You’re already doing it. You just haven’t noticed yet.
Article by JA BULGARIA
Summer is upon us! A well-deserved break from school, lessons, classrooms, textbooks and homework. You are probably already in holiday mode, staying up late, sleeping in, and enjoying your time off from school, right? Perhaps you are planning on going somewhere with your folks? Perhaps you are already there, or back already and spending way too much time on your phone.
Wherever you are in this period of rest between your working self and your holiday self, one thing is certain: you’re about to step outside your everyday routine. Maybe just into your city to meet up with your friends. Maybe, a completely different country where you get to flash your passport.
Which begs the question: What will you do when you get there?
And the answer is simple: Culture.
Every time you travel, whether it’s a short trip to the next town, a few hours away, or a flight somewhere completely new, what happens once you arrive is surprisingly similar.
You go to see something.
A famous monument, a gallery, a coastline, a city centre. You walk through streets designed, or sometimes clearly not designed, by people you’ll never meet. You read or try to read the billboards, the shop signs, the logos on the products around you. You taste the food, hear the music spilling played on the radio and spilling out of restaurants, and watch how people dress and move through their own city. You notice how things are the same, or how they are radically different.
Without realising it, you’re experiencing culture as it actually exists.
Visible, audible, edible, walkable. Sometimes presented beautifully and worthy of an Instagram post. Sometimes it is crude, rude or even gross and it becomes the story you tell of how you experienced the people and the place. In both instances culture is lived and experienced, not just spoken about in lofty terms.
And here’s the part you might never stop to notice. There is often (not always) a price connected to this experience.
The museum ticket.
The entrance fee at the historic site.
The gelato you bought without a second thought.
The snorkelling tour around the island.
The souvenir, the postcard, the guided walk through the old town.
Each one is a tiny transaction inside something much bigger, a cultural economy that exists in nearly every place you choose to visit. Yes. Even in your hometown, village or city.
Culture can be a lucrative industry built on creativity, heritage, design and experience.
Don’t think this is a bad thing.
Culture that is packaged and presented this way feeds into the tourism of any country and creates real jobs and real opportunities, often hiding in plain sight.
If you took the time to look around you and really see, you would notice your experience of culture. A city planner designed the park and the way you walk through it. A local entrepreneur opened the gelato shop in a 200-year-old building and made it work. A graphic designer shaped the city’s tourism branding, the one printed on every poster and Instagram-worthy street corner you photographed. All of these people are working inside the cultural and creative sector, even if you never noticed that it was a sector at all.
This is exactly the gap Cultural BEES wants to close. Helping you see that culture isn’t just something you consume on holiday. It’s something you can build a career around.
Spotting the creativity and the business behind a museum ticket, a city’s branding, or a local food tradition is the first real step toward imagining a future inside the cultural and creative industries.
So, this summer, wherever you are, at home, halfway across Europe, or already back and scrolling on your phone, here’s a small shift in perspective worth trying: don’t just enjoy the culture around you. Notice it.
Ask who designed it, who built it, who’s making it work, and who could do the same thing, one day.
Maybe even you.
