Travelers need not be mere spectators

“You can go to a church and take a flash photograph of Michelangelo’s Pieta or you can go to mass at five o’clock any day of the week, two different ways to experience a church in Europe. Most people don’t go to a church in Europe to worship — they go to a church to see art. They worship at home but they think they can’t worship there because they’re not at home. They put an artificial barrier between themselves and experience. You can go to the market and feel awkward because you don’t speak the language, you don’t understand the metric system, or you can go to a market and remind yourself you’re not a tourist: you’re one in a thousand-year-long line of hungry travelers. Hold your ground, you’re part of the scene. That’s a real important approach when you’re a traveler.”
–Rick Steves, in Michael Shapiro’s A Sense of Place (2004)