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"plaintext": "I have been a tourist many times, which is probably why I do not trust myself when I start judging tourists too quickly."
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"plaintext": "There is a very ordinary tenderness in wanting to arrive somewhere beautiful. A street with warm light. A balcony with plants. A beach that looks less tired than your own life. A market where fruit is arranged as if someone still believes in mornings. I understand that desire. I have carried it too. Most people travel because they want to feel briefly unburdened, or anonymous, or alive in a slightly different arrangement of streets. Sometimes they travel because they are curious. Sometimes because they are exhausted. Sometimes because the place where they live has become too familiar to comfort them and too heavy to ignore."
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"plaintext": "That part does not bother me."
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"plaintext": "What bothers me is the moment when a place stops being treated as a place and becomes an interface. Something to scroll through. Something to optimize. Something to enter, consume, photograph, rate, recommend, and leave before the ordinary consequences return. Tourism has always existed, but it feels different now. Not only bigger, though it is bigger. Not only faster, though it is faster. It feels more templated. A city becomes a set of recommended angles. A café becomes a backdrop. A staircase becomes a ritual. A beach becomes proof that you chose correctly. People no longer only travel to see a place. They travel to produce the evidence that they saw it in the expected way."
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"plaintext": "And then everyone is surprised when the place begins to resist."
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"plaintext": "I grew up Vietnamese-Czech, which means I learned early that a place can become a performance depending on who is looking. Czechia can turn Vietnamese people into a useful background very easily: the evening shop, the bowl of phở, the quiet family working too much, the polite story of integration that never asks who gets tired of being useful. Vietnam, from Europe, can become another kind of background: colour, heat, scooters, food, cheapness, resilience, beauty. A place simplified until it becomes easy to consume. Sometimes I feel like I have spent my whole life watching places and people get reduced into something convenient for someone else’s story."
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"plaintext": "So when I look at European cities struggling with overtourism, I do not see only a travel problem. I see a familiar gesture. The world looking at a place and asking it to be available, charming, affordable, photogenic, grateful, and emotionally convenient, while not asking too loudly who has to live inside the consequences."
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"plaintext": "Venice is the obvious example, maybe too obvious. It is almost unfair to use it, because everyone already understands Venice as a city at risk of becoming a museum of itself. But maybe that is exactly why it still matters. There is something frighteningly clear about a place where visitor beds can start to feel more powerful than resident lives. At some point the city still has windows, bridges, churches, laundry, bells, and water, but the grammar changes. It no longer asks, how do people live here? It asks, how do people pass through here?"
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"plaintext": "Barcelona carries the same question with a different voice. Lisbon too. Mallorca, Dubrovnik, Amsterdam, Prague, Salzburg, the list keeps shifting, but the pattern is familiar. First the city becomes desirable. Then investors notice the desire. Then platforms make the desire easy to book. Then local life becomes an obstacle to smooth consumption. The neighbourhood is still there, physically, but something inside it starts being translated into another language, one spoken by lockboxes, wheeled suitcases, brunch menus, short-term rental calendars, and people who are very briefly in love with the idea of living somewhere."
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"plaintext": "The tourist apartment is where the problem becomes intimate. It is not just a bed rented for three nights. It is a unit of ordinary life removed from a building. Enough of them, and the building changes. The hallway changes. The keys change. The rubbish changes. The sounds change. Nobody knows who is supposed to greet whom anymore. The neighbours stop being neighbours and become temporary silhouettes with suitcases. A door that used to mean someone lives here starts meaning someone arrived."
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"plaintext": "A city can survive visitors. What it cannot survive forever is being redesigned around people who do not have to stay."
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"plaintext": "The easy argument is that tourists bring money. They do. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Restaurants survive on them. Hotels employ people. Museums, guides, cafés, drivers, cleaners, markets, bars, airports, festivals, and whole local economies depend on movement. There is no pure version of this where visitors vanish and everyone is suddenly safe, housed, well-paid, and serene. I do not believe in that kind of moral theatre. Cities have always been porous. People have always arrived, traded, eaten, looked, learned, worked, loved, misunderstood each other, and left."
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"plaintext": "But tourists bring money is one of those true sentences that becomes stupid when it is used to end the conversation."
