Warning: this method will work only if you are white. I’m not sure if it’ll work if you are black or any other colour since it hasn’t been tested.
Have you been trying hard to stand out from the crowd, but still keep getting blended back in all the time? To get attention, you may have tried going out in the middle of winter with gaping wide rips on your jeans so that the goosebumps on your knobbly knees stick out shivering. You may have shaved off your eyebrows and drawn them back on half way up your forehead like two slugs stuck there. Sure, you’ll get people (including me) staring at you when you do things like that. But the moment you stop, you become just another face in the crowd. You see, you don’t need to try that hard. There is a very simple way to instantly stand out.
Move to Burma. 
You will definitely stick out. People will gawk at you wherever you go. And you don’t need to wear anything silly or do anything special to attract people’s attention. You can truly be yourself and be the centre of attention.
You see, if you are white, the Burmese see you as a sort of adorable alien. Imagine if you were to see a friendly creature from Mars right now. You know the alien is friendly and not going to kill you with a laser beam and he is eager to communicate. You can’t help standing there and gawking at him, can you? Soon, you would approach him and try to talk to him. You might even take selfies with him to put on Facebook.
Even though Burma (now called Myanmar) has become a lot more open over the last few years, the majority of people coming into the land are from neighbouring countries like Thailand, India and China. The Burmese see many of them every day. So, sadly, the people from those countries don’t enjoy the privilege of being gawked at. But there aren’t a lot of white visitors. So, when the Burmese see one, it’s like they’ve seen an alien! They will gawk. It’s not because they mean to be rude. They just have a gawking culture. Most people aren’t sophisticated enough to just sneak a peek from behind their tea cups.
Their gawking has certain traits to it. Their gaze will be transfixed, completely poker faced. You can’t read any emotion in it. You may even wonder if they see you at all. A simple way to test that is to just sway your head swiftly side to side and see if their eyes follow you. They will. (And you’ll get dizzy.)
My adopted English dad (I adopted him, by the way) was in Burma for 10 years. Within those years, every single day, he was gawked at wherever he went. He could be in a taxi, sitting in the passenger seat. Sometimes the taxi would be waiting at a traffic light with a crowded bus in front. All the eyes of the people who were clinging onto and spilling out of the bus would be resolutely on him. Sometimes, he waved at them out of annoyance, just to provoke a reaction. But every time, nothing. Just poker faced gawking that didn’t stop even long after the bus and the taxi had gone their separate ways. He could still see the bobbing blur of people’s heads still turned in his direction in the far distance in the crowded city of Yangon.
Most Burmese are fascinated by the sight of a white person. But they tend to be friendly and helpful if you talk to them. Just don’t make the mistake of learning a few phrases of Burmese and talking to them with a good accent. They will be flattered that you have learnt their language. But there’s another thing they’re good at: jumping to conclusions. They immediately assume you can speak Burmese well and will start talking back to you in Burmese. My adopted dad experienced this at first hand. He’d hire a taxi in immaculately phrased Burmese. All the way through the journey, the excited face of the taxi driver would be bobbing in and out of the mirror, trying to engage my dad in meaningful discussion about the government, the price of fish, and the driver’s life story. My dad would be left guessing whether to nod or shake his head in agreement or commiseration.
So what should you do, apart from nod or shake your head?
If your Burmese really isn’t very advanced, I would recommend that you just talk to people in slow broken English. They will be falling over each other to try to understand what you are saying. And they’ll most likely help you after you’ve spent a good half hour surrounded by the whole street as you try to get an answer to the most urgent question “Where’s the nearest toilet?”
So, there you go. That is a very simple way to stand out from the crowd.
Disclaimer: this method still works at the time of writing. Not guaranteed to be working in a few years’ time since the effectiveness of this method has meant more white people coming into the country. So, the Burmese might very well lose their fascination soon. Shame.