Hawaii is a very traditional honeymoon destination, due to the beautiful beaches and other fascinating natural features such as volcanoes and tropical forests. But that is its problem--any common Megan, Dick or Harry can go to Hawaii, and when one is relating the fascinating tales of one's honeymoon to one's rapt social circle, one will excite neither awe nor envy. And what is the point of traveling unless you can brag about your expensive and exclusive vacation, exciting others' envy and resentment? It's like a sundae without the cherry and whipped cream! Let the hoi polloi go to Hawaii--McArdle and P. Suderman deserve better by virtue of their superior birth.
On to Turkey, then! But alas, Turkey, while exotic and adventurous, is, well, full of inferior people who don't even speak English or understand the superiority of the American Way of Life. Will they have Himalayan Rock Salt? Will the maids turn down her bed and leave a mint on the pillow while modestly keeping their eyes downturned as a recognition of their fiscal inferiority? Can you stiff your waiters while telling yourself that you're going galt for their own good? It's one unknown after the other.
True, you can haggle the natives down while shopping, carefully calculating their degree of poverty to gauge how little you can pay them. (Hint--buy rugs at a shop where the proprietor has lots of little kiddies running around. He might be more desperate.) Since the acquisition of possessions is the main goal in life and the only gauge of its quality, the shopping might make up for all the stupid historical sites and Islamic influence.
I have a better suggestion, of course.
Come to beautiful Baghdad!
It's very close to Turkey but without all its boring archaeological sites. Sure, they preserved our mutual human history for centuries, history that told us how civilizations rose and fell and gave us the origin of our religions, priceless, utterly irreplaceable means of increasing the total of human knowledge, the most exalted goal of mankind. But now they are gone, having made way for American bases and battlefields, so McArdle need not be concerned with them. Unlike Turkey, everything is privatized on the American bases, and she can rest assured that Halliburton and KRB will take very, very good free market care of her.
Some might hesitate to honeymoon in Iraq because of its infrastructure and violence, but McArdle knows better. She says that the the country is better off than before Saddam Hussein was executed, and quite safe. Best of all, she can visit our troops in person to show her support for all they have sacrificed for her, for their own good.
By the way, I still haven't received my invitation to the wedding, hint hint.
Aren't they saving to buy a house? They should spend two nights in a B&B in colonial Williamsburg.
ReplyDeleteLovely to see the pages of the Atlantic reduced to a spoilt yuppie soliciting for honeymoon advice.
ReplyDeleteYes, they're saving to buy a house because the fall of the stock market took out half of McArdle's saving.
ReplyDeleteCP, I"m just surprised she didn't want to go to somewhere with a thriving organ market.
I liked in the comments where she said no to the Carribean because it's June & hurricane season.
ReplyDeleteHow can Megan be so clueless on so many subjects?
(That was odd - somehow my first attempt at a comment ended up at a post on my [dead] blog)
Heh. No doubt some New York Times article said that you should not book your honeymoon there during the summer, and that was that. We get most of our bad hurricane weather in late summer, especially September.
ReplyDeleteShe could look it up but then she'd have to make her own decision instead of letting an "expert" tell her what to think.
KBR, just for the record.
ReplyDeleteI think Baghdad is a great idea for them. Without body armor, of course.
Bet on Iraq!
ReplyDelete"I"m just surprised she didn't want to go to somewhere with a thriving organ market."
ReplyDeleteNow THAT's something to register for. "Contribute a kidney--you'll still have one!--and we'll do the rest: sell it on the open (or black--thanks for nothing, blinkered socialist medical ethics codes) market, collect the fee, and we promise to spend every penny on the honeymoon. Spleens welcome too!"
Of course, it only took about an hour for one of her commenters to make a xenophobic comment.
ReplyDelete