This is an excellent post. Thank you for spelling out the difference between asylum-seeking freedom-seekers versus “my freedom”-seeker crypto bros eager to tell you how cheaply they’re living their Canadian or US life in Nicaragua, shamelessly sucking the resources out of resource-poor communities.
We met some incredible people on our travels, but meeting this “flavor” of traveler shocked and disappointed me.
Oh, I feel this so much! Luckily I spend the majority of my time with 'locals' and therefore have limited contact with such people. But because I'm american by birth, when I do meet such people, I notice how they relax and let their guard down immediately because they somehow assume that we are alike or have important things in common. (Ha!) When I first started living outside the US I was a waitress at a hotel in Ireland where lots of american golfers came... this was right around the time that France rejected the call to join the Iraq war. This big table of boisterous, loud, very american golfers would come to the restaurant and *constantly* change the name of anything french to freedom. Super boring and annoying. They assumed everyone there would be on board with this type of petty idiocy... finally one day instead of serving them 'freedom fries' they just got an empty bowl. I told them that freedom meant they were free to eat elsewhere, or better yet, go out and pluck the best potatoes from the land and make their own freedom fries- can you get any freer than that? They stopped tipping after that but they also stopped swapping the word french for freedom. Glad I don't have to deal with that kind of crap anymore, as you say- life is too short to waste time on people who don't want to expand themselves anyway!
YOU NAILED IT.
This is an excellent post. Thank you for spelling out the difference between asylum-seeking freedom-seekers versus “my freedom”-seeker crypto bros eager to tell you how cheaply they’re living their Canadian or US life in Nicaragua, shamelessly sucking the resources out of resource-poor communities.
We met some incredible people on our travels, but meeting this “flavor” of traveler shocked and disappointed me.
Great post.
You’re right Jessica - we have all the freedom already. Powerful insight.
Oh, I feel this so much! Luckily I spend the majority of my time with 'locals' and therefore have limited contact with such people. But because I'm american by birth, when I do meet such people, I notice how they relax and let their guard down immediately because they somehow assume that we are alike or have important things in common. (Ha!) When I first started living outside the US I was a waitress at a hotel in Ireland where lots of american golfers came... this was right around the time that France rejected the call to join the Iraq war. This big table of boisterous, loud, very american golfers would come to the restaurant and *constantly* change the name of anything french to freedom. Super boring and annoying. They assumed everyone there would be on board with this type of petty idiocy... finally one day instead of serving them 'freedom fries' they just got an empty bowl. I told them that freedom meant they were free to eat elsewhere, or better yet, go out and pluck the best potatoes from the land and make their own freedom fries- can you get any freer than that? They stopped tipping after that but they also stopped swapping the word french for freedom. Glad I don't have to deal with that kind of crap anymore, as you say- life is too short to waste time on people who don't want to expand themselves anyway!