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• sxan@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Also they seldom get to practice their English.

  Even with all of the tourism? From the US and UK? I know French is a common second language in the UK, but surely Paris gets its fair share of pensioners speaking only English.

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  • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Doubtful. It’s too expensive.

    Tourists stay for a few days, so you only get to meet them when they’re asking for directions or feeling talkative in bars. Unless you happen to be working in tourism of course. Which is a fairly big industry in the city.

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    • sxan@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      No time to spare, got to be efficient!

      Those tend to be infrequent travelers, though, or young 'uns hitchhiking or railing through Europe. I’ve yet to meet an experienced traveler who hasn’t learned that changing hotels is the worst part of any vacation.

      My wife and I have a two-hotel limit. If we’re go to southern France, we might stay a week in Provence, and then change to Saint-Tropez for a few days. Oh, I guess there’s always an extra hotel before departure: we always spend the last night near the airport, but that hardly counts since you don’t unpack. But we look at vacations now from the perspective of “base of operations”.

      One of these days we might try a river cruise, although I have this premonition it’s going to be a terrible experience. And we once considered a bicycling vacation run by a company that would move your luggage from hotel to hotel, and you spent the day biking between them. That might be worth all of the hotel changes, but as we get older it gets harder to pack lightly enough to make changing hotels easy.

      The “whirlwind tour” is, simply, the most awful concept in the entire history of vacation travel. Oh, and cruise ships. Cruise ships might be worse. I’m glad Venice banned them.

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