Is That Fenway Park?

It will always be true, and it will always be exasperatingly amusing, that tourists, when placed into an enclosed environment with more of their own, will say very, very stupid things, and think that they are clever or knowledgable, or in general not total tools. When my sister, my mother, and I flew to the East Coast for me to look at some college campuses among other activities and side trips, Jackie and I ended up sitting behind two of the most touristey tourists in the lower 48 states. In the middle of a long stream of banal conversation about the Boston Marathon and various bus tours of the city, we started our descent into the Boston area. The flight attendents had announced that we were about a half hour from landing, and the plane was low enough to see various towns and suburbs on the flightpath. As we flew over a high school and its surrounding sports fields, one tourist turned to the other and asked, "is that Fenway Park!?" The man by the window replied, knowingly, "yes, I think it is," as the little league stadium slipped behind the plane. Neither tourist seemed to notice, 20 minutes later when we were actually over Boston, the brightly-lit major league stadium that was in fact Fenway Park.

This type of self-assured, and utterly wrong, tourist is far more amusing but far more irritating than the type that asks directions to and questions about everything. My tour of the Kilmanhaim Gaol (there's no way I spelled that name right, incidentally) started out in a 10 foot square open area between the jail buiding itself and the visitors center annex. Immediately upon stepping out of the annex, a tang-haired british woman leaned to her Annie-permed traveling companion and said in a stage whisper, "This must be the exercise yard." That both women held very full bags from the gift shop at the Guinness Storehouse only partly excuses the ridiculousness of the statement; the smallest of the actual exercise yards we saw later was about 15 times as big as the courtyard between the jail and the annex, and what's more, the real exercize yards are actually within the prison.

Later on the same tour, when the tour guide pushed a button to automatically raise the projection screen that some slides had been displayed on, a man said, not quietly, "And we have liftoff!" Now maybe he had never seen a screen of any type go up before, and thought the slowly raising piece of canvas was exciting. But that was definitely the dumbest thing I heard on my entire trip.