I'M A STRANGER HERE MYSELF

One reader sent me a note asking why I seemed to dislike tourists. Hadn't I been a visitor in several foreing places myself? He could remember that a few years ago I went up to Vancouver and galavanted about enjoying the sights, the food, the museums ...
Why, he demanded to know, was I such a bitch?

Well, the glib answer is that I am an unforgiving and judgemental person, and will typically ignore my own flaws while excoriating everybody else for not meeting my impossibly high standards for them. And if they're wandering around getting in my way by dawdling four abreast on a busy sidewalk, they will offend me.

Actually, that's not only the glib answer, but the only answer.
Move faster, all of you dimwitted heffalumps.
And consider single-file.

Of course, one single Midwesterner walking down the street often takes up the space of four slow-moving Euries. Life is different in Europe, and outside their provincial capitals they may not ever have been any place with more than five stoplights or a surprising amount of genetic diversity. Midwesterners, of course, represent not so much any genetic diversity as selective breeding. Marbled flesh, and solid shoulders for pulling plows. Sort of the combine harvester of the human world, now sadly useless since tractors were invented.

Also, as I understand it, food across the interior of this country is all variations on burgers, deep-dish pizza, and potato. Your choice of pineapple chunks yes or no. Or, if it's potato salad, with or without raisins, which are the Midwestern spiritual equivalent of pineapple.

In some places they also have eggrolls, kung pao stuff, and orange chicken.

They've seen tall buildings and grocery stores on teevee.
It was a crime series from the seventies.

Europeans, almost all of them, grew up with Baywatch on the television and are perpetually surprised that no one here runs in slow motion toward the surf wearing electric red swim togs. What on earth is wrong with us? Are we sick?
Also, our coffee sucks.



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