问答题
{{U}}Technology has made it easy to cross national frontiers
physically, but there has been no invention of new mental habits to enable
people to cope with foreigners in a new way{{/U}}. For that to happen, the habits
of tourists will have to alter. The hidden god of travel is still Karl Baedeker,
even though he died in 1859. His guidebooks have a permanent pattern, making
travel essentially a matter of sightseeing, looking at places rather than at
people. (47) {{U}}His achievement was to find sights that could be guaranteed to
be there all the time, to be clearly identifiable, dated and classified
according to the amount of admiration they deserved{{/U}}. He made visits to old
monuments and to art museums--the staple diet of the traveler, drawing attention
away from the living inhabitants. To this day, tourism is a course in history,
architecture, aesthetics, and the appreciation of hotels and food. (48) {{U}}The
cult of "sights" has grown so much that most foreign (organized) travel involves
virtually no contact with the natives, beyond those who specialize in catering
for tourists{{/U}}. The business traveler tends to meet mainly people in his own
profession. How different from the itinerary of a modern package holiday
is this program, drawn up by an Englishman, Sir Francis Head, in 1852, before
the guide books told tourists what to do. In Paris, he visited the municipal
pawnshop, the asylum for blind youths, where Braille, still unknown in England,
was being used, a prison, an orphanage for abandoned children, the Salpetriere
old people's home, the morgue, the national printing works, the military
academy, the national assembly, the public laundry, and finally he attended/he
lectures at the Conservatory for Arts and Crafts. The rise of bureaucratic
officialdom soon stopped that kind of curiosity; but perhaps today a new
openness will allow it to express itself again. In former times, the attraction
of foreign travel was often that people did abroad what they dared not do at
home, which is shy foreign countries won reputations for sexual debauchery. (The
French considered England as debauched as the English visitors to the Folies
Bergeres imagined the French to be. ) (49) {{U}}But now that a visit to France is
no longer a dangerous adventure, and that an international uniformity exists in
so many of the goods and facilities the tourist encounters, where is the
excitement, and where are the new discoveries?{{/U}} It is to be
found in the people. (50) {{U}}The foreignness in foreign travel today must come
mainly from meeting individuals whom one would not normally meet at
home.{{/U}}