18. How Everyone Knows You're a Tourist

Travel days are always exciting for the Friend family. The day starts early and we pack up the entire apartment. After quadruple checking that we haven't left anything - not hard, we don't have much to begin with - we set off for the train station so we can get there AT LEAST an hour early. We then sit in the station trying in every way possible to connect to some type of free wifi while waiting for our platform to pop up.

Really we spend a lot of time thinking and people watching. While we are getting a lot of cultural experiences, we are mostly surrounded by tourists everywhere we go. Besides the obvious language differences, tourists are pretty easy to pick out of a crowd and here's some examples that we are very guilty of.

1. We like to match. We all have the same clothes here, shants and travel shirts. On traveling days, backpacks are added to that.

2. We take pictures of weird things. But what a cool twist on phone booths!

3. We spend too much time staring at the shelves at grocery stores trying to translate the labels.

4. We walk around looking up at all the cool buildings with our jaws dropped.

5. We walk confidently down streets that lead to this

6. We block the street and hallway for extensive amounts of time trying to get into our apartment. But who can blame us? Check out the industrial locks on these doors. Why is this normal?

7. We FREAK OUT at street stands that sell things like kürtöskalàcs chimney cake. And hold the line up to learn how to pronounce "kürtöskalàcs."

8. Hiking shoes. 

Every day.

9.  We pose with most of the monuments. 

10. We find that the most convenient place to review a map is in the middle of the street.

So there are some of the ways we stand out. There's no helping it. We will just accept it and keep trucking on with our passport holders under our shirts tucked into our pants.