Texas Size 11 wrote:The Annoyed Man wrote:lkd wrote:Nobody should go to another foreign country and expect them to conform to your culture, but Americans are not the only ones to behave in such a manner, I assure you.
Actually, throughout much of Europe, Americans are regarded as brash and unsophisticated, but largely harmless and well-meaning. The French though, outside of France, are genuinely loathed for being truly culturally arrogant. Americans are viewed as being culturally ignorant but eager to learn, rather than culturally arrogant as are the French.
One of my cousins is British and his wife is Italian. They live just north of London and this is about what they tell me. His wife always wants to ask questions about Americans because she cannot understand our mannerisms when abroad or when she visits us in the States. All in all, they like us despite our short-comigns and she really likes some of our cliches and trying to speak in an American accent.
Now, don't let either of them get started on the French. They are not too fond of them and their arrogance.
When I was 18, we went back to France for a summer vacation. Since my parents were both university professors who didn't work during the summer, and since my mother's side of the family still lives there, we were able to stay in my grandparents' homes in Paris and in Courçay - a tiny village in Touraine about 20 klicks east of Tours, right on the Loire river. During the month of July, my parents and my aunt went down to the Greek Islands and played around down there, while my two younger brothers and I took the entire month to tour a large part of France on bicycles. That's another story in itself.
In any case, my dad had a naturally olive skinned complexion, and when he tanned, he got darker than a chestnut. The three of them were visiting the ruins at Delphi, and my dad was resting on an ancient stone wall outside the entrance to the ruins while my mother and aunt were off exploring something. Now Dad is wearing a baggy old pair of brown corduroy pants, a very rustic old French fisherman's shirt, and one of those navy blue Greek sailor caps. In short, he looked like Zorba the colorful Greek local; and he's just sitting there, enjoying the sun and watching people walk by when a busload of French tourists drives up.
This guy and his wife pop out, and they see my dad sitting on that wall, and the husband tells his wife, "go sit next to that old [derogatory French expletive for "peasant"] on the wall there and I'll take your picture together. (Now, it should be noted that
inside France's borders, that term for "peasant" would never be used because "Paysan" is an honorable life.) So this bourgeois matron plops her smug self-satisfied butt down on the wall next to my dad - never thinking to
ask if it was OK to have her picture taken with him. What neither she nor her husband know is that my dad is married to a French woman, and he is 100% fluent in French. So he just smiles and nods at her, and waits until the exact moment that her husband takes the picture - at which point he says under his breath in flawless French so that only she can hear it, "Better to be a peasant than a [substitute expletive having to do with an oedipal act]," just as her husband catchers her dismayed gasp on film.
It was perfect. She jumps up and scuttles off while her husband scolds my dad for being rude to his wife, without a thought for how rude he had just been to my dad. My dad used to just smile serenely when he told that story.
THAT is how the French are often perceived as tourists by the rest of Europe.
