Any decent, well-mannered American who travels abroad probably crosses paths with a Stars-and-Stripes Stereotype now and then: a fellow American on holiday making an ass of themselves. I once saw an American guy shaking with rage at an airport counter in Charles De Gaulle. All our flights had been upended by a transport strike, and he was DEMANDING that he be seated in business class, as per his original ticket. “I am an AMERICAN and we don’t care about your little SOCIALIST COUNTRY,” he said. “I have RIGHTS as a CUSTOMER.”
There are the idiots, like the woman I heard insisting that the place we were both visiting—Conwy Castle, in Wales—was a copy of the original, because there was no way the original would still be standing, as “no buildings last more than 400 years.” There are also the people visiting small towns where English isn’t spoken trying to communicate with locals by speaking English LOUDLY AND SLOWLY. (And in the interest of fairness, I’ll note that I’ve also seen a lot of similar behaviour from Brits in Europe. Must be something about faded empires run by white guys.)
These people are all pikers compared to our heinous douchecanoe of a vice president. Per the Times of London, “JD Vance and His Forty 4x4s Visit the Vatican During Trip to Rome” (that’s an archive.is link; there’s no paywall):
A trip to the Sistine Chapel is near the top of the bucket list for most Americans making their first trip to Rome. Few visitors are able to do so in such grand style as JD Vance, who turned up at the Vatican on Saturday aboard a traffic-clogging motorcade of 40 black 4x4s. . . .
He was accompanied to the Vatican by his wife, Usha, and their three young children. The second family was then given a private tour of the Sistine Chapel.
Later Usha enjoyed an evening visit to the Colosseum — which her husband had also been scheduled to attend before a last-minute change of plan — where she was given a personal tour of the arena, famous for its gladiatorial combats and naval battles, by Alfonsina Russo, the director.
Lesser mortals unlucky enough to have booked their own visit had to make do with a refund — but not all of them had got the message. There were chaotic scenes as some would-be visitors tried to open the gates surrounding the building, while others climbed over the fences, ticket in hand, trying to force their way in. Some chanted “shame” or anti-American slogans when they learnt the reason for the closure, Italian media reported.
Among the disappointed was Stephen Fishler, 58, a businessman from New York who arrived with his family in good time for his 6pm slot, but was turned away without explanation. “What does he think he is, special?” complained Fishler, himself a Trump voter. “JD should have waited until the Americans who had tickets had their visit and then gone in.” His wife, Anila, tried to calm him down and blamed the Italians.
Screw tourists from any other country, obviously: the Americans deserved special treatment.
I despair. Open thread, though I hope those of you who have visited or lived abroad will vent about the idiot American tourists you’ve encountered.
JDM
You know the Italians stole my homework that one time too.
Then there was the time the Italian bicycle team threw a tire pump in my spokes and knocked me off my bike when all I wanted to do is ride with them.
And now they made me vote for Vance.
Scout211
I had to click through to the article (thanks for the web archive version!) because I could not believe that he had an entourage of 40 4x4s drive with him into the Vatican. WTF?
If it makes you feel any better, JD Vance treats most Americans that way, too.
Suzanne
I meet idiot American tourists in America, too. One yesterday, who caused yet another delay in my travel plans, by being “unruly” on the flight immediately preceding mine. Trashed the plane, had to be removed from the plane by police. Spent four more hours in O’Hare than I wanted.
I will note that the “Instagram Influencer” tourist is an incredibly annoying sub-species. I thought that person was only, or at least mainly, American….. but I was so wrong! They are FULLY GLOBALIZED!
Rose Judson
@JDM: The Italians made my cake fall in the middle!
(Technically 50% true, as I’m 50% Italian.)
Baud
The leopards
ate your facetook your spot.Gin & Tonic
Among the worst I’ve encountered were pasty, doughy, upper middle-aged American guys in Kyiv obviously shopping for a hot young Ukrainian girl. Not because they were overtly loud or obnoxious, but because I knew why they were there.
Baud
I actually haven’t come across any memorable asshole tourists.
