Let's pray and tour together!

About 15 years ago when I started to work as tour leader for Taiwanese tourists to Europe, we had almost all the Duomos, Cathedrals and Doms of the big cities included in our programs. Not that Taiwanese were all devoted Christians and even less were they interested in religious art, to my understanding, they went to big churches simply because those cathedrals were the most easily recognizable building in towns and it was technically practical and safe for the tour leaders to find them, do the guiding job and then goad the groups into the commissionable shops or next town. Some of my clients were so “traumatized” by these MUST-SEEs in Europe that over the years I had to promise some of them not to include any church visit in my program to get them back to my travelling herds.

Things have changed a lot since. Following Taiwanese steps on all fronts and in all directions, Chinese tourists, and hoards of them, are taking the lead in visiting big churches and shopping in those designated shops thru out Europe. I really wonder what Karl Marx and Mao would have to say about this if they could make a joint apparition in the ceremony of the 60th anniversary of the “liberation” of China in October.


I still take my groups to churches, mosques and temples whenever I have the chance to do so. And I’m glad to see that my clients from Taiwan are now much better informed on cultures and religions of the world and can really appreciate church (or mosque) visits, not necessarily from any religious point of view but those of the history, architecture, visual art and music of different peoples from different time/space of our common world. Most of them now agree with me that Church visits can be instructive and fun, and that tourism, spiritual and noble.


As a so called “atheist” myself, I’m always deeply moved by hymn concerts or choir singing in a Christian church and the call for prayers or chants of Koran from a Mosque, and I know that most of my atheist fellow travelers feel the same as I do. People might think that we are still attached to the sensual pleasure of these religious activities but I think we are simply more humble and thus much more tolerant vis-à-vis of religions than many devoted Christians or Islamists.


Atheist or not, I shall continue to show and share the beauty of all religions of the world with my clients and hopefully, make some revelations to other leaders, tourist and political, on the true beauty of tourism.


Written by Lu Wei in Taipei after hearing the news on Iranian president’s speech in Geneva yesterday.