Travail, tourism, 'Cox and Flings'

A couple of days ago, I was looking up visa requirements for different countries just to get a sense of how badly Asians fare on the spontaneous wanderlust ability index. Because, you know, nothing cheers a brown kid up more than seeing how suspicious everyone else is of her. I'm serious...sorry white folk, you shall never know how badass being feared by half the world's embassies can make you feel. At any rate, in my perusals of numerous fora across the internet, I realised that there were a lot of people asking questions about visa policies in various countries and saw a pattern. There are two kinds of tourists in the world - those who holiday in Paris and those who vacation in Prague. I realise how this sort of sweeping categorisation can be offensive to the variety of travellers all over the globe. I do realise it.

Pause for effect

Let me be clearer. I am excluding from this binary those people who are hardcore globetrotters, ready to pitch their tent anywhere just for the thrill of it. That's a species that can at least be admired for its unrelenting commitment to transience and celebrated for its love of movement. As long as they aren't lying to the customs officials, of course.

I also exclude the arty bohemian set that will find in Paris, Prague, Pyongyang or Patna the best of culture and tradition that there is to admire, almost in the spirit of amateur cultural anthropologists with extra suntan lotion. There is an earnest willingness to engage with the finest aspects of a foreign culture and enjoy what it has to offer. The world truly deserves tourists of this sort, happy to immerse themselves in the way of the exotic, appreciate its acme, acknowledge misgivings about some aspects of the culture, enjoy the experience while it lasts and then move on. Once in a while, they'll even decide to settle down and adopt the vacation spot as their permanent abode.

The perennial peregrine, in the one case, and the tourmet (as in gourmet) in the other, both treat the act of travel not as something incidental, but as an integer in their sense of being. Like IQ, this Travel Quotient can be plotted as a Bell Curve, the normal distribution in a given population. It is the mass of regular Joes and Janes in the middle of the curve that I speak of when positing the Paris/Prague rule. The ones who take pictures of themselves at the Eiffel Tower, in exactly the same pose for five consecutive snaps, and plaster them all over Facebook; the ones who squeal like piglets about shopping for clothes in Paris; the ones who think that "Swizzerland" is "like, so cool, man." These are the people who provoke xenophobia and piss off several ethnic groups on six continents with their slaughter of language and offence to local ways, not to mention baffling inability to either learn to abstain from or adapt their metabolism to the available variety of alcohol. If you can't handle an extra slice of bread at home, you sure as hell aren't downing that vat of vodka, dumbass.

The behaviour of these tourists can be analogised very aptly to explain dating mores among college-going youth. I call this the 'Cox and Flings' theory of dating that will summarise the attitude of 'tail tourism' that college campuses and adultescence is rife with. Now, being a woman, I can only speak from the female point of view but please free to distort my thesis to accommodate your current post-dump spell of misogyny and repeat viewings of 500 Days of Summer.

The 'Cox and Flings' theory of dating is very simple: just like your average moneyed mister off to "see world", the untended male tail tourist will want to sample everything there is on the relationship market. I use the term 'relationship' loosely of course. It covers the range of liaisons from one-nighters to knight-oners. He will do this out of a sense of entitlement and privilege that only be possessed by a boy brought up in the kind of society that we have. He will want to go sightseeing in Paris - binoculars firmly aimed at skinny French legs - and see subtitled films - because you can hardly make out intelligible speech - and *AHEM* shop for clothes, because  frankly, that's what you went there for. Everyone wants to go to Paris. It's almost the first phoren city you learn of, growing up. It's glamorous and giddy and mon dieu! the clothes.  Everyone wants to wear 'em and good golly, if you land those threads to show off to the other lads, won't that be something. I hope my attempts at keeping this post respectable by using the clever metaphor of "buying clothes" have not been lost. Because I could just switch right over to speaking of intercourse and such. Paris is the hot girl that must be nailed, that is easily available and that it ups your cred to be...er...in. Paris is ultimately the dream.

And then there's Prague. Let's be honest, there's a certain sort of man who would go to Prague for the love of it. For the tail tourist troupe, Prague is the city you go to because you have to exhibit your sense of culture to everyone else back home. Do you know who Kafka is? Of course not. But you'll hang around, take pictures as proof, break your teeth (or have them broken for you) on Czech, pretend to have secret communist tendencies in pubs (comma who now?) and well, not get much opportunity to dress up, if yaknowhadimean. Of course, having gone to Prague will score you bragging rights and the ability to impress a few French fillies. Maybe even some other Eastern European girls. Whatever. At the end of the day, however, Czech is a fucking tough language to learn and the weather isn't as great as Paris - it also doesn't allow for as many legs on display - and the films are much harder to understand even with the subtitles, by virtue of being pitched a little high, and the Marxism just gets to you after a while. And maybe Prague is even more hostile than Paris because it's so complicated. Just sayin'...So the nerdy girl doesn't get the boy, she sulks in a corner waiting for an industry apart from tourism to open up her economy. And the boy gets a smart girl on his air miles.

So, that's it ladies and gentlemen. You're free to disagree of course. But I'd certainly like a male point of view to this.