Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Travel pictures

As mentioned in the helpless story, Bloody Indians like to have items to show for money spent.

Travel is an uneasy exception. You can’t pack it into a suitcase to take back home, but you can take pictures. This is why, if Bloody Indians spend on travel, they’ll graft themselves to a camera – video or still – and document every minute. They have shots of people getting off planes and entering grey terminals. They take pictures of themselves sitting in buses. They sweep the camera over every single stop, as if searching for bugs; even at dreary rest stops that look so much like the previous one you wonder if the bus is going in circles.

You will rarely see a Bloody Indian lift up a camera and simply take a photo of a beautiful view or a monument. They will ALWAYS be a Bloody Indian posed in the picture – incontrovertible proof that “I was there”.

Sometimes, a group of Bloody Indian boys will have just one pair of sunglasses and a cap among it and they take it in turns to wear them and stand like rude Michelangelo’s Davids in front of monuments. If not standing singly, you can be assured they will have their arms tightly around each other.

Bloody Indians will do anything for a photo that impresses. They go up to stranger’s motorcycles and lean on them possessively. Sometimes they even break a biker’s cardinal rule and sit astride them. In this situation, Bloody Indians love Harley-Davidsons most of all.

I have, with my own monkey eyes, seen a fat Bloody Indian in Switzerland go up to a girl at the top of a ski slope, hustle her off her skis and then stand on them, bending over and holding the poles, posing for a picture. The poor girl stood to one side wondering whether to scream for help or just wait until it was over.

It was going to be a long wait. All his friends were in line.

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