September 24, 2003

A killer idea

Posted by Curt at 01:50 AM in Economics | TrackBack

Screw "Seeing Paris on a budget" or whatever the latest tourist guide-book trend is. I want to write guidebooks for the world's great cities entitled "Seeing _______ while hungover." Since this is the manner in which a substantial number of the world's tourists experience the cities which they are visiting, it opens up a whole wealth of information which standard guidebooks only address in an offhand or accidental way: what cities have the least and the most offensively blaring lights? Which have the traffic most likely to hit you while you lurch across bridges and so forth? Which have metros with directions utilizing at least three different senses for the temporarily impaired? Venice, for example, is a beautiful city to visit but a wretched one in which to go drinking (as I know all too well). It is not only because a rum-and-coke costs $6 there, but also because of the total lack of any form of transportation other then one's feet, the byzantine and identical-looking alleys throughout the city with no directions posted anywhere and the distant-yet-constant risk of falling in a canal. Anyway, this is what I think people really ought to know, because the somewhat fuzzy scenery of the disheveled faces of unemployed ex-deodorant testers staring incredulously at them while they lie prone outside "Les Deux Magots" is probably the sight they will come to know best. This may not be a profitable idea for me as the drunken expatriates wandering through the backalleys of the world's great cities are probably the least likely people on earth to solicit anyone's advice, let alone in guidebook form.

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