Jacalyn Royce
I was lucky enough to be recognized as a well-behaved human being by restaurant owners in rural France. On 3 different occasions, an owner kept my secret while other American or British jerks treated the restaurant staff like crap. One time I was able to repay the favor by surprisingly answering a question asked in very bad French by the nastiest British person ever, saying “Yes, but why not POLITELY and SIMPLY stop treating the staff like SHIT?”
bbleh
I hereby propose that JD be introduced at all future official functions as “His Heinous Douchecanoe.” It’s got about the right number of syllables and sufficiently obscure words as to sound pompous, and it’s just so … fitting.
Definitely have found two subspecies of American tourists on our visits. The ones we try to emulate are polite, unassuming, and usually drop hints early on that “no, we’re not that kind.” The others … we try to avoid.
emjayay
I guess I’m lucky that I haven’t been around a lot of boorish Americans in other countries. One time at breakfast in London an American family was at the table next to me and I did want to tell them to shut the eff up with their annoying American accents though.
I work in places in the US with lots of international tourists. The only people who have ever just started talking to me in their language like everyone should naturally understand it were several older French men at different times.
We are lucky that between the British empire, BBC, WWII and occuptation after that, American movies etc. that English has become the international language. Even In Japan most the signs (including the panel on buses showing upcoming stops) are also in English.
Younger Germans today typically throw not just English words but entire English phrases in conversation all the time. Other than with maybe older people in the East you really have no need to ever speak German there.
Rose Judson
@Jacalyn Royce: I hear a LOT of Brits complaining about having to wait in longer lines in EU airports. Can’t think why that’s happened to you, mate.
@Suzanne: Bonus time in O’Hare is never truly a bonus. And yes, the influencers are terrible!
thalarctosMaritimus
I was doing a postdoc in Cambridgeshire in 2010, and when the US was playing England in that World Cup, my British colleagues invited me to their pub in Cambridge to watch the match.
While I was ordering, some American tourists overheard my US accent, and invited me to join their table. I thanked them, but told him I was sitting with friends and excused myself.
The match started out with playing the “Star-Spangled Banner”, as the anthem of the visiting team, and the Americans in the pub sang along with it raucously. Nothing particularly wrong with that. But then, the band launched into the British national anthem, “God save the Queen“, and the Americans – thinking it was a totally different song – began singing “My country, ‘tis of thee“ loud and raucously.
I just silently mouthed, “Americans—what can you do?” at my British friends, and pretended I was a local.
Matt McIrvin
The worst ones I’ve seen were British, fellow passengers on a cruise that got diverted by a dockworkers’ strike from Corsica to Menorca. It was a lovely visit to a charming place we hadn’t expected to be at all, despite some light drizzle. They somehow arranged a bus tour of the island at the last minute… and these people spent the whole time berating the bus tour operators about how they might miss their dinner slot at the captain’s table. Get a grip! Nobody they were yelling at could do anything about the situation.
ThresherK
We didn’t put Vance in a Graft & Stift and pray for Gavrilo Princip to show up?
Bulgakov
Since my wife (Belgian) & I (KC area) have been married for 30+ years and travelled frequently to visit in-laws when the kids were younger we have plenty of bad American tourist tales. The most memorable was when we were strolling down the Rue de Bouchers in Brussels (to observe, not to eat, there are plenty of better places in Brussels to eat than that tourist strip) and heard a loud, beehive-headed, blond woman with a Texas drawl berating the waiter about her dish. She was complaining about being served “raw hamburger” without a bun as the waiter tried to explain that she ordered “Filet Americain”. “Exactly”, she yelled, “in America we cook ground beef.”
Steve in the ATL
@Baud: if you’re at a poker table and you can’t tell who the mark is…
Harrison Wesley
When I was in high school one of my fellow students told me about being in a store in Rome when an American tourist asked the sales person “How much is that in real money?”
Old Dan and Little Ann
My wife and I were having a medieval dinner at Bunratty Castle back in 98. It was my first full night ever in Europe and there was this loud mouth freaking lady sitting near us pissing me off about everything. She was from Missouri. I blocked the specifics from memory. That same week we were listening to an Irish talk show and they were lamenting about how fucked up America is. James Byrd Jr. had been dragged behind a pick up truck in Texas and killed by 3 racist scum. 1st time in Ireland and I was embarrassed to be an American.
