The Outraged Foreigner
They ripped me off! How dare they rip me off! These savages. Will tell you anything to extract a buck out of you. Authentically hand-carved. 100% local materials. Woven by the fingers of grandmothers and small children in mud huts with no ventilation.
He has the same as me! The exact same! God dammit, and I thought I was the only one with access to that door into their culture. I thought my key was unique, that I had somehow uttered the pass-code and, like doormen, they had stepped aside and with a sweeping gesture invited me into the secret tunnels and dark woven passages that they have been chipping away at painstakingly for centuries.
And he paid less! Those thieving bastards, providing me with a cheap imitation of something invaluable and inventing a value for it. All I wanted was that it was something that had been toiled over for hours. All I wanted was that it be an artefact, a physical manifestation of the complexities of their people, of their history, of their belief systems. All I wanted it to be was a beautiful, stylised abstraction of their oppression, with colours that would look good if it were hung from a hook in the study or placed on the mantelpiece above the television.
And all I wanted was a fair price for that, something that wouldn’t break my budget, because this hotel is expensive and, after all, money doesn’t grow on trees.
