Monday, January 16, 2012

The 6 Characters You’ll Meet At Every Expat Bar

This has been making the rounds on friends' facebook pages, so I thought I'd steal it and post it here with the following comments.

1). Pretty spot on. More or less.
2). Ouch. Number 2 is a little bit too spot on for comfort. The truth stings a bit.
3). Despite the introduction, I'm not sure this is entirely universal. It's probably true around the world in developing countries but in Japan, for example, many of these characters were absent. (Not much need for overpaid aid workers in a country like Japan.)

Also if I had to add one category, in Cambodia I seem to run into the "pretentious back-packer" a lot. The kind of person who believes that because they have traveled to the far corners of the earth and because they appreciate literature in a deep way, they are somehow better than us ordinary slobs. If you try and talk to them in a bar, they'll quickly try and size you up to see if you're as deep and cultured as they are, and then dismiss you and move on to someone else.
(Perhaps this is just bitterness talking.)

This type of person will also often have trendy tattoos--often Kanji characters that they actually can't read, and will sometimes get defensive if you try and make conversation to them about what their tattoos really mean.

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