I have other clients who are planning trips to their old vacation stand by's. There's something nice about going to a place that you've been to before for vacation. If you visit the same all inclusive resort every year, I think after the 2nd or 3rd year you could begin to experience a state of relaxation so deep that people would have to come around with a mirror to stick under your nose every hour or so just to make sure you are still breathing. For me, when I am in a new location, I have a little trouble relaxing because I feel like I have to see and do everything since I have a limited amount of time to do so. I always think, what if this is the only time I'll ever be here??!?!?! Just in case, I better do everything!!!! So, I spend my vacation running from one sight to another in a tourist frenzy the likes of which you have probably never seen snapping pictures every 20 seconds along the way.
I know I've told the stories about the trip to Europe before, but that is exactly the state that my travel buddy, Jenny and I were in while we traveled in Europe several years ago. It was our first time to travel together and it turned out that we were sort of on the same page. We both had an overwhelming urge to rush to each sight, snap multiple pictures as quickly as possible and then move on to another sight. I think one of the few times we slowed down and really enjoyed a tourist attraction was at Park Guell in Barcelona. When we first arrived at Park Guell we were still in the tourism frenzy mode that we spent most of the trip in as you might be able to tell if you saw how many photos I took in the first hour. But then we came across this guy who was testing the boundaries of the acoustics in the pavilion and and things changed. Suddenly a state of peace came over me and I felt the need to slow down and just enjoy all there was to see and experience.
In a place like Park Guell your photos can go one of two ways. Either you will end up with photos of people you don't know from some other country posing for someone else in front of whatever land mark you are trying to photograph, or you can wait around indefinitely until all the other tourists clear out and try to get a picture of the actual landmark with nobody else in front of it. Partially due to my lack of patience, most of my photos usually have other tourists posing in them. In my opinion, life is too short to spend it waiting for all the other people in the world to finish taking photos in front of a giant mosaic lizard at Park Guell. The other reason is that I assume that someone besides me will someday look at my photos and I want them to get that same sense that I had when I was visiting the location that this is an important sight, hence all of these people are in the photos. I mean, seriously.... if you visit the Great Pyramids and take a bunch of photos of just the pyramids and no other humans are in he photos, in 500 years if someone comes across the photos are they going to think, Wow! Those people in the 21st century were so self involved they didn't even realize what a big deal those pyramids were!!!!! Let's face it, we are pretty self involved. It wouldn't be a big jump for someone from the 26th century to make that we were too self involved to recognize history when we walked right through it. So, this is what the entrance of Park Guell looks like on any given day with a ga-zillion tourists all stopping to take photos of one another in front of the different pieces of art.
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