A Tale of Two Tourists

Today me and Rachel pretended to be tourists.

It was SO funny.

We got cameras and went downtown to the Visitors' Bureau and I went up to the desk. "Excuse me," I said to the dude, speaking in a very proper british accent. "Excuse me but we're trying to photograph the river and it's so hard to take a picture with all those telephone poles and wires and things in the way of the view, where can we go to take a picture like we see on the postcards?"

The guy asked if I knew where Main Street was, and when I said no he proceeded to start telling me all about Memphis and its fabulous attractions. All we wanted was a telephone pole free shot of the Mississippi. "Thank you for your time," I said, chickening out too much at the end to add "gov'ner."

Rachel tapped me on the shoulder and gave me this really dumb look like a cow so I "translated" for her all that the visitors' bureau guy had just told me--in what I hoped sounded like Chinese. Rachel beamed at the guy and gave him a peace sign.

So it looked so pretty outside we really did want to photograph the river, and we kind of thought it would be neat to ride the riverboat too, so we walked across the dangerously uneven cobblestones to the riverboat. Two ladies were walking off the boat as we got there and I said, once again in my very proper british accent, "excuse me, can you tell me how much it is for a ride?" and the lady smiled and helf out the brochure, pointing to the cost that said $18. "That's 18 of THESE," she said, waving a dollar bill. I opened my mouth to say a very proper "I'll pass then, thanks" but Rachel got the brilliant idea of saying "oh my!" in what she obviously thought was a british accent, which EMBARRASSED me to no end because THEN the two ladies realized we weren't really from England at all. Imagine, a british asian who can't even speak with a proper accent.

We gave up on the river and walked up toward all the buildings, and we went in the Cotton Museum. We looked around in the gift shop and I asked Rachel in my british accent why there was a collection of cotton on display for people to look at. I supposed it was because we hadn't SEEN any cotton growing since we got to America and so it must be really rare.

I decided to conduct a small experiment to test the extent to which a vendor will lie to a tourist.

I picked up an Elvis CD and took it to the counter. "Excuse me," I said to the guy in my little british accent. "I was just looking for some music and I was wondering if this is what normal American girls listen to. Is this popular with regular American girls?" And the guy said "Oh yes, we can barely keep those in stock, girls love that stuff."

I was very polite and I thanked him but after we left, Rachel and I were disgusted that he would say that. Neither of us has ever met a girl close to our age who likes Elvis. That guy was just trying to sell us his overpriced CD. What a scandal.

We went in Peabody Place and took pictures of a bunch of stuff. I asked the girl in Starbucks if American girls listened to Elvis and she LAUGHED and said no. I said I had heard girls loved Elvis in America and where could we find Graceland? The Starbucks girl didn't know.

Lesson #1: People really do lie to tourists to sell their crap.
Lesson #2: People who work in tourist-infested locations have no idea where anything is.

A woman stopped beside us at a stoplight heard us talking and asked us if we had been to see such-and-such a museum yet, and we said no, but we were wondering why cars drove on the wrong side of the road, and why steering wheels were on the wrong side of the cars? She said she had no idea, but that she was so happy we had come to town to see the place where Elvis was born and raised. I almost disrupted our experimentation to tell her in my plain old Memphis accent that Elvis was not born and raised in Memphis, but had merely started his career there, and that he had actually been born in Tupelo, Mississippi.

I DID ask her if Memphis was famous for anything but Elvis, and she said, "yes, the shopping!"

Obviously regular Memphians don't think so much about BB King, BBQ, or anything else that starts with BB. Not that I can think of anything. But forget about all the REAL tourist stuff. People recommend Elvis (although they have no idea where Graceland or Sun Studio are, and they have no idea that Memphis was not Elvis' hometown), and shopping (even though the shopping venues they recommend have the exact same shops you would find anywhere else).

Well we would have LOVED to stay and conduct more experimenting, but at 7PM we decided to leave downtown before it got dark and the creeps came out to play. We thought we'd get closer to the Pyramid and take pictures of it, so we made the first left turn we came to--sinxe the Pyramid was to our left and all. We ended up on the bridge taking us to Arkansas. We didn't find a place to turn around for FIVE MILES into Arkansas. We REALLY felt like two clueless tourists then.

So we had dinner in Arkansas and congratulated ourselves on the success of our first day as Memphis tourists.