h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

An almost guaranteed sign of a tourist is the bright white sneakers they wear. Tourists use them thinking that they'll be spending the day trudging around your town, just walking everywhere.
The reality is that they will be exhausted shortly after noon. For the rest of the day, they will stand around, wheeze, and generally making themselves ripe for exploitation by a nearby drinks vendor.

In Amsterdam, NL, you can tell a tourist from very far away because they have an American accent. Non-American tourists are much quieter so you have to be nearer to them to be able to tell.

I recently spent a weekend as a tourist in Belgium. I found that all the natives in Belgium speak at least four languages, whereas the (English) tourists only speak English. It was easy to recognise us from very far away, partly because of the Jikishin Jujitsu shirts our coach load were all wearing, but mostly due to the way we needed the entire width of a 6 foot wide pavement to stagger along, frequently flashing bum cheeks accompanied by gales of laughter at 3 in the morning, and also by the way we all wandered around in a dazed fashion holding our heads the next morning.

In Greece there are many tourists especially during the Summer. The Northern Europeans are the easiest to tell since they share several characteristics:
1. They have a distinct colour that ranges from pink to lobster red depending on how many ours they have spent exposed to the sun and they wear
huts in a hopeless effort not to get more sun-burned than they already are. 2. They carry small plastic bottles of water that they have bought in ridiculously high prices
in the hope that they will beat the effects of dehydration. They carry bugs of all shapes and sizes in which they store all the above when not using them, plus a towel
and maps, the latter are more or less useless because in many parts of Greece road signs etc are incomprehensible even to the natives. 3. During
the night English tourists are even easier to recognise since they are the ones to be drunk by 11:00 when for everybody else the fun is just beginning.
4. The Italians are always easy to spot at all times, they are the ones shouting the most, which is very common for the Greeks too but its their country
so what can you do.

Dear Crito,

Another characteristic of the friendly "tourist" that I have observed is the fact that (at least some of them) seem to greatly enjoy being drunk! Yes I am making an assumption here, but how else can you explain the fact that not only they get drunk, they get physically sick and then (instead of going back to their hotels and order a very strong, double, black Greek Coffee), they crawl back into the bar and drink some more! The natives on the other hand seem to have a better understanding of the effect of alcohol on them and don't get sick, or when they do they stop drinking.
Another characteristic is that they seem to have an entirely different footwear fashion code, that dictates they should wear sandals complete with white athletic socks.

How to recognize a tourist from very far away:
Lesson 1..... the American. ...

Number 1..... the American. ...
Number 1..... the American. ...
Number 1........... the American.

Tourists in Chamonix are also very easy to recognise from far away; they are the ones who
are out skiing/snowboarding in the middle of the storm, whilst everyone else is in the pub waiting for it to stop,
so that they can go out and get freshies in the sunshine.
Tourists in Scotland are even easier to spot: they are the ones who do not have a bluish white skin tone, or are
engaged in a fit of cardiac arrest at the pay window of a petrol station, having been asked to pay two and a half
times as much for a litre of fuel than anywhere else on the planet.
Australian tourists are useful for identifying your location (if unknown): if the barman/waitress who just served
you was not Australian, then you are either-
a) in Australia
b) in the next galaxy, having been abducted by aliens (assuming this is an infrequent occurrence, otherwise
you just never know.)

or more specificaly - how to
recognize an american tourist
in israel.
beside the abvoe mentioned
symptoms(white snickers,
mineral water,infra-red skin
tone) the one sure give-away
- they're polite to the extent
of making you gag, which stands
out even more in the backround
of that charming mid-eastern rudeness.

True, but one must remmember that there are also Israely Americans, which show the same charecteristics and yet aren't turists. I myself have a whole "American mafia" in my school. Nice people.

Of course, when they line up their family infront of a McDonalds restaurant (which lets face it are pretty close to identicle no matter which part of the planet you're on) and insist on trying to take a photograph regardless of the millions of people streaming past...

Ah, but consider the beauty of going to a McDonalds in another part of the world.

