18 July 1996

What Tourists Do

I was walking in a foreign country when I saw a film crew preparing to photograph a truck with four pig cadavers in a narrow alley. When I raised my camera to make a photograph, a man raised his hand in front of the lens and said "Excuse me!"

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"I am a tourist," I lied, emphasizing my foreign accent. "I am taking snapshots. That is what tourists do."

The simpleton couldn't think of any response to an irrefutable universal truth, and silently walked away. I think he was probably working on one of those terrible made-for-television movies.