Tourist In My Own Country Quotes

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How utterly lovely the Puerta del Sol was in those days, how exciting for a foreign tourist! This word has come into ill repute in recent years, because so many tourists have gone abroad with no preparation which would enable them to appreciate what they were about to see and no humility to make them approach the country on its own terms. In Spain I have always been a tourist and have been rather proud of that fact. This is the book of a tourist and the experiences described herein, are those which are open to any intelligent traveler. If, as I once heard an Englishman say, "to be a tourist is to stand gape-eyed with love," I have been one, and never more so that in my first days in Puerta del Sol. p376
James A. Michener (Iberia)
In the nineties…yes, we were ecstatic; there’s no way back to that naïveté. We thought that the choice had been made and that communism had been defeated forever. But it was only the beginning… Twenty years have gone by…“Don’t try to scare us with your socialism,” children tell their parents. From a conversation with a university professor: “At the end of the nineties, my students would laugh when I told them stories about the Soviet Union. They were sure that a new future awaited them. Now it’s a different story…Today’s students have truly seen and felt capitalism: the inequality, the poverty, the shameless wealth. They’ve witnessed the lives of their parents, who never got anything out of the plundering of our country. And they’re oriented toward radicalism. They dream of their own revolution, they wear red T-shirts with pictures of Lenin and Che Guevara.” There’s a new demand for everything Soviet. For the cult of Stalin. Half of the people between the ages of nineteen and thirty consider Stalin an “unrivaled political figure.” A new cult of Stalin, in a country where he murdered at least as many people as Hitler?! Everything Soviet is back in style. “Soviet-style cafés” with Soviet names and Soviet dishes. “Soviet” candy and “Soviet” salami, their taste and smell all too familiar from childhood. And of course, “Soviet” vodka. There are dozens of Soviet-themed TV shows, scores of websites devoted to Soviet nostalgia. You can visit Stalin’s camps—Solovki, Magadan—as a tourist. The advertisements promise that for the full effect, they’ll give you a camp uniform and a pickaxe. They’ll show you the newly restored barracks. Afterward, there will be fishing…
Svetlana Alexievich (Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets)
It interests me that there is no end of fictions, and facts made over in the forms of fictions. Because we class them under so many different rubrics, and media, and means of delivery, we don't recognize the sheer proliferation and seamlessness of them. I think at some level of scale or perspective, the police drama in which a criminal is shot, the hospital in which the doctors massage a heart back to life, the news video in which jihadists behead a hostage, and the human-interest story of a child who gets his fondest wish (a tourist trip somewhere) become the same sorts of drama. They are representations of strong experience, which, as they multiply, began to dedifferentiate in our uptake of them, despite our names and categories and distinctions... I say I watch the news to "know". But I don't really know anything. Certainly I can't do anything. I know that there is a war in Iraq, but I knew that already. I know that there are fires and car accidents in my state and in my country, but that, too, I knew already. With each particular piece of footage, I know nothing more than I did before. I feel something, or I don't feel something. One way I am likely to feel is virtuous and "responsible" for knowing more of these things that I can do nothing about. Surely this feeling is wrong, even contemptible. I am not sure anymore what I feel. What is it like to watch a human being's beheading? The first showing of the video is bad. The second, fifth, tenth, hundredth are—like one's own experiences—retained, recountable, real, and yet dreamlike. Some describe the repetition as "numbing". "Numbing" is very imprecise. I think the feeling, finally, is of something like envelopment and even satisfaction at having endured the worst without quite caring or being tormented. It is the paradoxically calm satisfaction of having been enveloped in a weak or placid "real" that another person endured as the worst experience imaginable, in his personal frenzy, fear, and desperation, which we view from the outside as the simple occurrence of a death... I see: Severed heads. The Extra Value Meal. Kohl-gray eyelids. A holiday sale at Kohl's. Red seeping between the fingers of the gloved hand that presses the wound. "Doctor, can you save him?" "We'll do our best." The dining room of the newly renovated house, done in red. Often a bold color is best. The kids are grateful for their playroom. The bad guy falls down, shot. The detectives get shot. The new Lexus is now available for lease. On CNN, with a downed helicopter in the background, a peaceful field of reeds waves in the foreground. One after another the reeds are bent, broken, by boot treads advancing with the camera. The cameraman, as savior, locates the surviving American airman. He shoots him dead. It was a terrorist video. They run it again. Scenes from ads: sales, roads, ordinary calm shopping, daily life. Tarpaulined bodies in the street. The blue of the sky advertises the new car's color. Whatever you could suffer will have been recorded in the suffering of someone else. Red Lobster holds a shrimp festival. Clorox gets out blood. Advil stops pain fast. Some of us are going to need something stronger.
Mark Greif (Against Everything: Essays)
i feel like a tourist in my own country
khaled el Hosseine
The truth is that I'd gain nothing by being a saint after being dead, an artist is what I am, and the only thing I want is to be alive so I can keep going along at donkey level in this six-cylinder touring car I bought from the marine's consul, with this Trinidadian chauffeur who was a baritone in the New Orleans pirates' opera, with my genuine silk shirts, my Oriental lotions, my topaz teeth, my flat straw hat, and my bicolored buttons, sleeping without an alarm clock, dancing with beauty queens, and leaving them hallucinated with my dictionary rhetoric, and with no flutter in my spleen if some Ash Wednesday my faculties wither away, because in order to go on with this life of a minister, all I need is my idiot face, and I have more than enough with the string of shops I own from here to beyond the sunset, where the same tourists who used to go around collecting from us through the admiral, now go stumbling after my autographed pictures, almanacs with my love poetry, medals with my profile, bits of my clothing, and all of that without the glorious plague of spending all day and all night sculpted in equestrian marble and shat on by swallows like the fathers of our country.
