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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
i felt the same every summer while living in d.c., the hordes of ugly pink tourists making a mess of everything in what i felt was MY town.
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Although i've chopped it down mercilessly, this is a great post.
I agree that English visitors to Paris don't make enough effort to genuinely engage with the culture. But I worry about any city that becomes so reliant on tourist money to survive. Paris thinks of itself as a world power but the reality is that it's most powerful asset is as a tourist attraction. This is now recognised as a fact by economists, who contrast it with other cities such as Beijing, Tokyo, New York, London, Riyadh, et al. Unless Paris wants to become the Orlando of Europe (along with Amsterdam, Athens, Rome and Prague) then it needs to look at itself beyond the next influx of tourists.