“She’s a tourist.”

There was a small party of men in my hotel room, standing on the balcony in response to my complaint. The hotel manager kept repeating that phrase, hia siyaha, to explain to anyone who would listen why I had been on the balcony in the first place. A proper Egyptian girl, I was given to understand, would not have been out there— at the very least, she would have gone inside at the first sign of trouble.

I was five days in to an eight-month graduate research project in Egypt. Things were off to a truly amazing start.

Outside the glass doors of my balcony, the Nile gleamed in the afternoon sunlight. Between me and the Nile was a squat grey apartment building, where I directed the men to focus their attention. Sitting on his own balcony across the street was a middle-aged Egyptian man, calmly reading a newspaper, looking for all the world as though he’d been reading that same newspaper for hours. As though he hadn’t, a scant twenty minutes earlier, leered at me and lifted up his robe to masturbate in my direction.

I had grabbed my camera and caught him in flagrante, and had gone downstairs to show the front desk. After many expressions of shock and sympathy they had recommended that I switch rooms. My refusal to do so had led to the argument happening on my balcony now. The hotelier kept repeating, hia siyaha. She’s a tourist.

As a tourist, I couldn’t be expected to know or follow the rules for behavior, couldn’t be expected to know that my private balcony would be considered a public space where I would be open for harassment. I hadn’t yet learned to adapt to Egypt, and in a country where the revolution had scared away most of the tourists, the hotelier was eager to have the locale adapt itself to me.

In the end, the hotelier won the argument in my favor. An altercation took place across the street, the man with the newspaper disappeared, and I was free to enjoy the Nile view from my balcony.

It was hard to feel pleased.

For the next eight months, I would adapt my dress and behavior anytime I stepped outdoors, keeping my body covered, my hair back, my gaze down. I would count the number of times I got catcalled—ya mouzza!—each day, and if the total was less than ten I would be pleased. Occasionally, I would feel my nether regions groped by ghostly hands when I walked through a crowd.

Some days I didn’t bother to leave the house.

Each week, I would hear fresh stories coming out of Tahrir square, of women being publicly stripped and assaulted when they went out to protest for democracy and human rights. Even as I was adapting to Egypt, Egypt was adapting to the strange new world without Mubarak, where the only authority was the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Learning self-defense for protests became a preoccupation among my local friends. I watched my Egyptian Facebook feed fill up with recipes for homemade mace cleverly concealed behind large pieces of jewelry, watched calls go out for gas masks and field hospital supplies. I met a girl on the metro who proudly showed me the knives she carried up her sleeves. My adaptations away from being a siyaha were minor in comparison to this countrywide shift.

Over time, the daily sexual harassment layered with the growing civil unrest began to feel normal. Acts of aggression became part of everyday life, and sights or events that would have once shocked me left me numb. The women begging on the highway seemed normal. The random roadblocks, the police violence, the tang of tear gas in the air. The tourists stopped coming. The expat community drank heavily.

The expats left, one by one. As did I.

Returning to the U.S., I felt like a siyaha in my own country. I no longer knew how to dress for U.S. cities. It took me months to walk without looking at the ground, to get used to the lack of casual violence every time I left the house.

Today, I see news in the U.S. that reminds me of my Cairo days: the protests, the police aggression, the widespread culture of misogyny.

I do not want to get used to this. I do not want to learn these rules again.

I do not want to be a tourist in my home.

Photo © Laura Carroll. All rights reserved.

Laura has spent several years living, working, and studying in different countries, most recently in Egypt. Her career focuses on linking sustainable tourism with international development work.

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I recently sat on a panel at a women’s event in my hometown of Boston, whose discussion focused on “how to keep traveling while staying put.” Comments from the audience focused on getting out of a rut at home, and the idea appeared fairly straightforward—visit museums, strike up conversations with new people, take photographs and try to appreciate where you are through the eyes of others. But as the panel went on, it was clear that something was not quite making sense. What was the link between location and freedom of spirit?

Then, a young woman mentioned that she had been planning to move to a new apartment. She was excited to explore a neighborhood that she did not know well, but since it was an acknowledged “bad” area, her family did not approve. Her frustration showcased what we had all been navigating around: the joy that so many people find when on the road isn’t about being on vacation or the thrill of discovery. What we’re feeling is freedom from the baggage of our own culture.

In one’s own environment, where the line between “safe” and “dangerous” is clear, it’s easy to make the choice to remain inside your community’s unspoken rules. “This neighborhood’s good, that one’s bad… people here dress a certain way… watch your accent to blend in…” It’s never-ending, the list of subtle social signposts that we all get facile with in our own homes. And there’s something comforting about understanding these signals on a nuanced (or even invisible) level; reaching that level of cultural fluency is really how you become a local.

So, for many people, travel is fun when they can bring their own culture with them, which they achieve by staying at a certain style of hotel or using their own language. They understandably want to mitigate the disorienting experience of ignorance. To be fair, there’s a particular sense of power that comes with knowing that you have the ability to make yourself comfortable wherever you are.

But my theory is that, in the end, doing this means carrying your fears with you as well. Instead, there’s potential for mental freedom when you travel, particularly for people who decide to abandon their native culture and rub up against the limitations of unacknowledged social conventions on a daily basis.

When I backpacked in Europe during my senior year at Smith, I did not know the difference between a good neighborhood and a bad one and ended up staying in red light districts, grim workmen’s blocks, and high-end luxury apartments. I chatted with strangers, had romances, and drank wine before 5pm. Years later, stuck in the Sinai desert after flash floods tore up the road, my friend and I jumped out of our car to push a taxi out of the mud. We forgot that we weren’t in modest Egyptian clothing—still, a local man, grateful for the help, serenaded me with “American Woman” as I wiped the mud off my arms.

But losing mental constraints isn’t always fun, especially when not done responsibly. Fed up with haggling over every purchase in rural India, I said I was a student to elicit sympathy and make me sound less well-off—however, there, my formal education marked me as prosperous in a way that should have been embarrassing. Furthermore, the reason I was dressed immodestly while pushing the stranded taxi was because we had spent the night trapped in our car at a rest stop. Only men were out and about; all women in the vicinity had been reduced to the occasional pair of eyes peering out from other stranded vehicles. So we three women sweated in the back seat of a small sedan so that it appeared our male friend, in front, was “in charge of us.” We barely drank water, so we could avoid needing to leave the car to pee—I was ill from dehydration when we finally made it back to Cairo.

Returning to Boston for a few years, I found real comfort in knowing exactly what slang meant, what constituted “polite” behavior, and how to navigate the pile of logistics—health care, phone contracts, apartment leases—that always surprise me in their differences across national borders. It was relaxing in a way I’ve never known abroad.

For me, the value of having lived internationally is that I don’t have to carry a sense of familiarity with me wherever I go, with its associated limitations and complacencies. Rather, I can carry with me a sense of comfort in the strangeness, a freedom from obligation to the cultural expectations put on my body and mind.

Photo © Julia Hudson. All rights reserved.

Julia is a writer and digital marketer in London, England. She founded The Epic Adventurer, a website that celebrates independent travel.

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