DC Etiquette #10: Tell everyone how well-traveled you are.

Of course, in a city where everyone must boast about their foreign language skills, so too must extensive traveling experience be detailed constantly as well.

A few ways to do this:
1. FACEBOOK!

Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg, for creating an interface where douchebaggery has a chance to abound. Here, not only may you now post all the foreign languages you know (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) but you can list "travel" as one of your interests. Feeling super douchey and international? Instead of writing "traveling to exotic locations where I can practice my new found foreign language skills", try writing "getting my passport stamped". Then, you leave people with the impression that you've been all over the world, when really you probably just live in Maine or northern Michigan and have gone up to Canada several times each winter (for skiing trips? colder weather? I don't honestly know where I'm going with this), and asked them to stamp your passport. Not because it's necessary, but because you want to impress your friends who are leafing through your passport the next time they're over and you "accidentally" leave it on your coffee table with your cramped passport pages.

Oh, and remember a few years ago, like 2005ish when there was some... thing... on facebook where you could put dots on a map on your profile to show all the places you traveled to? Yeah, make one of those too.


2. Ordering in a restaurant.

At a Mexican restaurant, and you once overheard an exchange in Chipotle about the frijoles being negros or... pinto? Kudos, you can now say you've been to Mexico. So go ahead and tell your waiter you want frijoles refritos with your burrito (say that in your head in a dirty mexican accent), then launch into a long talk about how beautiful you found Mexico to be (because everyone's seen that recent commercial promoting how Mexico is so beautiful it's like Hawaii. Please, we all know it's a dirty poor people country, and Hawaii is not. There, I said it.)

Another option is to act like you've forgotten that you're back in your homeland. What I mean by this, is to order something like "lemon juice". When your waiter acts confused, explain that "overseas" if you ask for "lemonade", and not "lemon juice", you'll end up with a carbonated lemon drink, and not lemonade, proper. Yes, I've actually heard this go down in public.


3. Casual conversation

After recently meeting a new "friend", I regaled him with a great story of mine: the first time I went skiing. During this epic adventure, I was reassured by a friend that I didn't need lessons, and therefore ended up careening at full speed into the lodge with my friend yelling "PIZZA!" behind me, as I went full throttle into the shins of a 35 year old man (I was 15 in the Pocono Mountains at the time). I told this story because it's hilarious. The man started swearing at me profusely, and when his girlfriend asked, "Are you okay?" I thought it was directed at me, and answered, "Oh hey yeah thanks I'm fine," setting off my new 35 year old comrade into a new swearing charade which clued me in to the fact that the question had not in fact been directed at me. After telling this story, instead of the usual response of cackling laughter trying to imagine me as a 15 year old in a puffy bright blue marshmallow coat taking out a large 35 year old man by plowing into him on my back on skis at full speed ahead, his response was, "I've been to Everest, that wasn't a mountain you were on."

Take note: Clearly I've never been to Everest, since I fell down a mountain on skis at age 15. And there's a two-for-one here, since I now know my companion is better than I am since he's been to Everest.

Take casual sidenote: We all know Everest is a "real" mountain, even if we haven't seen it. If you really want to be impressive, start claiming you've been to Olympus Mons... and that Everest can suck its dick three times over (disclaimer: a friend who is much smarter than I am pointed out what Olympus Mons is to me. I am not this well informed on the mountains of our solar system).

So basically, all I'm really saying is...

...unless you're Amelia god damned Earhart, you're not ACTUALLY a world traveler. And she even failed. So go fuck yourself, 'cause no one really cares how many passport pages you have stamped, shitdick.