Well you can cry for Venice if you are a citizen of that fine city and it is completely submerged in a few years. But I, as a mere tourist with nothing of import in Venice, will not cry. Because Venice is just the first of many sinking cities.
No I don’t mean sinking like New Orleans or Venice. I mean cities that just stay at the same level while global warming makes the sea water rise. Basically almost any port city in the world will do.
Imagine taking a nice, calming gondola ride in Manhattan instead of those horribly obnoxious, always honking cabs. What a nice break between high stress meetings in that city.
Or you could take a gondola ride in Boston, Vancouver, Philadelphia, Liverpool, Washington, Rome, Cairo, Seattle, Rio de Janeiro, Miami, Sydney, Melbourne, really almost any coastal city because with global warming sea levels will probably rise by quite a large degree. There are going to be thousands of ‘Venices’. Maybe one will be on your closest sea coast.
We, as tourists, might not have to pay the fortune that gets to a particular area of Europe. Perhaps a few hundred miles away, no matter how landlocked you begin, there might be a ‘Venice’ within bussing distance.
This flooding of the market with ‘Venice’ after ‘Venice’ will of course make a Venice trip really inexpensive. As a tourist I think that is as it should be. Why can’t all the prime destinations have this much competition. I’m told that the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben are really inexpensive as far as landmarks go. Perhaps all of Europe could compete with knockoffs in each continent.
But I don’t intend to go to Las Vegas with their stunted Eiffel tower. They must be appealing to the cheapest of the cheap market. Let’s hope that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
Regardless of the other knockoffs, at the present ignorance around global warming, there will be a thousand ‘Venices’ in the not so distant future.
