A Child Of Atom

The town that I spent most of my adult life in was a tourist town, a destination on the southern coast. When summer arrived the town was flooded with tourists, come to see the azaleas, or go to the beach. One of the features of the town was that in the historic district there were several city block sized parks spread out across the city. To a native, or anyone with common sense driving around these squares was pretty intuitive, you simply had to treat them like medians, and stay to one side. Tourists of course never understood this, and so driving in the summer became a nightmare.

I'm beginning to notice the same sort of problems here now that the tourists are getting thicker. Things that seem basic to anyone that has lived here for a while just seem to baffle them. How hard is it to understand that you simply don't walk three or four abreast down a city street? Or that on escalators you stand to the right so that people can walk to the left? Of course there are courtesy rules that native New Yorkers don't seem to get either, like staying to the right, whether you are headed up or down, on the subway stairs. Tourists REALLY make that one worse as they not only take the wrong side of the stairs but frequently stop in the middle of them to make sure the rest of their party is keeping up. What other unspoken NYC "rules" are there that I might be unknowingly breaking myself? I don't want to be deemed guilty of the same thing that I'm blaming these guys for.

The whole thing reminds me of a t-shirt that was popular in my hometown: "If it's called tourist season, why can't we kill them?"