But hearing in the full sense is blocked. Intelligible foreign sounds are limited to the voices of waiters, shopkeepers, professional guides, and hotel clerks-plus snatches of dubiously “native” music. Even in Britain, accent, intonation, and vocabulary are often unfamiliar; tourists do not recognize many of the noises they hear, and they speak mostly to functionaries. The sense of smell still operates; but it is likely to be baffled or disgusted by many foreign odors. Above all, the sense of touch is frustrated; visible or invisible Keep Off signs appear on almost everything and everyone.
Two senses aren’t enough for contact with the world, and as a result places visited as a tourist tend to be experienced as blurry silent areas spotted with flashes of light. A window box bursting with purple-veined white crocuses; the shouting, anger-gorged red face of a taxi driver; a handful of hot fish-and-chips wrapped in the News of the World-these rare moments of sensation stand out in Fred’s memory of the past month like colored snapshots against the gray blotting-paper of an old photograph album. Appropriately-for what tourists take home are, typically, snapshots.
Tourists also bring back special meretricious objects called “souvenirs”-which as the word suggests are not so much actual things as embodied memories; and like all memories somewhat exaggerated and distorted. Souvenirs have little in common with anything actually made for and used by the natives-who’s ever seen a real Greek woman in a headscarf bordered by fake tinny gold coins, or a French fisherman wearing the kind of Authentic Fisherman’s Smock sold in tourist shops? But these false symbolic objects are meant to indemnify the tourist for having been, for weeks or months, cut off from an authentic experience of the world, from physical contact with other human beings-