Rusty
On my expat assignment from 2005-09 we lived in England and traveled a reasonable amount to the rest of Europe as budget and having three (and we added a fourth while there) would allow. Europe overall was really kind as we traveled with children. At passport control they would jump us to shorter lines, restaurants would be extra friendly, and the craziest was waiting in a long line for the Lourve to open, a member of the museum staff keeping everyone orderly pulled us out of line and had us go to a different place for immediate admission. The UK was actually least accommodating to families (but even there, at Heathrow we frequently were directed to the flight crew passport line). We ran into a few ugly Americans over our time, ut mostly remember the kindness across Europe toward us and our family.
scav
Two ladies in Skansen, Stockholm, observing a perfectly ordinary man (if in costume) making perfectly ordinary cookies. Perfect New Yawk squawk, at volume. “Look Mabel! He’s doing it!”
The Audacity of Krope
Makes sense from someone who voted to support an individual promising to screw the rest of the world, supposedly on our behalf.
prostratedragon
What the hell is wrong with people? There have been PsOTUS who altered travel plans because they know what an imposition their security can be on hosts.
Suzanne
@Rose Judson: Due to weather, O’Hare did a full ground stop due to a storm yesterday. So my first flight was delayed at point of departure — which they announced just as we were about to pull out of the gate. Five minutes later, they announced that the stop was extended, so they let us off the plane for about another hour. Then, once we actually got to Chicago, the airport was (as expected) a disaster. I had missed my connection, so I got rebooked on the next flight. Got something to eat, went to the gate…… hung out until I realized there was no one else there and they had changed the gate without an announcement. Went to the new gate, and the storm had apparently damaged the roof in that area, so there were all these buckets all over, catching roof leaks, and very little space to sit. Then the drama and arrest of the plane-trasher, which resulted in a need for a special cleaning crew to come out to clean the plane. So. I was very much at my maximum capacity for bullshit yesterday.
Toeless Flenser
Not to defend Vance, but the wife & I were at Stonehenge when Obama was offered an impromptu visit. We all got kicked out, not even offered a refund. We’re lifelong Dems, but it did become a joke among us to have our own “thanks, Obama”moment. It’s just a thing that happens with world leaders. JD is still a massive choad.
Richard Fox
There are some douchecanoes that are inculcated from the moment they open their eyes. Then there’s a whole tribe of people that have it in their DNA. The modern Republican MAGA voter is the latter. Vance suits this age of the DNA polluted douchecanoe perfectly. I believe there’s going to be a backlash. Always is. They die off in plagues or by guillotine, but always at great cost to the folk around them. That’s the hard part.
evodevo
Been to Conwy – stayed there overnight in a “quaint” hotel up the hill from the castle. Loved it, walked all around the castle admiring the stone tracery in the wall/window in one place.
I really haven’t run into very many ugly americans on our trips. Back in the 90’s, the Japanese tourists were the ones to watch out for. My sister and I were squashed up against a wall in a narrow Pompeii passage by a bunch of them trying to get ahead of us. Didn’t hear any “excuse me’s” (sumimasen) either.
Grover Gardner
I myself was a bad tourist a few years ago. We were looking for a certain metro stop in Paris and I spotted the owner of a fruit shop standing in front of his store. I walked up to him and asked, “Ou est le metro?” He stared at me for a moment, then very pointedly said, “BONJOUR, monsieur.” It took me a moment to twig, then I said, “Excusez-moi. Bonjour!” We shook hands and then he pointed to the subway entrance catty-corner from his store.
cain
lol – “Breaking Away” movie reference?
NotMax
Obligatory?
:)
AM in NC
I lived in London for a year right after college, and then a fellow American friend and I traveled on the continent for a few months. We frequently kept silent in the face of other ugly Americans we witnessed. The group of college students from Chicago being drunk, loud and obnoxious on the Tube; the group of young men drunk, loud and obnoxious (to the point of breaking shit) at a biergarten in Germany; the older (60s or 70s) woman in the Sistine Chapel complaining that nothing was written in English and loudly, repeatedly asking in a very NY accent, “wheas Mozes?
We felt that it was our job to be goodwill ambassadors, and made a point of learning at least tourist phrases for every country we visited. We had passable French and Spanish between us to begin with. Had a lovely interaction on Crete when we wished a grandma “Kalispera”, as we walked by while she was sweeping, and she broke into a big grin and we gestured and smiled for a small bit of “conversation”.
Why be an asshole? Like, truly, why be an asshole?
