Pennyaline wrote:
>
> "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.


Everyone can get those things *anywhere*, if it comes down to it. But
the foreigners, other than the Americans still spend a lot of money at
Harrods. The Americans just gawk according to al Fayeed.