#so that they could do touristy stuff while stationed in europe with a baby/toddler without being hated by everyone around them

[surrexi]

so my dad had a 30-year career in the (united states) air force, and we moved several times while i was growing up. from when i was in 4th grade through 7th grade (so about age 9 to 13), we were living in hawaii. dad was stationed at hickam afb, on the island of oahu. we were able to take a few short trips to the island of maui over the four years we lived there. on one of those trips, when i would have been around 11/12 (i can't remember now), i was allowed to wander away from my parents as long as i stayed relatively close and checked in periodically. so we were wandering around some beautiful tourist overlook somewhere in the mountains on maui and i was separated from my parents. a woman who i remember as looking older than my parents (who would've been in their mid-late 30s at the time) but not, like, old, struck up a conversation with me. it probably started with, like, "child, where are your parents" and then i, who as a child was always very good at interacting with adults, probably pointed them out with a pleasant smile or something, and thus reassured that i wasn't lost, she starts making idle conversation about tourist things like where she was vacationing from and asked me where we were from.

so i'm like "oh, we live on oahu"

and this grown-ass adult american woman deadass looked at me and goes "oh! are there very many americans where you live?"

to this day my mother is proud that despite the fact that neither she nor my dad were there to keep me from laughing in this woman's face, i managed to very calmly and neutrally tell her that, uh, we lived on base so all our neighbors were also military! and then i also managed to not cringe when she acted like that was a huge relief!

i did fairly quickly disengage from the conversation and run to tell my parents about the woman who apparently hadn't realised that she did not have to show her passport upon arriving in our nation's fiftieth state.

anyway that's the story of how at roughly 11 years old i learned to never underestimate the sheer obliviousness of my fellow americans.