AM in NC
@JDM: I love you for the Breaking Away reference!
cain
@AM in NC:
lol – I thought the brits were really good at being loud, drunk, and obnoxious. :) I mean their hooliganism was known EU wide at futbol games.
Of course, it seems a lot of that shit rubbed off on us as a former colony.
montanareddog
@Bulgakov:
I witnessed similar linguistic confusion when I lived in Paris but it was quite charming. The American on the next table was served Tartare de Boeuf which, I guess, he had ordered because he recognised that it meant beef. I will never forget the totally-perplexed look on his face when he was served raw hamburger with a raw egg on top, and the polite but world-weary explanation of the waiter.
And I once had lunch with an English visitor who perused the menu and said “Agneau? That’s lamb, isn’t it? I love lamb”. As I am not a cruel person, I explained that it was cervelles d’agneau and lamb brains was probably not what he was looking for.
Not angry tourist stories but I hope they fit the thread.
The Audacity of Krope
Some people are simply entitled to have everything go smoothly their way and entitled to harass anyone telling them no or wait or, god forbid, be respectful.
prostratedragon
@NotMax: What an assemblage of a cast. Two of each kind or something.
Steve in the ATL
@Old Dan and Little Ann: we did that aw well and it was great fun! Especially since we were selected as lord and lady and presided over our minions.
I had not thought much about it until a couple of years ago when I bought some store-brand “honey” flavored cough syrup at a Meijer in shithole Michigan. “Oh yeah—now I remember how awful mead tasted!”
montanareddog
@evodevo: a friend who is cabin crew for a European airline told me that it is Israeli and Russian tourists who are the most obnoxious and entitled nowadays.
Old Dan and Little Ann
@Steve in the ATL: Do your snort the snuff? WTF?!?
Joy in FL
Since this is an open thread– in some posts recently, Bookshop.org has been mentioned. This weekend they are having free shipping in honor of Indie Bookstore Day. … in case anyone wants to buy books and support local bookstores and get free shipping. I’m off to order a couple books now.
I like this thread. One time I was in Trafalgar Square in London and some other tourists asked me where the Strand was. I was thrilled to be taken for a Londoner, but I had to say that I did not know where the Strand was. Shortly after, I continued my wander around that part of London, and I was amazed to see that the Strand was about 50 feet from where I had been standing when I was asked its location.
The next year, I was in London again, and in Trafalgar again, and again, thrilled to be taken for a Londoner by other tourists, who asked the same question. And this time, I knew where to direct them. Those of you who know London, know that the Strand goes right to Trafalgar Square. I just love London. and England. and Europe. I loved learning my way around cities that I got return to, like London and Paris.
mrmoshpotato
OT – oh this is good!
Huffington Post – Website For MAGA-Friendly Businesses Backfires As People Use It For Boycotts
Steve LaBonne
During our visit to Paris in 2018 we had lunch in a little café in the Marais which had a display of “Fuck Donald” T-shirts (I am still kicking myself for not buying one). We had an enjoyable chat with the owner, who told us a funny story about an American couple who left a very huffy note on their table about “disrespecting our President”. We heartily encouraged him to continue pissing off such idiots.
rekoob
Lived in German-speaking Europe from 1986-1990. At first, I was embarrassed that I didn’t speak German, but I picked it up surprisingly quickly and then I became embarrassed by my fellow Americans and their inability to speak the local language or even try to engage with the culture. On occasion, if someone was struggling, I’d translate/explain to make it easier, but then I realized that I was intervening on “their” tourist experience. I tried to stay out of it and be a local unless it was an emergency.
scav
@montanareddog: I’ll throw these in. Not bad tourists, just tourists wrestling with language. Both involve my poor mother.
Last night in Venice, indulging in a treat of actual prosecco on a sidewalk just a civilized distance off San Marcos. She orders a glass of Prosciutto.
Sunny day at a picnic table in Lagrasse, south of France, Ice cream the treat this time. Poivre (pepper), Poivron (red peppers), then Poireau (leeks) on the way to Poire (pear).
Both waiters loved her. That is very much a cooking dialect she speaks.
mrmoshpotato
@bbleh:
Yes!
The Audacity of Krope
A little too lofty…
mrmoshpotato
@Rose Judson:
Haha, I think that applies to every airport.
