Nice read. The professional foreigner one is funny and reminds me of a weird incident.

My friends and I were in Bali and we went to visit a Buddhist temple. When we arrived a small minibus of Japanese tourists were also arriving. For some reason they went crazy over us. Not the temple - us. We were made to pose for photos with different groups of them, they followed us about, it was literally as if they thought we were Hollywood stars or something. As we were posing for one photo I whispered to my mate “what the f**k is going on?” and he just said “I have no idea.”

Still a surreal incident. But I reason as we were 30 year old, not bad looking, western men, blonde hair, all that, we were a novelty. I dunno. Maybe we were the butt of their jokes?! Who knows. But being foreign certainly has some odd gravitas at times.

Cheers for the article.