Writing city guides must be such fun, people always say to me. You actually get paid for being on holiday.
Well, sort of. The fact is that when I’m putting together one of our mp3 tours of Rome, Venice, London or Paris, or any city, I have a pretty packed schedule. I’m usually out of the hotel by 9am and then it’s a case of getting to wherever the first stop is and walking through the route I’ve planned already. I won’t get back until 6pm or later.
The first thing I find is that the actual layout of the city is not much like the map. What looks like a square on paper is, in fact a street. It might appear that you turn left and walk a short distance to find the second stop on our city walking tour but in reality, when you hit the ground you realise that you need to go right and then left. I won’t bore you with the details but it’s amazing how streets and the maps that are supposed to describe them differ.
I then have to walk a section of the route of the city tour a few times to make sure that our directions are clear. I might also find that there’s a much prettier street to stroll along and so I’ll have to walk that route and then amend the script that I’ve written along with the map – usually leaning my papers against a wall or balancing them on my knee as I’m crouching down on the pavement. I found when doing our guide to Barcelona, for instance, that some of the streets in the Ribeira and Born districts plus the new Gaudi extension are much prettier than the ones on the route I’d planned and so I had to scribble these changes.
While doing this I usually find that I’ve become the object of interest or amusement for a few people – either locals wondering what this mad tourist is up to or tourists wondering whether this is some native custom or popular activity.
It’s amazing how awful the weather can be when you’re doing an mp3 tour – I’ve had down pours when doing our Rome guide and when I was writing our guide to Vienna it was so cold that I could hardly move my hands or hold the pen. In Amsterdam it suddenly got so windy that papers and notes were flying out of my hands across Dam Square and while doing our Edinburgh city tour I felt plain ill for some reason.
Taking photographs, which I do for our city guides to show people what we’re talking about and what they should be looking at is also a hazard. I happened to be walking through our mp3 tour of London including St Paul’s and the Bank the day before anti-capitalist demonstrations were due to take place. The policemen who stopped and questioned me, complete with cameras on their helmets were all very nice. “A downloadable walking tour for my iPod,” said one. “What a good idea. Now, just keeping moving, eh?”
In Barcelona I was stopped while making notes about and taking photos of building that turned out to be a police station. Goodness knows what will happen when I do our walking tour of Moscow and St Petersburg.
So, are people right? Is it fun? Well, despite the weather, the police and the scribbled rewrites, the answer is yes, writing audio city guides is great fun.