Today is just a quick post, as another 3 weeks have passed since my last German test, and therefore we have another test tomorrow.

OK, it’s a bit scary, but  it just took me more than a minute to write that first sentence. My first attempt had the words in more of a German order, rather than in the correct English word order. Perhaps I have studied a little too much German this week, as I try to make up all the work I missed the first week of class. 😉

Anyway, I do need to continue my studies for tomorrow’s test, so today I’ll ponder what it takes to make a tourist happy.

All over the old part of Barcelona we kept running across this sign with a man and horse:

Sign with man leading horse, Barcelona

It was scattered around on various business in the old part of town.  This one reads Entrada, “entrance” and some others read Salida, “exit”. However, the signs appeared on the sides of buildings that were blocks apart, and so we didn’t really understand what you would be “leaving” or “exiting”.

So, when we spotted the sign in the photo, I realized it was right across the street from the tourist Information Center, and I suggested we head inside to ask what it was. You could see this sign from the front desk in the center, so it was easy enough to point to.  When we asked “What does that sign mean?”, and pointed toward the wall with the sign, the woman looked at it, and then us, and said “it’s a street sign”.

OK, we said, but what does it mean?

She looked at us like we were a bit crazy and said, Carrer de la Ciutat is the name of the street we’re on.

OK, right. There is indeed also a sign on that building that has the name of the street on it. But we’re talking about the other sign.

And I swear to you that the woman we were talking with, as well as her colleague, both acted like they didn’t see the other sign there on the side of the building. When we finally convinced them that we were talking about a sign with a man and horse, right there below the street sign, we didn’t have too much more luck. Finally, one of them started to explain that it was something to do the pilgrims coming through Barcelona on their way to Santiago di Campostella.  I was all set to believe that – I could imagine that pilgrims arriving by horse to Barcelona would need to figure out where to go to spend the night, and/or to find the church in town to go, etc.

However, the first woman’s colleague quickly dismissed that suggestion as untrue.  In the end, the two of them decided they didn’t have any idea what the sign with the horse and the man meant.

And I still contend that neither of them had ever really noticed it much before we asked the question.

Anyway, this whole adventure at the tourist information office  put me in mind of a story from when I lived in Japan. Although I usually taught English to businessmen, I was at some point offered a chance to make a little extra money on the side by tutoring Japanese tour guides who were studying for the national exam. They were studying to qualify to work as a tour guide in English. I was partnered with  a current Japanese tour guide and given a list of typical tourist questions that the students had to answer. For example, “How high is Mt. Fuji?” or “Are the deer in the park in Nara tame?” I, the “tourist” in these training sessions, posed these questions in English to the students, who then had to tell me the answers in English. It was a fun and easy way to earn a little extra money, as well as to learn facts about Japan.

Now, most students remembered the correct answer to the deer question: Yes, the deer in the park in Nara are tame.

However, most students didn’t remember the correct height of Mt. Fuji. The first time this happened, the student gave me a very specific wrong answer. Her answer was plausible, e.g. maybe someting like   “Mt. Fuji is 3123 meters high”, but the real answer is that it’s over  3776 meters high. So, after complimenting her on her English,  I suggested that if she didn’t know the real answer to the question, she shouldn’t make something up like that. Rather, I told her she should just say “I don’t know,” or give an estimate, e.g. “It’s over 3000 meters high”, rather than giving such a specific, and yet wrong, answer.

But I was the one who’d given the wrong answer. The student had been trained that when a tourist asks a question, what the tourist wants at that moment is an answer to their question.  It’s information they are seeking just at that particular moment, it’s not something that has been a long-standing interest on their part. When they go home, if they should happened to discover the correct answer, they might think they misremembered the tour guide, or they might think that the tour guide didn’t know the real answer. But while they are on the tour, they will be satisfied with getting a specific answer, and moreover, satisfied with the tour guide, and therefore satisfied with the rest of the tour.

At the time, and over the years, that approach has always struck me as a little odd. After all, don’t I, as a tourist, always want to know the correct answer to things? Wouldn’t I be happy if I were given an honest answer, even if the tour guide didn’t happen to know the answer?

As it turns out, however, I guess I’ve become just like the typical tourist those Japanese tour guides were trained to handle. That day in Barcelona, I actually would have been happier with the story the first woman started to tell about the sign being connected to the pilgrimage route in Spain. Whether or not that turned out later to be true, at least I would have had an answer. And I wouldn’t have thought for days later that the Tourist Information Center folks didn’t seem very knowledgeable. And I wouldn’t be looking a picture of that sign and remembering how unhelpful for finding information we found the Tourist Information Center.

Of course, the fact that those two women didn’t seem to have noticed the sign in the first place probably would have stuck with me. 😉