Being abroad has been different from any other travel experience I’ve had; I am a student, and a tourist, and a traveler, and those multiple identities play a huge role in shaping your experience interacting with new people, cultures, and topographies. In Madurai, I very much felt like a student: I had a routine, was practicing the local language, and was not a part of the hoards of French tourists that I occasionally saw bopping around the Meenakshi Temple.
However, I was by no means an integrated part of the local community. Not being a tourist does not erase positionality or your status as an outsider, but it does mean that you might have the chance to get even a fraction closer to the heart of a community through occupying local spaces, engaging in dialogues you may not have as a tourist, and incorporating community routines into your own life.
In Sri Lanka, the first leg of my post-program travels, there was some feeling of familiarity. Signs had some Tamil writing, autos (or tuk tuks) were the same albeit a variety of colors, and the cuisine was not unfamiliar territory. While my friends and I participated in a number of explicitly tourist activities, I did not yet feel like a tourist. In Malaysia, the number of tourists we were surrounded by definitely increased, but I did not yet feel any particularly striking distance between the community of tourists and residents of Malaysia; there was in many ways a coexistence that I felt made my experience there ultimately more meaningful and educational in understanding and learning about a culture and community I had never even thought of before.
I am currently finishing the last leg of my travels in Thailand, where there is still more delicious food to be discovered and beaches, temples, and markets yet to be explored. So far, I have felt more like a tourist here than anywhere else; I am surrounded by families and college age students from the US and the UK, and the streets boast a number of Western friendly restaurants and tourist shops offering “I Heart Thailand” tshirts by the boatload. The beaches are sandy, clear, and accessible by tourist-friendly boats, and often the menus are labeled with nifty English translations so as not to scare off potential customers with the lovely but elusive Thai language.
It would be dishonest to say that I wasn’t a little bit taken with some of the tourist gimmicks, but there is a part of me that is saddened by the fact that the people around me do not live in Thailand, and the closest I come to meeting residents of the area is through food service or tourist services. Rather than living in a place as I was in Madurai, it feels as though I am existing on the outskirts of Thailand. However, I am also trying to recognize that I am not the one who decides what is and isn’t distinctly Thai, and the definition of Thai culture may include a degree of popular tourism.