The Most Oppressed Group in Human History
By “No-smoking areas? It’s incredible!” said Michael Kuntze, a 59-year-old German day care manager who was savoring a long cigar and sipping rum and cola in the Hotel Conde de Villanueva, home to one of the city’s most popular cigar rooms.
Kuntze and six other smokers from Hamburg were on a nine-day tobacco tour, sampling more than three cigars daily and selecting 50 each to bring home.
“That (no-smoking ordinances) is what we have in Europe, in Germany, but we don’t want this here,” he said, as aromatic smoke rose from the thick ash at the end of his stogie. “This is why we are here. Not to sit inside a small smoking lounge, no. Never.”
I’m sure those of you who have traveled in the developing world will agree that it’s hard to even imagine a group that faces such oppression as the Euro tourist. Between the swearing that makes even an American blush, the Irish pubs in every tourist town with hard-partying Europeans who travel to Guatemala or Thailand to only drink in Irish pubs, the rise of drug tourism in places like Laos, and the sex tourism in nations ranging from Thailand to the Philippines to Costa Rica. And now, god forbid, smoking bans in some restaurants. I am outraged.
My god, will a ban on the music of Bob Marley in tourist towns be next?
And I do understand that Americans sometimes do these things to, but the American tourist and the European tourist are very different, most specifically in that the annoying American is afraid of any developing world place outside of Cancun whereas the annoying European is ubiquitous.