Tourist

Such a dirty word. However, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, a tourist is “one who travels for pleasure.”  Given this definition, I think I may have decided it to be my life calling as soon as I read my first Paul Bowles story.  Tourists get to see and do strange things.  (Yes, it is possible that one could be driven to insanity before dying in Morocco, but hey.)

And yet, to be called a tourist can be a bit of an insult.  For Americans, anyway.  Perhaps travelers from Canada or Japan are completely happy with the tourist label.  I simply don’t know.

Americans can fall into two extremes.  There is the American who is blissfully unaware that s/he is the only one wearing a baseball cap and that their skin has turned an unsightly shade of pink, very much the color of cooked flesh.  And, there are those Americans who are painfully aware that they are in a country that is not their own. Aware that they look different, speak in another language, do things that people with a permanent bed in that country simply do not do…like walk around with hot liquid in a cup.  For some reason, perhaps awareness, this latter category tries to cover up their difference. As if.  As if an American could be anything other than an American.

How did being a tourist turn into a bad thing?  Traveling to another place and time zone implies curiosity and curiosity usually begets knowledge and growth.  There are plenty of people in history – Mark Twain, for one – who we admire as tourists.

Since moving to Madrid, tourists come and stay with me.  And I do tourist things with these tourist friends of mine.  (My mouth should be washed out with a bar of soap by the end of this post.)  One of the tourist activities I most recently took part in was going to a NINE PM flamenco show at Casa Patas.  And it was fun.  I want to be a flamenco expert.

Looking around at the audience, it was hard not to notice that the majority was from out of town.  Tourists!  Out in public and showing their faces!  The woman next to me was from Dallas. She and her husband were in Madrid for just two days before heading north to San Sebastián and then on to Paris. She seemed to think that the parts of the show when there was no singing or dancing were just musical interludes when she could chat with me about Madrid, her vacation, her sons.  I really thought I was going to walk out of there having agreed to become part of her family.

Crazy, friendly lady from Texas included…that tourist attraction was a really good time.