I grew up in a little town with great natural heritage. As I was growing up, I saw more and more people coming to see the quiet nature, and at the same time I saw more physical infrastructure improving, which was targeted to increase accessibility and the visual pleasure for tourists. But as the tourist population visibly increased over time, I also experienced discomfort when tourists were damaging “our” natural heritage. It was an odd experience that I quickly associated the nature with me personally just by the touch of “others”. It was never ours but the existence of outsiders arbitrarily created the boundary between us and others. I sometimes confronted the tourist to solve the problem and other times I wrote to the city asking to improve their natural heritage conservation policy while emphasising how long I lived in that city.

Having said that, I was not exceptionally interested in tourism and the protest by residents that are happening in some of European cities. The pictures of residents protesting in touristic cities came to me as aggressive and it reminded me of the idea of alterity and NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) which perhaps came from my own experience. In this regard, I was not completely ready to be more “objective” to view the situation as a researcher who is studying the residents’ perspective. This was the most frustrating thing. However, after having a long break and a relative detachment from the issue, I started seeing the situation more neutrally without my own judgement to it and I was more able to connect and become a “participant” during the fieldwork. It was important for me to do so since my part during the fieldwork with our stakeholder was taking charge of sensory, unspoken language, attitudes, and relations between the people and the context. I never lived in Amsterdam, never was attached to any physical place nor am I middle aged, retired person. I had nothing in common with the actors at first sight and I wasn’t quite font of the subject of tourism in the beginning. However, I found the joy in observing the sentiment, action, and reaction of people who are after all just ordinary people like me but only in a different situation. Nonetheless, there came the difficult part: group work. Working as a group that consists of people with different targets, personality, way of working was not easy. For the first half of this course, my answer to “how are you?” was always “I’m okay..” with a hint of a frowny face. I constantly felt agitated whenever the group work notifications popped up on my phone screen. I thought why I had to go through this complicated process when I can do it more efficiently myself. What made it more complicated was the personal and cultural differences. For instance, I never feel comfortable at interrupting while someone’s talking and I find it rude and regard it as emotionally driven action. I’m not sure if it’s Asian thing or just my thing. I’ve met many people from many different places but it was still frustrating. But the pain indeed taught me how to be more humble of my ideas and how to compromise for good. I found amazing values in each member by working together.