Essay #2

The "Anti-Tourist" 

Zach Krueger

               What an anti-tourist isn't is someone who has a clear idea of where they're going or what they're going to experience. They are completely lacking of any kind of expectation as to what is held in store for them because they are completely open in a way a "tourist" is not. According to Kalder, a tourist is someone who has a specific idea of where they wish to visit when traveling. As if across continents and oceans, all there is to see is what you read in travel books. It's planned content. It's a planned experience to which Kalder feels a traveler can only gain a limited sense of culture from. For the most part, a tourist will keep their own sense of identity and sensibility of living while being among many members of their own ethnicity in a place their already somewhat familiar with. The question an "anti-tourist" might ask themselves is this; when has anything in life that has ever been truly worth it been something that met their expectations? An "anti-tourist" is someone who would start at a location, and simply exist in it. Instead of having their own schedules form their experience and bend the world to their plans, they allow the world to shape their schedules and their stories. Something an "anti-tourist" learns is that the best stories come from the unknown. They're something that you need to "drift" into, in which you may find a people living in the corners of the world that history forgot, or the last true pagans of Europe. Or hidden sounds you didn't know were there because you weren't looking for them.