You've been on the road for days, seeing strange country scenes and stranger country people, with customized customs and foodstuffs at each stop. It's a constant assault of intensive learning and sensory input. Now, up on the horizon, down the lane, or what have you, there's a McDonalds.
You know what a McDonalds is. You know what it does. You know what's there, and how much it should cost. You know where to go with your food when you get it, and you certainly know how to eat it. When you're done, you know what to do with the remains.
Think of it as the small bit of routine that the acciential tourist can use as a security blanket.

Of course, at home it's just evil [your favorite word for "dung" here].

While I can see your point, I still wouldn't consider lining up my family to take a picture of one. I don't know, I've just got this crazy thought, maybe these tourists came from a far and distant place, untouched by comercialism and had never seen a McDonalds before.. naa.. that can be possible can it?

you speak of McDonald's as if
it were no more than a brand name.
a service giver. an eatery.
let me disabuse you of that notion
right now good people. McDonald's
is an entity. it is everywhere, it is
all the time. in the largest metropolyn
and in the smallest village. it finished
what Coka-Cola started.

i had a point to make when i started
this entry. i think.
my short term memory isn't what it
used to be. sorry.

Well, my point wasn't so much to do with McDonalds, but about the pointlessness of trying to line your family up outside one and take pictures even though there are thousands and thousands of people streaming past! It's not as if McDonalds is a majot landmark now is it?

When you say the English go back for more drink after being sick this can hardley be taken as a tourist sign because we do that anyway. It doesn't matter if were in another country or even if there isn't a reason to celebrate we still drink even more because it's a natural emune system we have developed to our weather, if we sober up in our country we then notice how bad the weather is so we learn and stay drunk. This is so deeply embedded in that when we hit the lovely weather of a foreign and the cheap drinks we get compleatly blasted and our instincts take over. Hence the typical brittish phrase "Ah! you're drinking, what's the celebration?" "Urm, I was sober."

Tourists are recognisable by wearing what they suppose to be the native dress, so that they 'fit in'. Thus tourists in Scotland pretty much all wear tartan; in SE Asia sarongs and so on. Utter crap, of course.

And in Israel that's all kinds of "I love Israel" or "Jerusalem" (etc.) t-shirts. Or, for the Jewish-American tourists, usually shirts of their home football/baseball/basketball team, with which they do fit in because people here try (too hard) to look like Americans.

BTW, have you noticed the tourists' strange atraction to the "native" camel? I mean, the only camels in jerusalem are for tourists. Even the Beduis have cars now.

Here in Australia there is a theme park called "Wonderland", and every time my family drags me along, me and my sisters play "Spot-The-Aussie". There are just so many tourists there, each and everyone of them trying to be as Australian as possible.......and failing miserably!!!!!

Now, everyone loves to make fun of the American tourists that drop by in your country and make asses of themselves, but what you may not realize is that Americans love to make fun of other Americans who drop by other bits of America to do the exact same thing. The best way to reconize a tourist from northern America (A Yankee) in a southern American area is to watch for the only people who go outside much in the middle of the day. Everyone else knows that no one's gotten around to air conditioning most of the south yet and it is thus advisable to stay indoors as much as possible between noon and about 5pm. Also, tourists seem to have an irresistable attraction to those wierd little pouches you strap to yourself like a belt and also to buildings which people tell them are old but look just like all the other buildings that try to look like the old ones.

That's true. Here in San Diego, where you're almost always a tourist, the easiest way to tell is
1) It is 75 degrees or less, and the tourist comments on how hot it is
2) "Look at all the palm trees!"
3) "What's Jack Murphy Stadium?" (You see, recently our stadium was bought and renamed the Q, but we all refuse to comply)
4) They don't know how to pronounce..well, any of the suburb's names: La Jolla (la hoya) El Cajon (el cahone). etc.

In fact, recently I was strolling downtown and I came across some British tourists, who were in the WORST part of downtown commenting on how pretty it was....being the good person I am, I led them to to NICE part of town (really). which brings me to number 5,
5) They are TOO TRUSTING...