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"plaintext": "Money for whom? At what cost? In exchange for what kind of city? Does it pay wages that allow people to stay? Does it protect housing? Does it support public transport, schools, waste collection, health, maintenance, quiet? Or does it mostly teach a place to smile while it is being hollowed out? A full terrace can still sit under an empty apartment building. A city can look successful from the outside and become unlivable from the inside. That is the cruel elegance of overtourism. It often photographs well."
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"plaintext": "The problem is not that people want beauty. The problem begins when beauty is turned into a machine that local people are expected to service."
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"plaintext": "I think about Prague here too, even though Prague is not Venice. Prague has its own texture. Its own exhaustion. Its own way of being loved badly. There are streets in Prague where the city feels less like a capital and more like a corridor between one rented bed and another. A beautiful corridor, yes. But beauty does not cancel the feeling that something has been flattened. Some parts of Prague have become so available to visitors that they feel strangely unavailable to people who actually belong to the ordinary life of the city. Not inaccessible exactly, but emotionally removed, like a room in your own house that has been redecorated for strangers."
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"plaintext": "Maybe that is why I am suspicious of the word authentic in travel. Tourists love authenticity until it becomes inconvenient. They want real neighbourhoods, but not real noise. Local food, but with translated menus and card payments. Old streets, but no old infrastructure. Culture, but not the kind that asks them to behave differently. They want the feeling of entering someone else’s life without the awkwardness of being a guest."
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"plaintext": "I do not say this from a clean moral place. I also take photos. I also save locations. I also want the small pleasure of finding a street that feels like a secret, even though the secret probably has forty thousand views and a woman nearby who just wants to carry her groceries home without becoming part of my atmosphere. I know the temptation of beautiful framing. I know how easy it is to confuse noticing with possessing. There is a small colonial instinct hiding inside many innocent travel habits: the belief that what moves us becomes somehow ours."
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"plaintext": "That is an uncomfortable sentence to write, because I do not want to turn every visitor into a villain. Most people are not trying to destroy the places they visit. They are trying to rest, or celebrate, or escape, or find something they lost in the place where they usually live. A tourist with a suitcase is not automatically an enemy of local life. Sometimes she is just a tired person with bad shoes and too many saved pins. But overtourism is not only caused by bad tourists. It is caused by systems that make all of us worse at being guests."
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"plaintext": "Platforms reward repeatable places. Airlines reward short escapes. Cities reward visitor numbers until the numbers turn against them. Influencers reward angles. Algorithms reward crowds by sending more crowds. Politicians reward growth because growth sounds responsible, even when residents are quietly losing the ability to remain. Ordinary people, tired from ordinary life, follow the glowing path. By the time they arrive, the moral damage has already been softened into convenience."
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"plaintext": "This is what makes the issue difficult. It is too easy to blame the person with the suitcase. It is also too easy for the person with the suitcase to feel innocent. Both positions are comfortable. Neither is enough."
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"plaintext": "There is a better word I keep returning to: guest."
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"plaintext": "Not customer. Not consumer. Not content creator. Guest."
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"plaintext": "A guest enters a place with some awareness that life was happening before her arrival and will continue after she leaves. A guest does not need to be ashamed of being there. But she should know that arrival is not ownership. She should know that a home can welcome her without becoming hers. She should know that being able to pay for a room does not mean the city owes her its entire personality. In Vietnamese homes, at least in the version I know, guesthood is practical and emotional at the same time. You are fed. You are noticed. Someone asks if you have eaten even when the answer is obvious. A plate appears before the conversation has found its shape. But there are also rules, even when nobody explains them as rules. You do not behave as if the home exists for your performance. You do not confuse hospitality with surrender. You do not make yourself bigger than the room."
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"plaintext": "Maybe travel needs more of that. Less conquest, less optimization, less must-see, less hungry innocence. More guesthood."
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"plaintext": "This would not solve housing. It would not regulate platforms. It would not limit cruise ships, protect residents, tax extraction properly, or return apartments to people who need homes rather than weekends. Cities need policy, not just better manners. They need courage from officials who can say that more visitors are not always the same as more life. They need rules that treat housing as housing, not as a moodboard with a lockbox. They need transport designed for daily use, not only for seasonal flows. They need wages that allow the people serving the city to live within reach of it. They need to stop measuring success only by arrivals, overnight stays, spending, growth, and the cheerful arithmetic of being desired."
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"plaintext": "But manners still matter because they reveal what kind of world we think we are entering."
