Cultural Tourism - the Facebook great experiment

A friend from Facebook.com. His wife. And a trip to discover cave churches, fortresses and Thracian tombs. People I didn't know in person. They had different plans - to visit the Ustra Fortress. The hot sun of South Bulgaria and the amazing discoveries we stumbled upon made us change plans. Of course, such spontaneous trips always have some disasters included -  waiting 2 hours to see a monastery which was nothing spectacular, walking hours to see a Thracian sanctuary without the time to reach it high in the mountains. Overall: an exhausting trip of cultural discoveries made out of enthusiasm of people who are only facebook friends. The economic results: more than 500 euros spent in places with low income and high unemployment rate. I hope this cultural tourism helped them. It helped us to transfer our friendship from the virtual space into the real cultural realms. For me, this experiment was great for 2 additional reasons, besides the new-forged friendship: re-confirm my conviction that not wild hidden places are as attractive as the UNESCO over-visited sites, and that cultural tourism is possible everywhere. And the biggest discovery: the Web 2.0. works for cultural tourism, it’s not an illusion. We transferred friendship, knowledge and pleasures from the screen to the real life, and back to the screen for other people to admire and visit these unknown treasures of little known cultures. See the great images on  Klearchos Guide to the Galaxy. This is what I call the great experiment of Facebook. I hope that from the 200 million of users of this social network many will follow our example and enrich their real life with real cultural trips.