Dress codes and travellers
It’s very easy to spot tourists. It’s not only the different skin tone but also what the visitors wear to cover their pale or sun-scorched skin. We all know those people with shorts. Hell, we are them when we just can’t bear the heat. But when travelling in places like the Middle East, if we looked around we’d see that only kids and cool-wannabes wear them.
The other day I was walking through the medina from a walk along the beaches and cliffs (could be beautiful, but the trash and sewage tarnish the beauty somewhat). Among the natives and tourists, a homely pair of people stood out. Both of them were European but I couldn’t tell where from because they weren’t talking. The ham-like pink colour suggested that they were exhausted from a long, hard day of self-frying. But that’s not what made them unattractively conspicuous. He was shirtless—and no one is shirtless this far from the beach, and I mean no one. The woman walking with him, his mother most likely, was wearing a spandex top that probably served as her swimsuit top and that revealed where her bosom started (somewhere around her diaphragm) where it ended (close enough to her knees so they can support it). Now, I don’t have a problem with this woman’s physic. No one’s perfect. But you should have seen the head-covered Moroccan girls taken aback by the sight of this charred, beached whale barely managing to crawl up the packed medina, wishing she had taken a taxi. But I think walking up the medina was a good call for her to have made. In fact, she should do it every day for the rest of her life. What she should have done was drape herself. And her son too.
Later that day I spotted a backpacker. He could have blended in if it hadn’t been for his squalid sharwal (or shalwar, depending where he bought it, God knows how many moons ago) and black toenails. David Sedaris talks in one of his stories about a clueless Texan couple on the Paris metro, who mistook him for a Frenchman. The American couple could be anything else than an American couple, dressed in their Sunday’s best: beige shorts and matching sneakers. Their tasteless attire makes him flesh out a reasonable travel etiquette that goes as follows. When you’re traveling somewhere, don’t dress as if you’re going to mow the natives’ lawns. May I add that you shouldn’t dress as though you’re going to raid their trash bins and ask them for change. Ya Allah!