Gabriel García Márquez (Leaf Storm and Other Stories)
I feel like a tourist in my own country,” I said, taking in a goatherd leading a half-dozen emaciated goats along the side of the road. Farid snickered. Tossed his cigarette. “You still think of this place as your country?” “I think a part of me always will,” I said, more defensively than I had intended. “After twenty years of living in America,” he said, swerving the truck to avoid a pothole the size of a beach ball. I nodded. “I grew up in Afghanistan.” Farid snickered again. “Why do you do that?" “Never mind,” he murmured. “No, I want to know. Why do you do that?” In his rearview mirror, I saw something flash in his eyes. “You want to know?” he sneered. “Let me imagine, Agha sahib. You probably lived in a big two- or three-story house with a nice backyard that your gardener filled with flowers and fruit trees. All gated, of course. Your father drove an American car. You had servants, probably Hazaras. Your parents hired workers to decorate the house for the fancy mehmanis they threw, so their friends would come over to drink and boast about their travels to Europe or America. And I would bet my first son’s eyes that this is the first time you’ve ever worn a pakol.” He grinned at me, revealing a mouthful of prematurely rotting teeth. “Am I close?” “Why are you saying these things?” I said. “Because you wanted to know,” he spat. He pointed to an old man dressed in ragged clothes trudging down a dirt path, a large burlap pack filled with scrub grass tied to his back. “That’s the real Afghanistan, Agha sahib. That’s the Afghanistan I know. You? You’ve always been a tourist here, you just didn’t know it.
Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)
The truth is that I'd gain nothing by being a saint after being dead, an artist is what I am, and the only thing I want is to be alive so I can keep going along at donkey level in this six-cylinder touring car I bought from the marines' consul, with this Trinidadian chauffeur who was a baritone in the New Orleans pirates' opera, with my genuine silk shirts, my Oriental lotions, my topaz teeth, my flat straw hat, and my bicolored buttons, sleeping without an alarm clock, dancing with beauty queens, and leaving them hallucinated with my dictionary rhetoric, and with no flutter in my spleen if some Ash Wednesday my faculties wither away, because in order to go on with this life of a minister, all I need is my idiot face, and I have more than enough with the string of shops I own from here to beyond the sunset, where the same tourists who used to go around collecting from us through the admiral, now go stumbling after my autographed pictures, almanacs with my love poetry, medals with my profile, bits of my clothing, and all of that without the glorious plague of spending all day and all night sculpted in equestrian marble and shat on by swallows like the fathers of our country.
Gabriel García Márquez (Collected Stories)
Money is a country all its own,’ he said. ‘My parents were ship-owners; the family business was an international enterprise, despite the fact that we had lived until now on the small island where both of them were born, an island you would certainly not have heard of, despite its prolixity to some well-known tourist destinations.’ Proximity, I said. I think you mean proximity. ‘I do beg your pardon,’ he said. ‘I mean, of course, proximity.’ But like all wealthy people, he continued
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Professor Samson
Many years later, serving time in a special detention center after yet another arrest, I sat in my cell reading a collection of newly published materials from the archives. These were secret reports by the KGB branch of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic proudly documenting an extraordinary operation involving a journalist from Newsweek who had visited Ukraine sometime after the accident. Some twenty or so individuals had been involved in this operation, including members of special militia units and retired KGB agents. The KGB arranged it so that everybody the journalist interviewed was an intelligence officer, and all of them assured him the consequences of the accident were minimal and that the public was impressed and delighted by the efficient way the party and government had dealt with it. Vast resources had been brought to bear to deceive a single reporter because it was the appropriate thing to do. We could hardly allow enemy journalists to slander the Soviet reality by twisting the facts. Therefore, we would rather twist the facts a little ourselves. None of these tricks were any more effective than the infamous grocery stores in North Korea in which plastic produce is strategically placed so foreigners being driven from the airport can see that bananas and oranges are freely available. For years now the foreigners have been merrily snapping photos of these stores as a tourist sight. Hey, look over there! The famous fake fruit! Paradoxically, people in Washington, London, and Berlin knew more about what was really happening than those living in the contaminated zones. Our family did not know the whole truth, but we knew a whole lot more than most: when the party and government robustly denied the "contemptible insinuations of Washington's propaganda" about an explosion in Chernobyl, our relatives phoned and told us everyone in the region was aware there had been an explosion at the power station and that there were soldiers all over the place. Then the nightmare began. Soon, everybody within thirty kilometers of the power plant was being evacuated, and no matter how glowingly state television reported a well-coordinated operation, we already knew better. Our numerous relatives had been dispersed all over Ukraine, to wherever empty accommodations, like Pioneer camps, could be found. People were in despair. It was unbearable to be forced to abandon your farmstead, a home you had built with your own hands, especially since these people could be considered well-off by Soviet standards. We were the poor relatives compared to them, even though my father was in the army, which meant his pay was above average. We were just living a standard Soviet life in a military unit, with an apartment and a salary, while they, with their orchards and cows and private plots of land, were better provided for, at least in terms of food. Now they were leading their children to a bus and being driven away permanently to who knows where with only their identification papers and a minimal set of clothes. There were cows mooing and dogs barking, just like in films about the war. A couple of days later soldiers went around the villages shooting the dogs. A starving cow will just die, but dogs go feral, form packs, and might attack the few remaining people. What a monstrous shambles it all was, and it could not be concealed...A total of 116,000 people were evacuated. They needed new housing, new jobs, and compensation for the property they had abandoned. Even for a rich, developed country that would be a big ask. For the U.S.S.R., with its planned economy, it was a nightmare. New homes were needed; new cars were needed.
Alexei Navalny (Patriot: A Memoir)