Tourist Guilt

Let's talk about tourist guilt.

I'm sure there's a much better word for it than this but I don't know it and I'm too lazy to google it. Maybe I've invented it and you're about to read a revolutionary piece of writing... I mean, that's almost certainly not going to happen but we can pretend.

Tourist guilt refers to the feeling that as a tourist/traveller/person in a new place, you should be constantly making the most of the place you are in and when you need to do something normal like rest or eat familiar food or not walk for miles on end, you feel guilty. Almost like you're wasting the opportunity and that you should be "on" for all of your waking hours, seeing and doing as much as possible.

That's obviously pretty stupid. I do think you should make the absolute most of every new place you visit but I also don't turn into some sort of super human version of myself when I go away. Actually, I turn in to a really tired, guilty, homesick version of myself with bad hair and puffy eyes. Travelling is a really good look for me.

What I'm trying to say (yep, this post actually has a point) is that when Soph and I visited Paris a couple of weeks ago and only had one full day to see the city, I couldn't help but feel really bad when I needed a rest in the middle of the afternoon. We had been up since 7am, walked so much that we were both in pain and we felt like we physically couldn't take in any more sights.

We were touristed out.

It took a while to kick in. We walked to the Louvre and had a lot of fun trying to take selfies with disposable cameras (impossible).

We walked along the Seine to the love lock bridge where we spent a good 15 or so minutes trying to find the lock that Anthony and I put on there three years before. I don't know if we looked on the wrong bridge (possible) or if we originally put our lock on the wrong bridge and it was removed, but either way Sophie and I couldn't find it. It was a lot of fun looking through all of the different locks though, and watching people trying to take pictures with the locks in the backgrounds.

We walked to the Notre Dame next. We relaxed in the garden and I even earned stares of most of the people around us by having a photo taken without my coat on (shock horror!). We went inside the Notre Dame next and I was again awed by the beauty of it. Is that something you ever get used to? I think I will catch my breath every time I see those big circular windows, no matter how many times I've visited.

After having photos outside the Notre Dame, we walked aimlessly through the surrounding streets for a while. It was nice just walking around, taking everything in but also having a chance to catch up with Soph. I miss this girl so much, I was really just enjoying being around her again. Paris was just the added bonus ;)

Our next stop on the longest-sightseeing-plan-anyone-has-had-ever was the Sacre Coeur. We were starting to feel a little tired by this point but it might not have been so bad if we hadn't lost the metro.

I know, I know. How do you lose the metro? That is a question I can't answer. All I know is that when we didn't need to get on a train, metro stations were all over the place. When we not only wanted to get on a train but were trying to look for a specific metro station? Poof. They all disappeared. It took us about 20 minutes to find one (how!?) and it was so not the one we had been looking for it was laughable.

We collapsed on the train and enjoyed the break from walking. I was looking forward to seeing the Sacre Coeur again but I was really really really not looking forward to walking up to it. I have no idea how many steps there are leading up to the church but after the morning's experience I wasn't sure if my legs were going to make it.

Thankfully they did and we reached the top of the climb only to have our remaining breath taken away by the view. I can even understand why the locals climb up just to sit on the steps and talk or eat. I would brave the climb every day just for that view.

It was at this point in the day that the tourist guilt kicked in. I think I would have cried if Sophie had suggested doing anything other than going back to the hostel for a nap/rest. As bad as I felt (and trust me, I felt bad) I knew that if I was going to enjoy any more sightseeing, I needed to do something to boost my energy. I was too tired to even care that there was graffiti showing Yoda marrying Yoda - clearly, something needed to be done.

And now I'm tired all over again just from writing about it. I think I'm going to go take a nap..