Over the years I didn’t come in contact with the topic of tourism, other than being a tourist myself. The topic spoke to me because of a conversation with a mutual friend of my friend Vikki, who did an internship Barcelona. This friend, Sergi, lives in Barcelona and when I went to visit, he did not want to meet us in the centre of town, because it would be way to crowded with ‘guiris’ - outlanders. He told us how he never goes to those touristic parts of the city because they are too crowded with tourists and he would always get irritated. I asked him what he thought of us then, he said jokingly: “I guess you’re kind of a guiri too, I just know you and therefore I tolerate you”. So when the topics were presented, ‘tourism kills neighbourhoods’ really caught my eye, because it made me think of this anecdote. The subject fascinated me and I wanted to learn more about the situation. Therefore, I am glad that we decided to choose neighbourhood associations as our main stakeholder, this way we would be able to gain an insight on life in these metropolitan cities, (over)crowded by tourists. I will never look at travel and tourism the same way again. I have become increasingly more conscious of my own behaviour as a tourist.

I enjoyed working with my team members, even though working with eight people from completely different backgrounds can be quite the challenge. Nevertheless, the intense and demanding group discussions lead us to the project we are presenting today. The atmosphere was one in which I always had the feeling that I could share my thoughts, even though I knew not everyone would necessarily agree with me. Ups and downs are part of these kinds of projects, but I think I can say we got through them together. Sharing my first moments of fieldwork with more experienced and equally leveled team members gave me confidence and made these days in the field an interesting challenge. What I learned most from my teammates is to be very critical of myself and others, and to see a problem from different perspectives, which was not always self-evident.