TO WAKE up in an Airbnb apartment can be briefly disorientating. Where are you? The brushed steel, the exposed lightbulbs, the mid-century furnishings. The lively walls and bookshelves (a guide for hosts recommends accentuating “personality, not personal items”). The laminated guide to the neighbourhood, the English slightly askew and peppered with exclamation marks. The excellent Wi-Fi. You could be in Lisbon; but perhaps it is St Petersburg? The Verge, an online magazine, describes this Airbnb aesthetic as the “hallucination of the normal”, a phrase borrowed from Rem Koolhaas, a Dutch architect. That is why it can also offer the jaded traveller the sense of a home from home.
Not all Europeans feel the same. Tourists packing for this year’s holiday season might brace themselves for an awkward welcome. Anti-tourist protests in some cities have become a summer ritual. Last August 200 locals occupied a beach in Barcelona to tell visitors to shove off (or at least to stay in hotels). In several...Continue reading
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