🚲 Street Selfie Worth Waiting For – Pipeaway Newsletter #159

Hi from the Swiss Alps!

You can win some money here. But first…

I’ve been in Switzerland for 10 days already, and yet, I mainly go out for groceries. Unusual warm days are exchanged with sudden waves of coldness.

Until I can freely explore the mountains, it feels comfier to stay inside. I’m a total summer person, and nothing close to this selfie lady who had mistaken powdery Zermatt slopes for a tropical sandy beach. Going sleeveless at minus 8? No, thanks. Plus, I don’t have a pink dress.

Humans reached this fascinating period of development where widely available phone cameras enabled us to feel as if we had become a part of history. We shoot ourselves and then, believing in their importance, we share these images with our peers.

We are obsessed with our own place in the world. From galleries to landfill hills, any site can feel like a crucial building block of our self-centered universe. For selfies, we are ready to risk our lives (Norway‘s Stone of Love), reputation (statue rubbing), or values (Kanchanaburi‘s Bridge on the River Kwai).

AND – we are happy to queue! We hate standing in lines in a bank, in a supermarket, on a highway… But when it comes to memorizing our presence, we suddenly become patient.

That’s what a large part of tourism has become – a consumeristic voyage around the world for quick experiences, and even faster reporting on them via social media.

We don’t follow bucket lists of places TO SEE before we die anymore. Our compas points to the list of places TO BE SEEN AT before we die.

“Been There, Done That” is the name of Pipeaway’s new video series exposing tourist sites where visitors stand in line to, often, make fools of themselves.

As long as we are in the focus, we’re ready to hunt those backdrops down and show everyone how special we can be. Just after dozens of others claim their uniqueness too. In the process, we’ll probably miss seeing a non-mainstream beauty before our very eyes, the one that would make our experience truly special.

The BTDT videos will be without comment or camera movement, so you can explore these sites like a fly on the wall, or CCTV.

For a start, watch what people do around “Little Children on a Bicycle”, a street art piece that changed the identity of George Town so much that its author wanted to paint over it, in hopes to “end that circus”.

Oh, and you can earn some money by watching the video! All is written in its description.

Have a self-empowering week!

Ivan Kralj        
Pipeaway.com

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Ivan Kralj

Editor

Award-winning journalist and editor from Croatia