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Notes -
As someone who admittedly did something similar to the described tourist at some point in my life, the biggest difference was that I am not a particularly rich or exceptionally handsome guy, but some of the girls I could date easily were definitely the top of their societies in these aspects. (Also I am not particularly “white” to a westerner but in the third world I am. Weird dualism of being Turkish..)
People are generally accepting of class differences and its consequences in their own societies to sometimes extreme degrees. But they tend to get angry and develop some class consciousness very quickly when it’s the foreigners doing the same and disrupting the existing cultural norms. Perhaps it’s because this also bothers local elites and they are the only people whose opinions actually really count.
The great genius of American world empire compared to the previous European attempts was to avoid appointing any visible American rulers to its colonies but instead co-opt the local elites to run their own countries like colonies and share the spoils through opaque financial means.
If I'm parsing this correctly, you mean that you're not particularly wealthy in your home country, but were unusually wealthy relative to the typical standard of wealth in the countries in which you were travelling. A sort of comparative advantage?
Right now I am rather wealthy in both aspects but this is a while ago and I was just a broke backpacker back then
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