My father may have been a worse tourist that I am. Upon returning from trips to well known spots people would ask him if he'd seen the ... and then they'd name the famous tourist attractions that wherever he'd visited had to offer. Inevitably he'd respond "no, but I bought the postcard". He assumed, at least partially correctly, that often seeing a famous sight in person wasn't the transcendent experience that people who dreamed of traveling expected it to be. And of course "the sights" were status points that one collects. He preferred to meet interesting people from the cultures he was encountering. That's probably not as easy as it once was - not because it's hard to meet people, but because more and more our cultures have become homogenized so that you hardly feel you're visiting a foreign country. For me, simply walking around a town, preferably with no clearly determined destination, is often more interesting than getting to the tourist attractions. Then again, the fact that the vast majority of us get to the same spots raises the possibility of an interesting project.