Many people travel to see foreign places and people. Which of course means that foreign people get to see them and therefore the observer becomes the observed.

On a side note, it was instructional to be in a country that didn’t use Roman script on road signs (or just about anywhere else). The situation helped me understand what it’s like to be completely illiterate. I’ve been to plenty of places that don’t speak English but they tended to use Roman script (even in places like Japan and Morocco) so I still found it easy to get around using maps. What wake up call I got in Bangkok, when I was trying to use a map that was in English to give a address to a Thai cab driver by pointing to the map and he couldn’t read Roman script and I couldn’t make sense of his map in Thai script. From that situation onward, I’d ask hotel staff to write out my destinations in Thai script.