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Comment by throw0101a | Hacker News Reader

> Don't dress like a tourist.

What does this mean? How do tourists dress? How would it differ from a non-tourist?

Fanny pack, ugly shirt, shorts with too many pockets, shoes (which look silly with shorts). Can spot the typical American tourist from a mile away. Euro tourists look a bit different, but still almost always dress the same as each other.

The gist of it is, tourists typically are carrying way more shit than they need and look silly more often than not. It's also nice to just walk around with the same amount of shit as you would if you were walking around your home city.

You can always spot German tourists when traveling abroad. They are the ones with the extremely technical hiking clothing wandering around the museum.

I’m only kind of kidding. That is to say tourists look like tourists everywhere because they are different. The better advice than “don’t dress like a tourist” is “don’t expect where you are traveling to be the same as where you are from. Take some time to see if you can pick out what they are.”

Fanny packs aren’t really an American thing. Actually, you’ve basically described Australian tourists in Bali in my experience.

In Europe at least, nine times out of ten, that tourist is not American. We just aren’t very numerous compared to Europeans in Europe (don’t you know most of us don’t even have passports). Russians on the other hand....

Are you sure this description of an American tourist didn't come from a 1990s newspaper cartoon? Fanny pack? Really?

I changed that to "stereotypical" tourist above, but I agree that this is still a bit harsh.

What I meant was that: if you are visiting a town in a foreign country, it would at least be polite to research beforehand how locals dress and what is considered rude, inappropriate or simply tasteless.

Not what I was expecting at all, I wish people dressed that well on vacation. I thought you were going to link to someting more like https://goo.gl/maps/AnzFYfXAuCDt2rDD8

That said, all of these measures you describe are a bit much. There are a million ways to tell that somebody's a tourist, are you going to pretend you're there to raise VC?

Edit: Parent's editing their comments a lot so mine makes no sense now, but they linked to https://img.budgettravel.com/_facebookShare/tourists-in-spai... as an example of tourist attire.

So...comfortable and practical?

People don't want to do laundry on their vacation. And unless you're rich and have porters lugging around massive luggage with carefully packed fashionable clothes, people are also space-constrained

So, they optimize for comfortable, quick-dry, wrinkle-free clothes so they can maximize exploration and energy.

That's......what you have to do when you are spending your limited vacation time to see the world.

Part of this is definitely a snobby european mindset. Europeans get 5-6 weeks of vacation a year, and burn 4 of those on August so they are used to LOONG consecutive getaways, and structure their lives accordingly.

The rest of the world (And I don't mean America, I mean the entire rest of the non-European world) doesn't have that luxury.

I don't have any problem with the usual tourist attire, but still appreciate if people are dressed nicely. Parent may have a stronger view.

Maybe it is just you who doesn't have long vacations.

My relatives from Canada are constantly complaining how they have only 10 days of vacation per year yet every year entire family takes road trips that last 5-6 weeks. Every second year they come to visit Europe.

Your relatives are retired, or are taking unpaid leave.

I'm not speaking for myself, I'm speaking for the vast majority of the world.

Do you seriously think that tourists from China, Japan, India, and the US have 5-6 weeks of vacation every year?

To be so blind to your own privilege...befuddling..

If they take unpaid leave that means they are compensated well enough so they can afford to take unpaid leave. What is the difference between having paid vacation days or having a salary so high that you can afford unpaid leave?

Also, this is a nice indicator as well... https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/china/ https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/japan/ https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/india/

compared to this: https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/croatia/

I don't see why research is necessary for most destinations. The key factor is just wearing pants. Unless you're actually near a beach. That seems really hard for a lot of tourists, but I think just wearing jeans instead of cargo shorts or board shorts resolves most of the problem with tourist garb.

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