Wish I'd said that - December 4, 2020

“Tourism was the source of history’s original failure of cultural understanding. Cyril Aldred writes that ancient Greek and Roman vacationers in Egypt ‘never really understood Egyptian religion and were inclined to see in inexplicable acts and beliefs a more profound significance than actually existed.’ Thus the concept of the ‘inscrutable Orient,’ the idea of the ‘mysterious East.’”

P.J. O’Rourke in The Atlantic Monthly September 2002