Photo-crazy Asian Tourists
02 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Thailand Tags: bangkokian, Ikea
The Europeans like to say that those who always take picture (of themselves when they are on holiday in Europe) are the Japanese. This habbit, actually, is not the monopoly of the Japanese only, but most Asian, specially South East and East Asians like to take photos of themselves in front of or next to an object that serves as a background. The Japanese get the unlucky part of being labelled as the photo-crazy tourists because they have more wealth to travel around the world than other Asians do. Beside, most westerners cannot differentiate the Japanese from the Koreans or the Chinese anyway, so all they know is the “Japanese”.
The object that serves as the photo background can be a historic building, a statue, a tower, part of a bridge, a sculpture or just a landscape. The background is just that, a background to prove that they have been there, to that very place or tourist attraction. It doesn’t matter if it is a 750 years old goethic church or a new landmark, but all that matters is the person in the photograph. For most Asian tourists, the most important things during holiday are sightseeing and taking photographs, of course with them in the photos. So, all they want to know is where (they are), what (they are seeing) and when (they are there).
Some people take this photo-crazy habbit to the extreme, they took photos of themselves in the IKEA showroom. IKEA’s displays are the background of their photographs, as if they were tourist attractions. This is what I saw in the recently openned IKEA Store in Bangna, Samut Prakarn province of Thailand (south of Bangkok).
IKEA seems to have done really well with their advertisement campaign prior to the opening of their first store in Thailand. The number of people who visitted their store today (January 2, 2012) must have been thousands. I have never seen as many people in an IKEA store as I saw today in Bangna, it was fully packed (but then my comparators are limited to IKEA’s stores in Madrid and Melbourne only). Some of the visitors, however, were in the store to test the displays only. Others were there for tourism reason and they were equipped with a pocket camera.
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