Today, my wife was mistaken for a Muslim.

[lexington filly]

85. I'm a Kentuckian who isn't a racial or religious bigot but

I've got a different frame of reference as to what the people you saw may have been thinking. As a kid I grew up in a small town where you were able to walk most everywhere. Sometimes I saw "The Nuns." As a Methodist, they seemed "other" and though I was taught my manners, I would sneakily stare at them when I thought they wouldn't notice. To me, their habits seemed like costumes, barriers between us as people, and I was quite curious about them because they were foreign to my personal experience of how females dress. Actually I had no negative or positive thoughts about them other than on a hot day when I, dressed in shorts, thought they must be suffocating. Compassion isn't a bad thing. So their religion seemed strange to me as a kid, when they dressed like that with their services in a foreign language that was dead, Latin.
Today, when I see a teen with her hair dyed purple or green, I look out of curiosity but then they do that not because they're trying to avoid attention. And I envy them a bit because I would never have had their self-confidence to do that when I was their ages.
Our ears and eyes are drawn to the stuff that isn't white noise in our daily lives And we can only guess as to what others are thinking at any given time based upon our very personal frames of reference.