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"plaintext": "If I arrive somewhere and treat it as a background, I am saying something. If I photograph everything but notice no one, I am saying something. If I complain that local life interferes with my experience, I am saying something. If I expect beauty without friction, service without labour, authenticity without discomfort, I am not only travelling. I am practicing a politics of entitlement in comfortable shoes."
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"plaintext": "The hardest thing about overtourism is that it can make even welcome feel exhausted. A city can be generous for centuries and still reach a point where generosity starts to look like self-erasure. Locals who protest are then framed as hostile, ungrateful, anti-tourist, anti-business, anti-fun. As if people should be endlessly grateful for an economy that makes their own streets harder to inhabit. As if hospitality is only real when it has no limits. As if setting a boundary means forgetting how to be kind."
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"plaintext": "I do not believe kindness works that way. I was raised by a woman who understood care as action more than performance. Food cooked, bills paid, errands done, language handled, life made possible without dramatic announcements. There is a kind of hospitality that comes from strength, but there is also a kind that is demanded until it becomes submission. Cities are often asked to perform the second one. Smile, host, clean, adapt, absorb, repeat. Be charming, but not angry. Be local, but not inconvenient. Be alive, but not in the way that interrupts the itinerary."
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"plaintext": "Nobody owes permanent emotional hospitality to a business model."
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"plaintext": "I keep thinking about the people who stay after the photo is uploaded. The cleaner changing sheets in an apartment where no neighbour knows the next guest. The old woman taking a longer route because the usual street is blocked by bodies and phones. The waiter smiling through another language he learned for survival. The child growing up in a city where every summer feels like being pushed to the edge of home. The resident who is told this is simply the price of living somewhere desirable. The shop owner who benefits from visitors and still misses the quieter rhythm of a street that used to belong to more than consumption. The person who works in the beautiful centre and commutes from farther and farther away because beauty has become too expensive to sleep near."
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"plaintext": "But desirable to whom?"
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"plaintext": "That question sits under the whole problem. Who gets to desire a place? Who gets to profit from that desire? Who gets to remain when desire becomes expensive? We talk about destinations as if desire were neutral, as if being wanted by the world were always a compliment. But desire has weight. It changes rents, jobs, streets, seasons, politics, even manners. A place can be loved so intensely by strangers that the people who know it best begin to feel pushed out of the frame."
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"plaintext": "This is where overtourism becomes more than tourism. It becomes a lesson in how modern attention works. Attention does not simply reveal things. It reorganizes them. A quiet place becomes content. A neighbourhood becomes a vibe. A restaurant becomes a queue. A beach becomes a trend. A city becomes a brand that has to keep performing itself. The internet makes this faster because it does not only show us where to go. It teaches us how to want. It gives desire a template, then pretends we discovered it alone."
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"plaintext": "That is why I cannot separate overtourism from digital culture. The old tourist wanted a view. The platform tourist wants a recognizable view. She wants the image to be legible to people who were not there. The photo must say something quickly: I was here, I knew where to go, I touched the correct surface of the world. This is not always vanity. Sometimes it is loneliness looking for proof. Sometimes it is memory outsourcing itself to an audience. But the result is still pressure. When enough people want the same proof, the place begins to bend around the camera."
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"plaintext": "And somewhere inside that bending, local people become either service or scenery."
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"plaintext": "I have felt versions of this in smaller, quieter ways as a Vietnamese person in Czechia. Not tourism exactly, but the same appetite for a simplified image. People want the food, the hardworking family, the cute bilingual confusion, the polite gratitude, the colourful festival, the safe kind of difference. They want the part of diaspora that enriches the majority without asking too much of it. They want us visible enough to season the national story, but not always loud enough to complicate it. So maybe I am sensitive to places being turned into backgrounds because I know what it feels like when people do that to communities too."
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"plaintext": "The background is never empty. It is only being treated as if it has no claim."
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"plaintext": "A city is not a blank surface waiting for our temporary freedom. A beach is not a prop. A neighbourhood is not a lifestyle accessory with better light. Even the most visited place still contains ordinary life: appointments, boredom, repairs, school mornings, bad moods, family arguments, laundry, old people, young people, people who do not care that the sunset looks cinematic because they have to get home. This ordinary life is not a failure of the destination. It is the reason the destination is real."
