Elizabeth A. Micallef, Żebbuġ
Time to have tourist police to cut abuse
You can say I am a new resident on the island of Malta, having lived overseas for a great number of years. However, I am Malta born of Maltese parents and I was brought up here. Therefore, I reserve the right to speak my mind about issues that I find intolerable without being asked to "go back to where I came from" by people who ought to know better.
On this occasion, however, my annoyance does not stem from the inadequacies of Malta (about which one could easily write several books) but from seeing tourists abusing our hospitality and taking over our streets and promenades in a way that no Maltese person does.
Today, it offended me to see three youths of some obscure nationality "showering", using bottles of water to do so, on the Font Għadir promenade and at least one of them carried on to change out of his swimming trunks. He did this decently enough, using a towel, but it is inappropriate to change on the promenade.
In the same way as it was highly inappropriate for an English lady, actually just a Brit of a certain type, to be seen walking on the promenade wearing only a bikini and a packet of "fags" (which was tucked into her waist) claiming, when challenged, that she was on holiday and could do as she liked. And I could go on to mention numerous examples of perfectly revolting, bare-chested, lobster-red men and women who would do well to cover up rather than expose their well-past-their-best, sun-scorched bodies, parading themselves in our towns, in our cities and, indeed, on our promenades.
The more gorgeous may be a delight to look at but they too need to respect our customs and it is about time that we addressed this growing problem and gave the streets back to the Maltese.
Would it not be an idea to introduce "tourist police" whose role it would be to assist the tourist while politely but firming asking them to conform to the decencies observed by members of the community? If we do not respect ourselves, who will respect us and if we do not care for our surroundings and value ourselves more highly, who can we blame when we get the type of tourist we deserve which, sadly, is who we see on our streets and beaches?
Malta has seen much better days and no amount of "improvement" and development will give us back the respect we enjoyed in former times.
Enough damage has been done but let us not throw in the towel altogether and hand over our island to the use and abuse of the tourist leaving us as "injured" bystanders in our own country.
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F J Brincat
Jul 24th 2008, 14:27
An interesting proposition, but why limit the Tourist Police’s duty to just chastising tourists? Further duties could be to assist tourists in case of complaints of over charging, pestering by time-share touts (in this case the Tourist Police should employ multilingual officers), giving information (sort of mobile Tourist information) etc. There would be some technical legal matters to sort out first (like whether such tourist police would actually be part of the Police Force or employed by the uhhh....Ministry of Tourism???)
It is an interesting proposition…
T Mifsud
Jul 24th 2008, 10:19
Mrs Micallef, this is not China, where all your moves and daily life are monitored by government. Tourism Police is in fact not the way you think it is. In other countries, such police exist, but they are there to protect tourists from over zealous locals who rip tourists off with different prices for foreigners, invade their privacy by crowding around foreign women at the beach, harrassing tourists with timeshare sales, etc. The Tourism Police are actually protecting tourists!
However, I agree with your ethics, not as far as enforcing them by the promenade next to a bathing place, but it in city where most people are dressed appropriately.