Sensible Sandals

Summer is here again and once more it’s time to play one of my favorite games—spot the tourist. Living where I do, a short walk from the beach in a tourist destination like L.A., there’s always a healthy smattering of tourists wandering around. You can always tell them; they wear fewer clothes than the locals, are usually paler and tend to walk with their mouths open gazing at the sights.

I have a knack for guessing where tourists are from. I can’t pinpoint the details of my technique; sometimes it’s clothing or hair color; sometimes it’s a mannerism or a face shape. I can pick out a mid-westerner against a southerner and can always tell a Northern European from their Eastern European cousins. My specialty, of course, is British tourists.

British people have a distinct look that separates them firmly from their continental neighbors and labels them clearly as “not from around here.” Of course, I’d be stereotyping horribly if I said that every British tourist shares the same characteristics, but if you’d like to play “Spot the Brit” in your neighborhood, here’s an example of what to look out for.

Today I passed a couple of older ladies strolling by the marina. From 50 yards off, I pegged them as British. They each had complexions that hadn’t seen the sun for a while and both had practical, no-fuss haircuts. They carried sturdy nylon shoulder bags, undoubtedly with numerous handy pockets for organizing their tourist paraphernalia. They wore comfortable cotton three-quarter-length trousers and loose t-shirts in pretty flowered prints. But the telltale sign, the one that truly defines the British tourist, is the pair of sensible walking sandals. These ladies had those, too.

While Californians are often seen clipping around in flimsy flip-flops or (heaven forbid) bare feet, Brits love to walk, so sensible shoes are essential and if the sun is out (as it always is here in the summer) those sensible shoes have to be sandals.
As I walked by the two old girls, I craned my neck to listen for an accent and verify my assumptions. Sure enough, I heard the soft lilt of a northern accent, probably Lancashire. I smiled to myself at how clever I was and how honed my powers of deduction had become. It pleased me too that they couldn’t apply the same reasoning to me and guess that I too was British.

I’ve lived here for long enough now that to the untrained eye I look like just another American. (I hear a distant roar from everyone I know yelling, “That’s what you think!) But seriously, I have a year-round bronze to my skin and I wear sporty but not slovenly clothes. I have a hairstyle, rather than a haircut, and (let me say it before someone else does) my teeth are relatively straight.

As I walked past the two ladies, I checked myself out just to see how far I’d really come. I had a bad hair day today and I’m due for a haircut, so I’d scraped the rats tails that were my hair back in an Alice band and stuck an extra hair tie in my bag in case of a dire hair emergency. I looked at the bag slung across my shoulder. It was a hip, practical thing that Jose bought me one birthday, but on closer inspection it proved itself to be a sturdy nylon bag with multiple pockets. It went nicely though with the outfit I’d chosen that morning—comfortable three-quarter-length pants and a coordinating t-shirt.

It dawned on me then that perhaps I hadn’t actually evolved at all in my thirteen years here. There was only one way to know for sure. I looked down at my feet, clad today in a pair on Tevas. The shoes were rugged and cool, meant for leaping boulders and wading through rivers. They had natty clip-in straps and vents for draining water. There was no way I could deny it; they were very sensible sandals.