"Arri London" wrote:
> Depends on to whom one speaks. Harrod's is a department store, rather
> than simply a tourist attraction to be photographed.

Precisely. It's all relative. When I lived in NYC (and it's the same now
when I'm just visiting), I was mired in swamps foreign tourists all the
time. The Empire State Building is a office building, but a lot of people
sure do take photographs of it, wander through it, gaze off of it. The World
Trade Center had the same problem until recently.

The Statue of Liberty is just what its name says it is. It's a statue. It's
enormous. It has its own island.

The Circle Line jaunts over a polluted and stinky river and a polluted and
stinky seaway to circumscribe a different island (fairly nondescript in and
of itself) several times a day while passengers gaze at the nonfuctioning
mechanisms of a bunch of old bridges as they pass under them. Go figure.

One knew when one was behind a group of tourists, as one would be forced to
a sudden stop in midstride on crowded sidewalks by foreign bodies --
invariably looking up, pointing and gaping, oooohing and aaaaaahing, aiming
and snapping, assessing and critiquing -- lest one trample or topple over
them.

They crowd restaurants and museums. They crowd trendy department and food
stores. They crowd the sidewalks. They crowd into the Theater District, into
venues on- and off-. They go to movies. Their tour buses prowl the streets.
They are perfect strangers who ask us for directions and, not uncommonly,
ask to have their pictures taken. They crowd the Park and mass around
fountain and statuary like human pigeons. They take the subway. They
communicate with language and gestures and customs the natives don't
understand and may not cotton to. They're underfoot. They spend millions.

Miss Manners says: Suck it up. That's part of life in the Big City, and
therefore part of getting everything one asked for.

< Bloomingdale's is just a department store, too. >


> For the most part they don't buy those things. That's always been one of
> al Fayeed's complaints. The big ticket customers aren't the Americans
> according to him. He should know; it's his store.

True enough. We can get those things *here*, after all.