Phylllis
Not Europe, Hawaii. Had the great fortune to travel there in 1996, and the misfortune to travel with a group of ladies who put the ‘p’ in provincial. They complained about the cost of the breakfast buffet at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. I pointed out there was a terrific little diner across the street where I’d had breakfast that morning for about what I’d pay back home. They were appalled that I had ventured out to the place by leaving the hotel compound alone. Also complained about the menu at the traditional luau hosted by the hotel. I, of course, was unhinging my jaw to stuff more roasted pork in at the time. Also heard ‘back in the US’ at least 2-3 times.
Andrew Abshier
In Paris, I got on the Metro at one end of the car. In the middle was a group of Americans talking loudly with an Englishman. From what I could hear of the conversation (there was no missing it) the Englishman lived in Paris, so he was answering questions from the Americans. The French don’t talk on the Metro, and definitely not to strangers, so the loudness was jarring. Finally the Americans got off the Metro. As soon as the doors closed, the Englishman did a massive eye roll and the French who saw that were laughing. I was at my end of the car, acting as French as possible through all this.
Story #2: I was in the San José Costa Rica airport waiting for my flight home. Costa Rica grows some of the best coffee beans in the world, and one of the airport vendors was selling coffee brewed from Costa Rican coffee beans. You could walk up and order a cup, no line. Guess where the Americans were lined up? The other coffee vendor: Starbuck’s!
jonas
I don’t know if this is more in the “obnoxious” as opposed to “aggressively clueless” American tourist category, but I was in a museum in Florence Italy years ago and a pair of older American ladies were nearby looking at a beautiful medieval panel painting, talking rather loudly, and admiring how fresh and bright it looked despite being 500 years old. “Oh my!” one of them remarked, “it’s like it was painted yesterday!” as she reached out with her finger and poked the surface. A guard in the corner leapt up and ran over yelling in Ital-glish at them, “No tocce the painting!! Never tocce!” I think he scared the bejeezus out of them because they both sort of shrieked and took off into the next gallery.
Steve LaBonne
@mrmoshpotato: I think he should be introduced by his full name, Venereal Disease Jance.
Gretchen
When my sister and I visited London, we took the Eurostar to Paris. During the trip, a man approached us and started speaking French. We were thrilled that he mistook our not-particularly-elegant selves for Frenchwomen.
montanareddog
@scav: God bless your mother. I am sure the waiters did love her for trying and failing so amusingly.
Biggest linguistic trap in the French language is, of course, baiser.
Best not to understress the un in veux-tu un baiser.
HopefullyNotcassandra
I hung my head watching Americans (proto-MAGa) red faced and screaming. They had just jumped the line on a very hot summer day. Confronted by local police, they yelled about how they had paid for this tour, it was too damn hot and they deserved to go before all of us in line, since we were clearly “dirty, stinking foreigners”. This was in Greece. They were allowed to cut the line and enter.
JD Vance still wins as the more ugly American though. He demanded a public audience with a beloved, ill pope and that pope died. It does not get much uglier.
Our president is trying his best, to surpass that ugliness by blaming murdered Ukrainian men, women and children for their audacity in daring to be born in a country Vladimir wished to steal.
Andrew Abshier
Oh wait, story #3! We were in Cancún one year when I was married. We saw a couple walking along with the guy carrying a bucket of Budweisers. Buds weren’t all that available in Cancún that I saw (my wife and I were happy drinking Mexican beers) but the woman kept going on and on about, “why do we have to drink the funny Two-X beer?” in the whiniest American voice possible. I’m guessing her man (husband/BF/whatever) busted a gut to find the Buds and this was the “gratitude” he got.
The Audacity of Krope
Foreign to whom?
Apparently America owns the whole world. Others only live in it as we give them leave to do so.
Nettoyeur
We have spent something like 15 years working outside the US, in the USSR (bad old days), Japan, France, Australia, Germany. We speak fluent French and Russian, enough German for daily life, and survival Japanese. My wife also spent her teenage years in Paris. We cannot understand how some Americans manage to go and live in non English speaking countries for months and never learn enough of the local language to order in a restaurant. We are going to France for 3 weeks in June. I think we will tell people we are Australian (we are US-Oz dual citizens).
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Scout211: the “freedom” these folks appear to seek is the freedom to despise their neighbors because they despise themselves?
