Detecting Grand Tours of Europe with Geo-Tags

In his recent, light-hearted article “The Grand Tour”, New Yorker journalist Evan Osnos writes of his time with a Chinese tour group in Europe [12]. Osnos describes a group of thirty eight closelychaperoned tourists undertaking a breakneck bus tour, covering five countries in ten days. He argues that Chinese tourists have formed a distinctively Chinese “grand tour” of Europe. This tour includes places like Trier, Germany, the birthplace of Karl Marx, described in a Chinese guide book as “the Mecca of the Chinese people”; it includes some willows on Cambridge University’s campus that were described in a famous Chinese poem as “young brides in the setting sun.” Furthermore, Osnos notes that for nearly all of their meals, the tourists went to Chinese restaurants; the tour guide advised that “in general, one should steer clear of the local food.”