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"plaintext": "Maybe the most respectful thing a visitor can do is not to chase authenticity, but to accept opacity. To understand that not everything has to open for her. Not every local custom has to become an experience. Not every street has to be explained. Not every beautiful thing has to be captured. There is a humility in letting a place remain partly unavailable. I think about this a lot because I also want privacy for myself. I want to be readable without being owned. I want to be seen without being flattened. Places deserve that too."
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"plaintext": "There is a tenderness in restraint. Not the cold restraint of pretending not to care, but the warmer kind that says: I can love this without taking all of it. I can be here without making myself the centre. I can enjoy beauty without demanding that it become frictionless. I can leave money without leaving damage. I can ask what kind of presence is appropriate, not only what kind is allowed."
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"plaintext": "Of course this sounds small compared to housing policy and platform regulation. It is small. But small does not mean useless. A culture of better guesthood will not fix the rental market by itself, but without it every regulation becomes a fight against people who believe their convenience is morally innocent. The inner posture and the outer structure feed each other. We need both. Rules for systems. Manners for souls. Maybe that sounds too soft, but softness is not the same as weakness. Sometimes it is simply the refusal to become careless."
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"plaintext": "I do not want a world without travel. That would be smaller, colder, less curious. I do not want people to stop wanting beautiful places. Wanting beauty is one of the less embarrassing things humans do. I want a world where travel does not require places to become less livable in order to be loved. Where beauty is not automatically converted into rent pressure. Where a city can receive strangers without being reorganized around them. Where local life is not treated as decoration for someone else’s temporary freedom."
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"plaintext": "The question is not whether we should go anywhere. The question is what kind of person we become when we arrive."
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"plaintext": "I know I will still be a tourist again. I will still stand somewhere too beautiful and feel the small, stupid urge to photograph it before I have fully looked. I will still save places, compare routes, read reviews, search for coffee, make mistakes, misunderstand things, and occasionally become exactly the kind of visitor I am trying to think beyond. I do not need purity from myself. I do need attention. The kind that slows the hand before the camera. The kind that notices the cleaner, the neighbour, the queue, the noise, the sign asking for quiet, the difference between a public place and a place made public by force."
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"plaintext": "Maybe that is all this essay can really ask for: not guilt, not purity, not another elegant moral performance, but attention with consequences."
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"plaintext": "A city is not a background. A home is not a listing. A street is not a corridor between content opportunities. A place can be open, generous, funny, chaotic, beautiful, welcoming, and full of strangers without surrendering the right to remain itself. It can feed us, guide us, surprise us, and let us briefly belong. But it should not have to disappear in order to be seen."
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"description": "Notes on overtourism, borrowed beauty, and what happens when home becomes scenery for people who do not have to stay.",
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"textContent": "I have been a tourist many times, which is probably why I do not trust myself when I start judging tourists too quickly.\nThere is a very ordinary tenderness in wanting to arrive somewhere beautiful. A street with warm light. A balcony with plants. A beach that looks less tired than your own life. A market where fruit is arranged as if someone still believes in mornings. I understand that desire. I have carried it too. Most people travel because they want to feel briefly unburdened, or anonymous, or alive in a slightly different arrangement of streets. Sometimes they travel because they are curious. Sometimes because they are exhausted. Sometimes because the place where they live has become too familiar to comfort them and too heavy to ignore.\nThat part does not bother me.\nWhat bothers me is the moment when a place stops being treated as a place and becomes an interface. Something to scroll through. Something to optimize. Something to enter, consume, photograph, rate, recommend, and leave before the ordinary consequences return. Tourism has always existed, but it feels different now. Not only bigger, though it is bigger. Not only faster, though it is faster. It feels more templated. A city becomes a set of recommended angles. A café becomes a backdrop. A staircase becomes a ritual. A beach becomes proof that you chose correctly. People no longer only travel to see a place. They travel to produce the evidence that they saw it in the expected way.\nAnd then everyone is surprised when the place begins to resist.