Staying home, greeting world

All summer I have been working five or six days a week, meeting people from all over the world who chose Philadelphia as a vacation destination.

I know, sounds preposterousness to natives. "They chose to visit Philadelphia - this Philadelphia - in August? Didn't anyone tell them about Wildwood?"

I suffer from a similar sort of vacation destination denial in reverse - I haven't seen the Atlantic Ocean up close in five summers. No sand between the toes. No jaunts to LBI. I even passed on a two-week family vacation to a rustic cabin in Maine, near Moosehead Lake.

I have nothing against moose-watching in New England, or even watching the tram cars, please, on the boardwalk. I just enjoy watching summer in the city, and I don't have to travel as far to see it unfold.

And, as luck would have it, my full-time summer job has been to show Philadelphia's historic district and Old City to people from everywhere from Cairo, Egypt, to Cairo, Ill., from Kathmandu to Manayunk.

Usually the locals on these walking tours are accompanying out-of-state friends and family members they are hosting. Typically, they haven't seen the Liberty Bell since their grade-school class trip, and they are as impressed as the visitors by what they see and hear.

Between tours at the Independence Visitor Center, at Sixth and Market, I hear a 12-year-old girl from the Midwest call to her younger sister as she approaches the Rita's Water Ice stand: "Be sure to get a wooder ice." The younger sister stops, unsure of the instructions. The older sister walks over and confides, "That's the funny way to order water ice."

I sometimes warn foreign visitors on my tours that I speak Philadelphian, "which sounds a lot like English, only faster."

Two weeks ago, the father of a family from Missouri stopped me in the middle of a description of Philadelphia's historic innovations in firefighting and water supply. "A fire-conscious city is also going to be a water-conscious city," I said as we passed the Fountain Society of Philadelphia's drinking-water fountain for horses and dogs, erected in 1869 on the 300 block of Arch Street.

"Philadelphia had the first municipal water supply," I say. "Where the Art Museum is today, there was a reservoir. It was the highest point in the city, called Fair Mount. Water would flow downhill. ..." The father from the Show-me State barked, "What's that word you keep saying? Whadder?"

"Wooder," I corrected. "It's the Philadelphia accent tell word."

Dad laughed longer than I thought necessary, but he was truly delighted. "WHA-ter," he said aloud, practicing. "WHA-der."

When visitors from Spain are on the tour, I usually mention with pride that my surname is Spanish. Then I say my last name out loud. Duh-LEE-ahn. They stare back at me with blank expressions. "That's the way the name DeLeon is pronounced in Philadelphia," I say. Then I pronounce my name in Spanish and they all comment approvingly. "Ah, si, Day-lay-OWN!"

Sometimes I add, "Mi nombre es Español, pero yo hablo Español como una vaca Portuguesa." ("My name is Spanish, but I speak Spanish like a Portuguese cow.") This always gets a laugh, but tends to mislead them into assuming I can understand questions either spoken or mooed in Spanish.

I always ask visitors what state or country they are from, and for some reason there has been a spike in numbers from Europe, especially Germany and Scotland.

When I mistake a person with a Scottish accent for British, I always apologize. And I usually advise English visitors beforehand, "You guys don't come off so good in this story." They tend to nod knowingly.

This is similar to the reaction I get from people from Dallas. "Oh, that's too bad," I respond sympathetically. "You know we hate you, don't you?" And they nod like the pilot had announced it when they deplaned at the Philly airport.

I was touched by the sincerity of a professional architect from India who was traveling alone. He told me, "It has always been my life's dream to visit Philadelphia." He said it in such a way that I didn't ask why. It should be obvious.

By the end of the tour, I understood how the courage and brilliant foresight of the Founding Fathers gathered in Philadelphia from 1774 until 1800 inspired the democracy movement in India before independence from Britain.

I do three 90-minute walking tours a day, and at the beginning of each I take a group photo on "the lawn," which separates Independence Hall on Chestnut Street and the Constitution Center on Arch.

Most of the photos show more Americans than foreign visitors on any given tour, but that's changing. The biggest surprise this summer was the consistent increase in the number of Australians visiting Philadelphia.

Last week, I asked a family of four where they were from - it could have been Indiana for all I knew - and the mother answered simply, "Sydney."

On the 11 a.m. tour on Aug. 9, I mentioned the Aussie tourist boom to an enthusiastic woman visiting from Perth. "I'm afraid your Philadelphia secret is out big time," she said.

That's her wearing a hat in the accompanying photo, in the middle of the group with three Germans, four Spaniards, and one California girl.