Crawling into Trouble

For the last weekend of travels, we decided to go to Italy and visit Venice, Florence and Rome. By this time in the trip I feel like I have gotten a good sense of the tourist traps and schemes. These traps seem to normally be found around major monuments, main train stations, and sometimes even hostels. This was especially apparent in Rome as we visited the Coliseum, Spanish steps, and Vatican. We were constantly being nagged about doing tours, skipping the lines and trying to sell you on pub-crawls. These people would trick you because most of them are either British or American so they speak perfect English and makes it hard for you to play the “what, I don’t understand” language barrier excuse. When traveling everyone is always in a hurry and looking to hear the cheapest amount, when they won’t realize all the options and what is actually worth your money. One of the more common tourist trap that I have experienced are the pub crawls. They have been at all the cities that we have visited, they know exactly their customers, for they stand outside major tourist attractions and approach the big groups of Americans wearing the backwards baseball caps, shorts, college t-shirts, and maps in hand. As we were approached at the Coliseum, we were first taken back for they came out of nowhere and didn’t even have flyers in his hand. He then pulled out a hand full of flyers and he went into trying to sell us that pub-crawl. He said what all the others said “only 20 Euros, with 1 hour of unlimited drinks, a free shirt, will be taken to 5 exclusive clubs with no cover” all of which when said together and in a new city with absolutely no idea where to go at night sound like a pretty sweet deal. He gave us his name and then quickly disappeared. When we got back to our hostel from our day of travel we asked the front desk about which pub crawl she would suggested, she quietly said “ they don’t go on anymore”. We were confused. After doing some research and asking another person, I found out that pub crawls were illegal in Rome since May 26, 2010 due to a death of a drunk man who was walking on the edge of the bridge and fell off, wearing a pub crawl shirt. This all started to make sense to me now, why the man at the coliseum was being more restrictive when handing out flyers. Rome has been trying to cut down the drinking of tourist, along with littering and loud noises when also passing this law. Getting back to Luxembourg I looked up more about these restrictions of pub crawls. There seems to be a large increase of alcoholism in Italy, both of native Italians and tourist, mostly mentioning, British, Irish, Australian and Americans. Judging from the flyers that they hand out it is very obvious that they are geared specifically towards Americans, seeing uncle sam and lure of beer pong. The idea that the younger generation is going from the past Italian culture of drinking wine with dinner and never being drunk in public, to binge drinking and needing to get drunk. Pubs and clubs are starting to advertize to this market, giving deals for drinks, having more of a British pub feel. The pub-crawls are doing the exact same, with their deals of free entrance and unlimited drinks; it is now attracting more locals. In Rome there is now a bigger concern about teenage alcoholism and the general idea of what drinking is about. The government and adults that are concerned are claiming that the urge to party and binge drink is coming from the British and Australians, who have different cultural views on alcohol consumption. Having learned about the combining of social identity in geography, the idea that Britain’s culture is now affecting the Italian culture shows how European as a whole with the freedom to travel around so easily, is also making it easier for people to see what else is out there, travel around and do pub-crawls, and adapt to what other teenagers are doing. Rome, being one of the biggest tourist destinations in the world, is ironically struggling with the tourist that they are collecting income from. The constant flood of young tourist that are traveling abroad and coming to Rome, is also causing them corruption of their culture along with legal matters, such as the pub crawl restriction. Rome's concern about binge drinking and their culture being influenced by others, might begin to show up more in other european countries, for many Americans have already clumped European culture together as a whole as being a drinking culture, when many of these countries, although their drinking age is lower, is not always about drinking and partying, but the alcohol is weaved in with their everyday life and to enjoy dinner.

http://www.ias.org.uk/resources/factsheets/harm_ukeu.pdf