in even the most intimate family events, which other employees of the farm were not. I often ate my meals with the family. The people of the town itself quickly adopted me into their fold, and had they not been so nice I might have been nervous since they seemed to really want to keep me. This area seemed to be threatened for many reasons - the young people were going to more urban areas of Quebec, and the joke goes that the girls leave for the cities, the boys follow them and I would guess that is correct.