All of the photos above come from the hilarious site: http://www.peopleofwalmart.com And these are NOT the most outrageous. Not by a long shot.
All of the photos above come from the hilarious site: http://www.peopleofwalmart.com And these are NOT the most outrageous. Not by a long shot.
I've only recently discovered people shopping at Walmart photos on the internet...mostly they appear in emails sent from a friend inthe UK who has received the emails from friends in the US. Fascinating aren't they?
ReplyDeleteI just love the comment in the newspaper clip
:-))
It is more fascinating if you weren't born there. I just find it rather embarrassing. But it does answer the question how some politicians get elected year after year.
ReplyDeleteI recall when I was a easily-mortified teen, my mother wearing what she called a Mu-mu. It was a long flowing caftan, staggeringly brilliant colors. Still, she did have the taste to wear it only around the house and not out in public. Looking at the pictures on that site, that Mo-mo would look positively elegant.
When my wife first went to the Midwest, she turned and asked why so many of the elderly women like to wear pale pink jogging suits.
Yes I guess it is more fascinating to the outsider. But when I first saw photos I thought they had to be staged...that people surely didn't go out shopping dressed like this! We have our embarrassing dressers in the UK of course...I suppose every country does, but I've never seen anything quite like the Walmart shoppers!
ReplyDeleteIt's like they are all going to some really tacky fancy dress party.
ReplyDeleteHeh, they weren't kidding when they called it the land of the free and the home of the brave. Nomad, actually, I rather liked this aspect of your country when I was living there. It is liberating to be a foreigner over in the US where you can get away with a lot and don't have to worry about your mom either dressing weird or seeing you wear odd-looking cheap stuff. I still whine about how I -- instinctively -- left the purple shorts I had (a hand me down from a former GF) over there when I moved back here. I was just mumbling grumpy stuff about how I felt I had to change out of my perfectly fine pair of 'home' jeans with a nickel-sized hole (cigarette burn?) at the thigh just to go to the grocery store -- the thought wouldn't have even occurred to me in the US. We got suffocating neighbourhood pressure here, I'm telling you.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if it works the same way for foreigners living here. Stranger makes a point of being a stranger but not exactly from a positive/liberating POV.
Bulent, I suppose you have a point about conformity and social pressure but there should be some kind of balance. It's all about knowing what you can get away with. Knowing the difference between daring or interesting or relaxed and just trashy, silly and revolting requires a bit of taste. That's all.
ReplyDeleteTaking a look at the site I linked to, you can see a lot of people are wearing things that aren't even covering their bits. Not only is it like recess at elementary level clown school but add rampant obesity, over processed hair and you have a whole mess of ugly.
I think of it as individuality gone totally mad.
I suspect a lot of those Wal-Mart folks are prostitutes stopping off for a few things after work. Or insane people. Prostitutes and insane people deserve great deals on pencils and leg wax, too. :)
ReplyDelete@Buülent, in some ways being a foreigner here was much more liberating in the first few years I was here. Maybe because a lot of foreigners here are a bit, um, off, shall we say? Blending in with the foreigner culture was easy and fun and involved a lot of alcohol.
But then the yabancı bubble around my head started to grow thin as I began to understand more Turkish and more about the culture. Then I became aware of just how wrong I was being, and that in some ways, it was just sort of spoilt, rude, and imperious to behave in certain ways, as though I expected the whole country to conform to my way (which a lot of Westerners seem to do, especially the new arrivals who feel compelled to patiently explain to the locals how much better everything is done at home) instead of the other way around. Also I'm very ego-permeable and I just got tired of getting stared at or treated poorly. Or given special treatment, for that matter.
And while I think there are some aspects of Turkey that could do with a bit of modernization, I don't feel a strong need to go around upsetting people. At least not all the time.
Unless they're my in-laws, and to a lesser extent, my husband. I think they could all stand to do a bit more bending my way. That's why I wear my jeans with the hole in the back pocket over there as often as I can get away with, and have refused every offer to wear terlik for the last 7 years. They hate that.