TOURIST TRAP!
This is the word I saw many times in this vacation travel. I travelled to Spain and Portugal in this GW (GW is the long vacation in Japan) with my wife. Since we had several experience to travel abroad, we are obtaining some knowledge how to avoid danger or how to avoid scamming.
Nevertheless, we faced some situation when we should avoid. Too expensive restaurant, scamming shop etc… In Japan, we are living in relatively safe. So we were amazed at and shocked excessively when we received some behavior out of malice by other people.
The most bad thing to us was that it provides us a bad impression of that country by experiencing such a scamming or danger even though we know these type of situation or scamming people was rare. It cannot be owed to the country. So we wanted to avoid the situation as much as possible to keep our experience and impression good.
How can we achieve this?
Stars and Reviews
There is Internet for us! We found there are stars and reviews to each shops and restaurant in Google Map. Of course there are a lot of review sites in Japan. But is there comprehensive site which is available globally other than Google Map? So we referred Google Map review every time we tried to enter restaurant. We referred Booking.com stars in advance before reserving room at hotel.
Overall this strategy worked fine. We didn’t have bad experience after all. There were no chance to enter scamming shop and stay danger hotels.
But what’s the purpose of traveling?
But I wondered that this was what I wanted to do. The big purpose of going abroad was experiencing food, language and culture which cannot be provided in our country Japan. Checking the Internet review could prevent us from tackling the new field of view I’ve never got. Of course we have home, family and friend to return. We have to be healthy and safe even during travel. But I’m wondering I was too afraid of experiencing new things in foreign country.
I don’t have any good answer to this discussion. But I would be glad if I can have more courage to experience good things or even bad things on abroad. That should provide us more courage and tolerance.
Thanks.