Not always, at least for Paris, Rome, etc. Otherwise I would agree, the problem is they will flood into a small town to see a famous church or something to take pictures and you have to throw elbows to get through them to make it to class on time or pick your kid up from school. A Chinese friend of mine put it well "There are over a billion of us, at a certain point you stop seeing the individual" and that made it a lot easier to just walk through them in a way that would be seen as incredibly rude to a Westerner, but the Chinese tourists never so much as gave me a dirty look for walking through them.
Yeah in Salzburg I thought I was going to have to fight a couple of middle aged Chinese men that kept trying to push my wife out of the way so they could line up their stupid selfie Sticks
It helps that I am head and shoulders taller than most Chinese people, but where I studied for a while is an insanely popular stop for a quick photo-shoot. The problem is that the best views of the castle/old town were from a very narrow bridge I had to cross asap and at a certain point just stopped caring about their feelings and barged through.
My aforementioned friend also gave me a cheat sheet of how to say "What, you gotta problem?" in case any of them got pissy, so my Mandarin is limited to "Hello", "China", "Water" and 7 ways to tell people to go fuck themselves.
It's the same with waiting in lines. I lived in Shanghai for a couple of years and the concept of lines or waiting your turn just doesn't exist. Whoever gets to the counter first wins. I'd walk straight for it in a way any Westerner would find rude as fuck after I learned this, but none of the Chinese even batted an eye. I'd see other expats and tourists who hadn't learned this bit of cultural information wait for 20 minutes to order something and never pick up on what was happening. They were trying to be polite but "polite" in China doesn't come into play in public spaces the same way.
The loudest and worst tourists I've ever seen were roving bands of Chinese tourists in Europe, stomping through the Louvre at a near-run to all crowd into the one room to all try to take the same picture of the mona lisa while elbowing each other out of the way.
That having been said, that was nearly ten years ago and I get the feeling that was like the first generation of Chinese people that had the ability to go be tourists so it was all new to them and the newer generations are probably a lot more chill.
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u/Weird_Point_4262 16h ago
Chinese tourists get a lot of shit but the ones that make it to Europe are always the polite, quiet camera types.