A lot of tourism is just feeling a place. You can often get better views of a place in photographs than in real life. And yet the presence feels as if it adds something.

I remember being literally stopped in my tracks by the Rosetta Stone. (It was closing and they were shooing us out.) There's nothing there that I haven't seen far more clearly (and it's not as if I can read any of its three languages), and yet somehow it felt Important.

Irrational, but real.