Experimental tourism

[magid]

I got some interesting ideas about travel from browsing my friendsfriends page, checking a link to Latourex, the founders experimental tourism (site in French).

Instead of checking off the famous sites, or whatever other sort of prepackaged travel, they have lots of suggestions for other ways to explore, such as:

• walk from the first to the last street in the city alphabetically
  
• halfway through a tourist map, draw an 'equator', and walk the equator
  
• explore the city only at night, overnight
  
• tour the roundabouts (aka traffic islands) of the city, as places for picnics, etc
  
• find a round-robin of three-syllable street names, the last syllable of one being the first of the next, and so on
  
• play a local monopoly version, using that to explore

There were others, too, some less interesting to me, some I couldn't figure out due to the currently poor state of my French.

This sounds intriguing, in a strange way rather like flash mob travel, letting in the random elements. I think I might try one of these ideas locally, just to see how it might play out. Anyone interested? If so, which one appeals?

There are lots of other possibilities, too, of course. Rolling dice to determine which direction and how far to go, or checking out streets with friends' first or last names, or choosing things randomly out of the local paper. Etc.

Thanks to Tafkar's post on friendsfriends for this, with links to a BBC article about it, among other links.

Comments

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

One idea that's occurred to me (and that I have executed on occasion) was to go to the center of town and just pick a random bus route. The idea is to ride to the end and then take the bus back into town, just to see what's along the way. And then again, there's always the idea of picking a random destination off of a subway map ...

[magid.livejournal.com]

I think one of the suggestions on the site was related to your idea, taking a bus to the end and trying to circumnavigate the city (obviously harder in a city like Boston where there's lots more spokes than wheels).

Did you find anything interesting when you did this?

[missdimple.livejournal.com]

I like the idea of the exploring it at night or the equator one. I would love to do something like this.

What about obscure historic sites...you know, like teeny ones that never get promoted. Is that too close to famous ones?

[magid.livejournal.com]

I like the exploring at night, but I get seriously sleep-depped when I miss a night; I wish I had ZZ's flexibility about sleep. The equator one sounded cool, too.

Obscure historic sites: not sure. Heck, it's a group of people making it up as they go along. It has a different feel than the others, but that just means that it could be a goal that we'd enjoy and they wouldn't be as interested in....