I remain unsure. I can say whatever MAGA is, there is zero Good News in it.
The Audacity of Krope
@Nettoyeur: I can get through my haircut in Spanish, but that’s in Boston.
Andrew Abshier
@Nettoyeur: I’m one of those who wants to learn the language for where I’m going. I’ve learned Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese because I wanted to learn a lot more than just the courtesies and survival phrases. I’ll admit I’m a lot more hardcore than most, but it is so worth it–having language ability is like opening up a new world, as I’m sure you have found.
mrmoshpotato
@Steve LaBonne: LOL! Very nice.
Steve in the ATL
@Gretchen: had a man in Prague start speaking to me in French, for reasons unknown. Luckily I was able to respond, “bien sûr—je deteste Omnes aussi!”
Hadn’t occurred to me until I read your post that he may have thought I was a Frenchwoman….
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Suzanne: I wonder since the nastiness in planes has surged if it is some combo of the increase in turbulence in air travel (caused by climate change), fear of flying and MAGA-me! Me! Me-ism causing it. It could just be ugly Americans, of course.
It would help if airlines would ban alcohol sales on flights and gave us more space in coach. Rationality and unregulated capitalism dance poorly together, though.
Princess
When I was in my twenties and traveling cheap I have to say the Americans in similar circumstances were all very nice and thoughtful. Now I’m old, there is one kind of American tourist that drives me bats and it’s a me thing not a them thing — I often run into Americans who think that because they’re there and you’re there (and they assume I’m American at first blush) that I’m going to want to talk to them, chatty chat in a shared table at a restaurant or in a train car, and not for a few minutes — a really long yet necessarily superficial conversation. Why do people travel ifthey’re going to get so excited when they encounter someone with the same passport?
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Gin & Tonic: the Chuck Norris syndrome.
Steve in the ATL
@Nettoyeur: “je…voudrais…un…Big Mac”
scav
@montanareddog: “Je suis pleine” can also raise a solid giggle at the table if dining with the French.
Elizabelle
@HopefullyNotcassandra:
Non! I say non! I love my cocktail or wine while crossing the Atlantic.
Definitely keep a closer eye on the already inebriated. And airlines should share their “no fly” lists.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@ThresherK: oh my
@The Audacity of Krope: and other Americans too. Sadism seems to be the only salient point in the gop these days.
The Audacity of Krope
The Americans aren’t supposed to know the Trump administration is out to screw them. Mass media saw to that.
We only know as an aspect of observation and having a sense of the history of the politicians and political party.
Suzanne
@HopefullyNotcassandra: I think about this with some frequency, but I don’t know that I have any satisfying answer. I definitely observe a far greater expectation that goods and experiences will meet our ever-growing list of criteria. But I think part of that is capitalism and wealth; goods have become so cheap and in many cases better, and we expect things to be awesome. Some of it is extreme individualism and a lack of concern for the experiences of others.
I notice it a lot on planes, of course, since we’re all crammed in together. But I see it in all kinds of other places, too.
toine
In a bookstore in Paris an American is talking with the owner who is speaking English with him. At one point during the conversation the owner turns to a young woman working in the store and asks her, in French, to bring some books out of the back room and put them on the shelves. The guy turns to his wife and says “She just insulted us! Did you see that!”. The owner, flabbergasted, tries to assure him that she did not. He just kept getting madder and madder… I eventually stepped in to explain to him what she had said and that she had not in fact insulted him. He accepted my explanation but was still not happy and stormed out of the store, slamming the door behind him as he left with no apology for being an ass.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Richard Fox: yes, because plagues and guillotines take the innocent and the guilty. How I wish more gop “thinkers” and “tech bros” would do just a teensy bit of research into waves, populism and demagogues. It would be super sweet if they all would take biology 101 and learn the enormous important of diversity. Hint: diversity in the biological context has nothing to do with viewpoint or homogeneity.
Suzanne
@Andrew Abshier:
LMAO, Corona is the unofficial beer of the American Southwest.
The Audacity of Krope
Sounds like the beginning steps of realizing he was deeply in the wrong. I wonder if he called and apologized after he worked through his emotions on the matter.
Leaving aside the internation cultural difference angle, this is just very common behavior in retail settings.
The Audacity of Krope
@Suzanne: I believe they were describing dos equis. Literally “two X” like she said.