\nI grew up Vietnamese-Czech, which means I learned early that a place can become a performance depending on who is looking. Czechia can turn Vietnamese people into a useful background very easily: the evening shop, the bowl of phở, the quiet family working too much, the polite story of integration that never asks who gets tired of being useful. Vietnam, from Europe, can become another kind of background: colour, heat, scooters, food, cheapness, resilience, beauty. A place simplified until it becomes easy to consume. Sometimes I feel like I have spent my whole life watching places and people get reduced into something convenient for someone else’s story.\nSo when I look at European cities struggling with overtourism, I do not see only a travel problem. I see a familiar gesture. The world looking at a place and asking it to be available, charming, affordable, photogenic, grateful, and emotionally convenient, while not asking too loudly who has to live inside the consequences.\nVenice is the obvious example, maybe too obvious. It is almost unfair to use it, because everyone already understands Venice as a city at risk of becoming a museum of itself. But maybe that is exactly why it still matters. There is something frighteningly clear about a place where visitor beds can start to feel more powerful than resident lives. At some point the city still has windows, bridges, churches, laundry, bells, and water, but the grammar changes. It no longer asks, how do people live here? It asks, how do people pass through here?\nBarcelona carries the same question with a different voice. Lisbon too. Mallorca, Dubrovnik, Amsterdam, Prague, Salzburg, the list keeps shifting, but the pattern is familiar. First the city becomes desirable. Then investors notice the desire. Then platforms make the desire easy to book. Then local life becomes an obstacle to smooth consumption. The neighbourhood is still there, physically, but something inside it starts being translated into another language, one spoken by lockboxes, wheeled suitcases, brunch menus, short-term rental calendars, and people who are very briefly in love with the idea of living somewhere.\nThe tourist apartment is where the problem becomes intimate. It is not just a bed rented for three nights. It is a unit of ordinary life removed from a building. Enough of them, and the building changes. The hallway changes. The keys change. The rubbish changes. The sounds change. Nobody knows who is supposed to greet whom anymore. The neighbours stop being neighbours and become temporary silhouettes with suitcases. A door that used to mean someone lives here starts meaning someone arrived.\nA city can survive visitors. What it cannot survive forever is being redesigned around people who do not have to stay.\nThe easy argument is that tourists bring money. They do. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Restaurants survive on them. Hotels employ people. Museums, guides, cafés, drivers, cleaners, markets, bars, airports, festivals, and whole local economies depend on movement. There is no pure version of this where visitors vanish and everyone is suddenly safe, housed, well-paid, and serene. I do not believe in that kind of moral theatre. Cities have always been porous. People have always arrived, traded, eaten, looked, learned, worked, loved, misunderstood each other, and left.\nBut tourists bring money is one of those true sentences that becomes stupid when it is used to end the conversation.\nMoney for whom? At what cost? In exchange for what kind of city? Does it pay wages that allow people to stay? Does it protect housing? Does it support public transport, schools, waste collection, health, maintenance, quiet? Or does it mostly teach a place to smile while it is being hollowed out? A full terrace can still sit under an empty apartment building. A city can look successful from the outside and become unlivable from the inside. That is the cruel elegance of overtourism. It often photographs well.\n> The problem is not that people want beauty. The problem begins when beauty is turned into a machine that local people are expected to service.\nI think about Prague here too, even though Prague is not Venice. Prague has its own texture. Its own exhaustion. Its own way of being loved badly. There are streets in Prague where the city feels less like a capital and more like a corridor between one rented bed and another. A beautiful corridor, yes. But beauty does not cancel the feeling that something has been flattened. Some parts of Prague have become so available to visitors that they feel strangely unavailable to people who actually belong to the ordinary life of the city. Not inaccessible exactly, but emotionally removed, like a room in your own house that has been redecorated for strangers.\nMaybe that is why I am suspicious of the word authentic in travel. Tourists love authenticity until it becomes inconvenient. They want real neighbourhoods, but not real noise. Local food, but with translated menus and card payments. Old streets, but no old infrastructure. Culture, but not the kind that asks them to behave differently. They want the feeling of entering someone else’s life without the awkwardness of being a guest.\nI do not say this from a clean moral place. I also take photos. I also save locations. I also want the small pleasure of finding a street that feels like a secret, even though the secret probably has forty thousand views and a woman nearby who just wants to carry her groceries home without becoming part of my atmosphere. I know the temptation of beautiful framing. I know how easy it is to confuse noticing with possessing. There is a small colonial instinct hiding inside many innocent travel habits: the belief that what moves us becomes somehow ours.