Put a tourist in your life
Spain was different!
I grew up in a hotel.
My parents worked from sunrise to sunset on Christmas holidays, Easter, summer, weekends and feast days. It was a family hotel and many customers used to repeat year after year. So this was a big family. The children under five years old were a large gang of nine cousins, dozens of foreign children, neighbors and other Spanish latitudes people who vacationed here every year.
Our parents used to finish to work around midnight and we were walking up those hours playing freely, and even later, as they were taking a drink on the terrace of the hotel, with friends and clients who also had become friends.
I’m talking about the seventies. Altea, such as the Mediterranean coast, was a paradise for German and French who came to spend their holidays. They mingled with the people here, with which, at the cultural level, had little to do: the Spanish lived in a dictatorship that kept us from advancing and tourism was a new phenomenon that we got to know over the years, which did not prevent from gaving the best of ourselves to those people who looked at us with curiosity and some envy of our commercial innocence, I think.
We ate paella on the beach with our clients, we invited them to our birthdays and communions.
I remember my parents always working with joy, happy. Probably because human contact and feedback received fed them and made them feel good. They knew the world without leaving home and then there was no internet.
In winter, we wrote with our foreign friends and when they came on vacation, they always brought us gifts that here was impossible to find. I still remember the day that I got the Scrabble. I still have it and I can say to this day is still my favorite board game.
With just eight years, many of us were perfectly trilingual (pity English wasn’t cool at that time!). We knew world even before starting to travel and learned that tolerance can only be achieved with knowledge.
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The point is that tourism and the landscape has changed a lot since then.
The mass tourism became a very important business like so many other disciplines.
Today tourism as experience is said in every tourism congress but this is nothing new for those who grew up in this business. We know we just have to regain our good faith and return to what we were and that we have inadvertently been lost along the way.
Our parents told us to study to avoid having to dedicate ourselves to the hotel, which was sacrificed.
And we study. Different disciplines, and in the case of my family, none related to the family business.
And the years have passed. And from our respective experiences I can say, I believe unequivocally, that in my house, we have tourism in the blood. That our will to fly to other worlds, other fields of action made us converged at the end, to the place where we come from.
And I say this with great satisfaction and without a hint of resentment. Personally, it has helped me to really understand what stuff I’m made.
I am an extremely social animal. And Web 2.0 gives me many things but not the human contact that I’m speaking.
We live in a place where there is always a tourist nearby. Throughout the year we have the opportunity to meet new people, speaking in different languages, learn new dishes, share experiences with different people who lives in different worlds, but who share with us the love of our land.
And being so incredibly easy, it seems we inhabit parallel worlds …
Tourists move in another plane and our contact is purely commercial.
What a waste!
