Mi novia is extending a kindness to someone who needs help this morning, so I will drive myself to visit the oncologist for today’s chemo-treatment. If I felt the need, I could ask any of several friends who have offered to help when needed, but I feel just fine this morning and should for a day or longer. The negative side effects of today’s treatment, if any, will not commence for at least a day or two. Today’s chemo will consist of replacing the two most recent treatment drugs with two different ones. Their side-effects, on paper, seem similar to previous poisons, so I have an inkling of what to expect. Yesterday was the first day in quite a while that I haven’t napped during the day (but I did go to bed earlier than normal). My attitudes about my cancer bounce around between acceptance, resignation, disappointment, anger, depression, and combinations thereof. If the treatments could promise (or even make possible) a cure, I might add hopefulness to the list. But the aim of prolonging life with sufficient quality to make it worthwhile helps. I have read that many people live with lung cancer for many, many years. Even those with Stage IV lung cancer sometimes live for several years after diagnosis. I expect a “re-staging” sometime before long, after more CT scans and/or PET scans. If meditation could clear cancer from my thoughts, I might dive into it with a vengeance.
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A Google search for guided meditation yield roughly 53.8 million results. By removing the qualifier, guided, expands the search results to an astonishing 691 million. Reintroducing guided and adding another qualifier, hypnotic, reduces the count of results to a still-unmanageable 549,000. Clearly, the information available through these various keyword searches is overwhelming. I’ll have to find another way to expand my knowledge…if, that is, I am sufficiently motivated to pursue that intellectual and/or emotional growth in this corner of my life.
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I was on my second of two trips to Dubrovnik, Croatia—about eleven years after the first—that I first heard about official responses to the chaos of over-tourism. While the first trip was mostly business, I had a few opportunities to stroll through the streets of the old city. Plenty of tourists wandered about. But the limited crowds made the town seem lively, not crowded. Eleven years later, though, I was among the throngs of tourists who clogged the streets. The vast majority of them (but not I) arrived via cruise ship. I remember learning that the city’s mayor recently had informed the cruise ship lines of upcoming changes in tourism policy: that the number of ships arriving and the number of passengers allowed to disembark soon would be restricted. And I learned that the city had begun sounding sirens or horns prior to ship arrivals to alert citizens…to give them an opportunity to vacate tourist areas if they wished to avoid choking crowds.
During the past year or so, I have read a number of news stories about popular tourist destinations—especially in Europe—taking action to control over-tourism. Venice, for example, according to an article on Euronews.com, “…has restricted tour group sizes as part of its mission to regulate huge crowds and improve local life. Venice has banned tour guides from using megaphones and limited their groups to 25 people.” The city also has prohibited cruise ships from entering the Venice lagoon. Rome prohibits sitting on the famed Spanish Steps, among many other prohibitions designed to minimize the crushing impact of over-tourism. A July 23 article on Reuters.com says, “Last month, Barcelona pledged to shut all short-term lets by 2028 to contain soaring rental prices for residents. And earlier this month, images of an anti-tourism protest went viral after a few protesters used water guns to spray tourists amid growing rallies against mass tourism in Spain.” Just this morning, I read an article on BBC.com about a proposed 5% tourist tax for Edinburgh, Scotland. While the proposed tax ostensibly is not designed to discourage tourism (rather, authorities claim, it is intended to fund improvement of public spaces), it responds to concerns exacerbated by tourism.
Tourism is a both a blessing and a curse. The revenue from tourism is vital to the economic vitality of many, many places around the world. But, as more and more people have both the time and the money to travel, tourism can take an enormous toll on those very places. Residents must cope with throngs of people whose presence sometimes is offensive and damaging. Crowds get so large and unwieldy that the inherent appeal of a growing number of tourist attractions is becoming overwhelmed by the crush. Some of the solutions that immediately come to my mind are, on second thought, unfair and unrealistic. Others would be horrendously expensive and, perhaps, unworkable. One idea, though, while expensive to implement, might be worth exploring: 3-D experiential theaters. Rather than traveling to Norway’s and Sweden’s furthest northern reaches to see the Aurora Borealis and Lapland reindeer, a spherical theater with surround-sound and precise environmental control (e.g., temperatures, odors, wind, etc.) could provide a near-real experience. Admittedly not the same as an actual experience, of course, but far less hassle. And a portion of the fees collected from the experience could be funneled back to subject cities/regions/countries.
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Damn! It’s already 8:30! How could I have been sitting at my desk for so long? I do not understand how time can put me in a trance for so long.