\nThat is an uncomfortable sentence to write, because I do not want to turn every visitor into a villain. Most people are not trying to destroy the places they visit. They are trying to rest, or celebrate, or escape, or find something they lost in the place where they usually live. A tourist with a suitcase is not automatically an enemy of local life. Sometimes she is just a tired person with bad shoes and too many saved pins. But overtourism is not only caused by bad tourists. It is caused by systems that make all of us worse at being guests.\nPlatforms reward repeatable places. Airlines reward short escapes. Cities reward visitor numbers until the numbers turn against them. Influencers reward angles. Algorithms reward crowds by sending more crowds. Politicians reward growth because growth sounds responsible, even when residents are quietly losing the ability to remain. Ordinary people, tired from ordinary life, follow the glowing path. By the time they arrive, the moral damage has already been softened into convenience.\nThis is what makes the issue difficult. It is too easy to blame the person with the suitcase. It is also too easy for the person with the suitcase to feel innocent. Both positions are comfortable. Neither is enough.\nThere is a better word I keep returning to: guest.\nNot customer. Not consumer. Not content creator. Guest.\nA guest enters a place with some awareness that life was happening before her arrival and will continue after she leaves. A guest does not need to be ashamed of being there. But she should know that arrival is not ownership. She should know that a home can welcome her without becoming hers. She should know that being able to pay for a room does not mean the city owes her its entire personality. In Vietnamese homes, at least in the version I know, guesthood is practical and emotional at the same time. You are fed. You are noticed. Someone asks if you have eaten even when the answer is obvious. A plate appears before the conversation has found its shape. But there are also rules, even when nobody explains them as rules. You do not behave as if the home exists for your performance. You do not confuse hospitality with surrender. You do not make yourself bigger than the room.\nMaybe travel needs more of that. Less conquest, less optimization, less must-see, less hungry innocence. More guesthood.\nThis would not solve housing. It would not regulate platforms. It would not limit cruise ships, protect residents, tax extraction properly, or return apartments to people who need homes rather than weekends. Cities need policy, not just better manners. They need courage from officials who can say that more visitors are not always the same as more life. They need rules that treat housing as housing, not as a moodboard with a lockbox. They need transport designed for daily use, not only for seasonal flows. They need wages that allow the people serving the city to live within reach of it. They need to stop measuring success only by arrivals, overnight stays, spending, growth, and the cheerful arithmetic of being desired.\nBut manners still matter because they reveal what kind of world we think we are entering.\nIf I arrive somewhere and treat it as a background, I am saying something. If I photograph everything but notice no one, I am saying something. If I complain that local life interferes with my experience, I am saying something. If I expect beauty without friction, service without labour, authenticity without discomfort, I am not only travelling. I am practicing a politics of entitlement in comfortable shoes.\nThe hardest thing about overtourism is that it can make even welcome feel exhausted. A city can be generous for centuries and still reach a point where generosity starts to look like self-erasure. Locals who protest are then framed as hostile, ungrateful, anti-tourist, anti-business, anti-fun. As if people should be endlessly grateful for an economy that makes their own streets harder to inhabit. As if hospitality is only real when it has no limits. As if setting a boundary means forgetting how to be kind.\nI do not believe kindness works that way. I was raised by a woman who understood care as action more than performance. Food cooked, bills paid, errands done, language handled, life made possible without dramatic announcements. There is a kind of hospitality that comes from strength, but there is also a kind that is demanded until it becomes submission. Cities are often asked to perform the second one. Smile, host, clean, adapt, absorb, repeat. Be charming, but not angry. Be local, but not inconvenient. Be alive, but not in the way that interrupts the itinerary.\nNobody owes permanent emotional hospitality to a business model.\nI keep thinking about the people who stay after the photo is uploaded. The cleaner changing sheets in an apartment where no neighbour knows the next guest. The old woman taking a longer route because the usual street is blocked by bodies and phones. The waiter smiling through another language he learned for survival. The child growing up in a city where every summer feels like being pushed to the edge of home. The resident who is told this is simply the price of living somewhere desirable. The shop owner who benefits from visitors and still misses the quieter rhythm of a street that used to belong to more than consumption. The person who works in the beautiful centre and commutes from farther and farther away because beauty has become too expensive to sleep near.\nBut desirable to whom?\nThat question sits under the whole problem. Who gets to desire a place? Who gets to profit from that desire? Who gets to remain when desire becomes expensive? We talk about destinations as if desire were neutral, as if being wanted by the world were always a compliment. But desire has weight. It changes rents, jobs, streets, seasons, politics, even manners. A place can be loved so intensely by strangers that the people who know it best begin to feel pushed out of the frame.