My Fear of Acting the Foreigner

Me and my Guia T, the Tourist's BFFI have written before, in a post or a comment, at some point in this blog about noticing how some people have an eye for urban exploration, but that I don’t. In his chapter On Habit, de Botton speaks to this exact phenomenon, but he calls it a traveling mind-set, and I still feel like I have never acquired it. I do not call myself a seasoned traveler, even after this study abroad experience. Traveling for me is still a self-conscious process. I find myself fighting the urge to admire things for their strangeness and difference in other countries because I am trying too hard to fit in rather than stand out. I don’t know why acting like a tourist, truly accepting and being ok with my foreignness, is so hard for me. I don’t think of myself as a self-conscious person, and I definitely would not say I am more self-conscious/less confident than the average 21-year old woman (we tend to be a nervous demographic) so I wonder why I hate the label tourist so much. I want to look and act like a local. Maybe it comes from growing up in a very touristy city: San Francisco. I grew up being able to spot tourist from a mile a way, and there were always so cute, lost, and usually in shorts and a fluffy new sweatshirt with San Francisco branded across the front (San Francisco is not warm in the summer, so leave your shorts at home!). I don’t hate them; in fact I love them! I love helping them out, pointing them in the right direction, but because I take pride in knowing the way, pride in my identity as a local, pride in defining myself as different from them. This chapter gave me hope to become a true traveler.

I found the chapter very inspiring, surprisingly. There seems to be something (I want to say magical so forgive me for being cheesy) magical about experiencing a space aesthetically, and removing all function from it. It is about seeing it as it functions, finding that beautiful, but somehow remaining completely separate from it because you don’t need it, or need to use it. I am not lying when I say I am inspired to use my last three weeks in Buenos Aires, being the biggest tourist I can be. I want to stop and admire the city, look like a foreigner, and maybe even get targeted by more twelve-year-old muggers and be ok with that. I have been missing out on the traveling mind-set; I’ve avoided it like the plague, and as a result my experience of Buenos Aires has been one of functionality. I have appreciated coming to understand the city as an active member of it, using it because I need to, but I have been missing so much of the traveler’s perspective. For the next three weeks I will find the courage to be what I am, the foolish foreigner.