Word: touristed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Whatever money the Hermitage can scare up from this venture is sorely needed. Of all the world's great museums, it is in the worst physical shape. It is an enormous and, to the tourist, impossibly labyrinthine array of 1,050 rooms in six buildings along the bank of the Neva, the oldest of which, the Winter Palace, was finished in the 1750s. Though extremely art rich, the Hermitage is sustenance poor, from its crumbling basements to the cracking veneer on its intarsia doors. Its storage and conservation facilities are woefully inadequate: the walls weep with rising damp...
...where the tourist buses don't go, down the rustic road far past John Belushi's grave and Jackie O's sprawling compound, lie the tribal lands of the Wampanoags...
...stubbing subtexts are hidden here. Munro's gender agenda is neatly buried in her quietly daring art. An Albanian Virgin, for example, spans half a century and half the globe to join vastly different lives. A Canadian tourist who changes her itinerary in the mountains of southeastern Europe is captured by tribal Ghegs and put to work. Village routines induce a hypnotic adjustment that virtually erases her former self. The ways of these isolated Christians are bloody and strict. A woman can dodge her tribal fate as breeder and toiler only by renouncing sex, living alone and dressing...
...late in Old Havana, and Calle Obispo is shrouded in darkness as Jorge, who fears giving his real name, walks down the narrow street. Once a fashionable shopping avenue, Obispo is now lined with decayed buildings. Jorge passes a tourist store, where three young Cubans are staring at a window display of souvenirs that would cost them the equivalent of several months' salary. At the corner, a young man whispers, "Pizza, pizza," hoping to attract customers to an illegal private restaurant. At 20 pesos, the price of a pie equals what Jorge earns in two days. Light spills...
...aged rum -- a rare treat -- he pours out the familiar Cuban litany of despair. He eats no breakfast or lunch and cannot find milk for his 10-year-old daughter. His car has no gas, his home no electricity. When he walks down Obispo at night, even the cheap tourist souvenirs tantalize him. He sips more rum. "People drink here to an extent you can't imagine," he says. "They don't go to work anymore. There is no hope. We talk about food shortages, clothes shortages, but it's our spirit that is broken...