Which do you think would be more important when going to a new place: being able to understand and speak the language like a native, knowing the customs and practices of the place, or understanding the streets like somebody who has lived there for decades?
edit: as somebody described it, it’s language vs customs vs lay of the land
Plus, people will generally cut foreigners some slack for not knowing local customs. Hell, some black men used this fact to escape some of the effects of segregation in the Jim Crow era. A black American traveling through the South would be expected to accept discriminatory treatment. But foreigners were seen as exempt from these rules. Some black men would wear turbans while traveling through the South, pretending to be Indian and thus outside of the South’s racial caste system.