\nThis is where overtourism becomes more than tourism. It becomes a lesson in how modern attention works. Attention does not simply reveal things. It reorganizes them. A quiet place becomes content. A neighbourhood becomes a vibe. A restaurant becomes a queue. A beach becomes a trend. A city becomes a brand that has to keep performing itself. The internet makes this faster because it does not only show us where to go. It teaches us how to want. It gives desire a template, then pretends we discovered it alone.\nThat is why I cannot separate overtourism from digital culture. The old tourist wanted a view. The platform tourist wants a recognizable view. She wants the image to be legible to people who were not there. The photo must say something quickly: I was here, I knew where to go, I touched the correct surface of the world. This is not always vanity. Sometimes it is loneliness looking for proof. Sometimes it is memory outsourcing itself to an audience. But the result is still pressure. When enough people want the same proof, the place begins to bend around the camera.\nAnd somewhere inside that bending, local people become either service or scenery.\nI have felt versions of this in smaller, quieter ways as a Vietnamese person in Czechia. Not tourism exactly, but the same appetite for a simplified image. People want the food, the hardworking family, the cute bilingual confusion, the polite gratitude, the colourful festival, the safe kind of difference. They want the part of diaspora that enriches the majority without asking too much of it. They want us visible enough to season the national story, but not always loud enough to complicate it. So maybe I am sensitive to places being turned into backgrounds because I know what it feels like when people do that to communities too.\nThe background is never empty. It is only being treated as if it has no claim.\nA city is not a blank surface waiting for our temporary freedom. A beach is not a prop. A neighbourhood is not a lifestyle accessory with better light. Even the most visited place still contains ordinary life: appointments, boredom, repairs, school mornings, bad moods, family arguments, laundry, old people, young people, people who do not care that the sunset looks cinematic because they have to get home. This ordinary life is not a failure of the destination. It is the reason the destination is real.\nMaybe the most respectful thing a visitor can do is not to chase authenticity, but to accept opacity. To understand that not everything has to open for her. Not every local custom has to become an experience. Not every street has to be explained. Not every beautiful thing has to be captured. There is a humility in letting a place remain partly unavailable. I think about this a lot because I also want privacy for myself. I want to be readable without being owned. I want to be seen without being flattened. Places deserve that too.\nThere is a tenderness in restraint. Not the cold restraint of pretending not to care, but the warmer kind that says: I can love this without taking all of it. I can be here without making myself the centre. I can enjoy beauty without demanding that it become frictionless. I can leave money without leaving damage. I can ask what kind of presence is appropriate, not only what kind is allowed.\nOf course this sounds small compared to housing policy and platform regulation. It is small. But small does not mean useless. A culture of better guesthood will not fix the rental market by itself, but without it every regulation becomes a fight against people who believe their convenience is morally innocent. The inner posture and the outer structure feed each other. We need both. Rules for systems. Manners for souls. Maybe that sounds too soft, but softness is not the same as weakness. Sometimes it is simply the refusal to become careless.\nI do not want a world without travel. That would be smaller, colder, less curious. I do not want people to stop wanting beautiful places. Wanting beauty is one of the less embarrassing things humans do. I want a world where travel does not require places to become less livable in order to be loved. Where beauty is not automatically converted into rent pressure. Where a city can receive strangers without being reorganized around them. Where local life is not treated as decoration for someone else’s temporary freedom.\nThe question is not whether we should go anywhere. The question is what kind of person we become when we arrive.\nI know I will still be a tourist again. I will still stand somewhere too beautiful and feel the small, stupid urge to photograph it before I have fully looked. I will still save places, compare routes, read reviews, search for coffee, make mistakes, misunderstand things, and occasionally become exactly the kind of visitor I am trying to think beyond. I do not need purity from myself. I do need attention. The kind that slows the hand before the camera. The kind that notices the cleaner, the neighbour, the queue, the noise, the sign asking for quiet, the difference between a public place and a place made public by force.\nMaybe that is all this essay can really ask for: not guilt, not purity, not another elegant moral performance, but attention with consequences.\nA city is not a background. A home is not a listing. A street is not a corridor between content opportunities. A place can be open, generous, funny, chaotic, beautiful, welcoming, and full of strangers without surrendering the right to remain itself. It can feed us, guide us, surprise us, and let us briefly belong. But it should not have to disappear in order to be seen.",
"title": "The City Is Not a Background"
}