Melancholy Jaques
In my travels, I got the same behavior in Russia, Serbia, & Mexico. It might be one of those things buried in our brains like making our voices go higher when talking to an infant or a small child.
Citizen Alan
@prostratedragon: i still remember the time I got bumped from my hotel room because george fucking bush came to the city in the middle of my vacation. I rolled my eyes, but certainly didn’t complain to the staff about it. I just packed up and moved to the different room they gave me on another floor.
Melancholy Jaques
Well, shithead, you told he was when you voted for him.
jonas
@scav:
That’s pretty funny. A friend of mine who spent a semester as an exchange student in Germany once related the following marvelous anecdote: In German Vögel means “birds” (plural), but the word vögeln means, well, to screw. His host family greeted him one morning as he came down for breakfast and asked if he’d slept well (“Gut geschlafen?”) “No,” he wanted to say, “because of all the damn birds [chirping outside his window or whatever]”. Needless to say what came out was that he hadn’t slept because of all the damn fucking outside.
It apparently took about twenty minutes for them to get themselves off the floor and wipe the tears of laughter away.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Phylllis: I witnessed that too. Hawaii is the closest to paradise I have ever seen and I was there only once a rainy February. The locals kept apologizing for the loveliest rain which was warmly massaging all of us with this simple floral scent hanging lightly in the air.
and yet there were ugly Americans who “could not wait to get back to the states” loudly and with venom. Made me curious what screwed them up so badly they could not see paradise when they were quite actually smack dab in the middle of it.
The Audacity of Krope
I always thought people were just pretending to not know Hawaii was a state because Obama.
They really don’t know?
HopefullyNotcassandra
@The Audacity of Krope: yes. There were also a number of locals and young Americans in that line.
In perhaps? a defense of those ugly Americans, I have been told those air-conditioned bus tours for Americans are often wildly overpriced and very short on time to see much of anything.
Steve in the ATL
@HopefullyNotcassandra: maybe the lack of dashboard lights?
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Princess: loneliness, I think. IMHO, we are unfortunately becoming a lonelier and lonelier country.
The Audacity of Krope
Lucky me, I’ve been intuitive enough to never consider a bus tour.
Whatever happened to discernment? Or an independent drive to exploration?
The Utter Dregs
Waiting to board an SAS flight to Copenhagen last summer: asshole in a cowboy hat, boots, and a Trump “Fight! Fight! Fight!” t-shirt. Hello?
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Elizabelle: Fret not. Alcohol sales on flights will not be banned. Airlines should certainly share their no fly lists and people who get ballistic on planes should be ordered to anger management classes. I worry about the families of people who can become so belligerent in public
Raoul Paste
Going through security before our tour of Parliament in London, we were recognized as Americans. For some reason, they specifically asked if we were carrying knives. Sigh That’s our stereotype,.
Still, if you ever have the opportunity, take the tour. It was unforgettable.
Another Scott
Our first time to Japan (in the late ’90s) we probably initially came off as the Ugly American types.
My J is always careful and always worries (often rightly) about being cheated or taken advantage of. It was one of the big lessons from her mother.
And big trips to new countries are almost always stressful.
We read in various places about how much it should cost for a taxi ride from the airport to our hotel. A very nice man in a very clean Toyota picked us up at Narita and drove us to our hotel. We got there and the fare was higher than what we were expecting and J was very, very upset. The driver tried to explain things to us but the language barrier was a huge impediment. I had no problem with the fare and tried to mediate without much success. The driver offered to charge us nothing just to prove that he wasn’t trying to cheat us. (I mean, who does that!!)
We eventually got it all sorted out, paid the fare and a decent tip, and thanked him and apologized.
We bring lots of baggage with us when we travel, and humans in groups can be toxic (especially young human males in groups). It’s kinda amazing that there aren’t more stories of mass slaughters of tourists these days. ;-)
Best wishes,
Scott.
Steve LaBonne
@HopefullyNotcassandra: I just get relaxed after a couple of drinks (and fall asleep if more than that). I really wonder about people who get belligerent. Obviously they have a lot of barely constrained rage just underneath the surface. It seems unlikely that they’re really harmless when they’re sober.
trollhattan
@Raoul Paste:
Knife crime is a big deal there and the rest of Europe ATM. You know, since everybody can’t just go get all the guns they want.
