On Sun, 10 Jun 2001, Charlie Bell wrote:
> However, I do think that, getting back to where we started, Americans abroad
> tend to be arrogant. I mainly have experience of students (lived next to or
> near Pepperdine University's London halls for 4 years...) and elderly
> tourists, but it's there. Hearing the same conversations from the American
> students in our college bar, always within a week of their arrival (twice
> yearly...) "London's so boring, we've seen everything..." OK...
>
> Cliches and stereotypes exist for a reason...
> Charlie
I've sort of been watching this debate with mounting amusement. This
whole debate has, to my mind, been a remarkable example of a dialogue of
teh deaf. I'm from Washington DC, where we deal with _lots_ of European
tourists. The United States, I point out, has more tourists visiting it
than any other country in the world. What do you think our view of
_European_ tourists is, do you think? Well, we love the British, of
course, because anyone with an upper crust British accent can get away
with _anything_ in the United States. But, outside of that, well, if I
were to amalgamate all of the stereotypes into one, it would be
"pack-traveling, fat, unwashed, smelly, lazy, arrogant,
anti-American, loud, obnoxious, ignorant, demanding, and with
bad dental work." I'm probably missing a few. I think it's remarkably,
well, European, for our European list members to be absolutely sure that
they and their countrymen are paragons of civility and virtue when they
leave the old country, while Americans are uniquely loud and obnoxious.
Let me assure them that this is not the case. So tell me, Charlie, if
cliches and stereotypes exist for a reason, what do _our_ cliches and
stereotypes say about Europeans?
A suggestion, perhaps? There are more American tourists than there are
from any other country. Why? Well, there are more Americans than there
are any other wealthy country, and more of us are wealthy enough to be
able to afford to travel than anyone else as well. This means that
American tourists are far more noticeable than those of other countries.
Since Europeans are predisposed to resent all things American _anyways_,
this only makes things worse. A second, compounding, factor may be the
fact that Americans are, I think, used to a level of efficiency that is
usually not present in the rest of the world. My parents and I travel a
lot - in Europe we have spent at least some time in, IIRC, Germany,
Austria, Italy, Switzerland, France, Great Britain, and Ireland. I loved
all of those countries in different ways, and am immensely happy that I
visited each of them. And I too have winced at the behavior of american
tourists in each of these countries, on occasion. OTOH, I have also been
embarassed by the behavior of tourists from _other_ countries in these
places - from the Japanese couple that insisted on attempting to use my
head as a tripod outside of Buckingham Palace to the Australians who
visited St. Stephans in short-shorts. And I have been nothing short of
enraged by the behavior of European tourists in the United States - ones
who barge into Church services snapping photos as if they were at the zoo,
the French who loudly proclaimed that their week in the United States had
shown them that it had no culture worth observing, the Germans who
announed (at the top of their lungs, in the National Art Gallery) that
Americans were all rude and obnoxious, the Austrians who insisted that the
Jews ran the United States, and so on. How, exactly, is that different
from the behavior that you cite, Charlie, other than that it is done by
Europeans and so is something that we colonials are just supposed to put
up with?
Gautam