Still funny they assume Yanks are gonna be armed no matter what.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Suzanne: I am fairly fortunate. I rarely come face to face with boors with the exception of air travel and road ragers. The internet is much nastier than a walk down any street near me. I do hear about increasing despicable behavior, but I do not witness it much.
I know they exist out there in the wild. I hear the silly persons rolling coal on occasion.
trollhattan
@The Utter Dregs: That was the future governor of Greenland, checking out his new domaine.
trollhattan
@Phylllis: One, uh, advantage being a Californian is travel to Hawaii is relatively fast and not much costs more there. Plus, the Pacific somehow manages to become warm!
Gin & Tonic
@Another Scott:
I try to follow Rick Steves’ advice and just go with a carry-on.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@The Audacity of Krope: I don’t know what the people I saw behaving badly in Hawaii knew, only what they said. Yet, I can assure you some people did not know Hawaii was a state or when it became one.
I made calls for Obama for America all of those years ago. The number of folks who querulously informed me Barack Obama could not run because a territory was not a state were so numerous I had a response prepared—
Barack Obama is 2 years younger than Hawaiian statehood. I even had links ready to offer for anyone who needed proof.
One lady exclaimed after hearing that “Why! He is just a baby.” I had no reply to that, but she agreed she would vote for him anyway.
Upside down and round about the ways of politics are strange and different.
montanareddog
@trollhattan: There was much bemusement, eye-rolling and head-shaking at my Parisian employers when an American executive, scheduled to visit for discussions about a potential partnership arrangement, emailed us to ask if he should bring his gun because he had heard that Paris was so dangerous.
opiejeanne
@The Audacity of Krope: And Dos Equis is a better beer than Bud, according to my husband who likes beer.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Steve in the ATL: perhaps
Steve in the ATL
@opiejeanne: the list of beers that are better than Bud is exceedingly long
HopefullyNotcassandra
@The Audacity of Krope: Fear.
it all comes down to that, I think.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Suzanne: Modelo is #1!
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Steve LaBonne: yes. The belligerence is like a truly bizarre cry for help, I think. I think those near somebody that angry take the brunt of the rage.
Martin
Watching the legal podcasters/video folks grappling with the last week and I’m getting the sense there’s a slow realization of the core problem – that the rule of law’s biggest weakness are a billionaires gift to Leonard Leo, Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk, and so on. That Democrats failure in their cries of the loss of democracy was their inability to point to the billionaires as the cause, because they bring both motive and opportunity. And Democrats can defend their billionaires as not having motive, but they still have opportunity which is how longtime Democratic donors like Bill Ackman became a recognized threat because it takes a long time to build opportunity, but you can change motive overnight.
cope
@jonas: In a woolen clothing store in Fort William, Scotland while studying geology with a group of American students in the early ’70s, my friend was interested in buying a pair of woolen knickerbockers to wear while cross country skiing back home. When a friendly young female salesperson asked if there was anything in particular he was looking for. “Yes,” he answered, “some woolen knickers”. Her expression was priceless.
montanareddog
In the interests of not dunking solely on American ugly tourists, a white English guy told me about the time he was visiting Chicago and wanted to go to a museum ( I think it was the Griffin Museum) and the route from downtown involved a change from the L to a bus line:
“We were horrified when we changed for the bus and found that we were in the Black part of town. My wife tried discreetly to pull her sleeve down to hide her expensive watch as we sat at the bus stop. We were terrified we were going to be robbed. It was the longest 10 minutes of our lives”.
“Nothing happened at all did it?”
“Err, well, no”.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@opiejeanne: my tastebuds concur with your husband’s.
The Audacity of Krope
@opiejeanne: Dos Equis must be a better beer, because I don’t like beer but I can at least *barely* tolerate bud.
Which suggests to me Bud is gently beer flavored water.
The Audacity of Krope
@montanareddog: 🤨
opiejeanne
@The Audacity of Krope: In 2010 we took a bus tour*, “Wild Wicklow”, on our last day in Dublin. Smallish bus full of mostly Americans, well-behaved except for two married couples late 50s traveling together who squabbled with each other half the time. Our bus driver was our tour guide and a delight. When the bus arrived in Glendalough one of the wives said to him, “We have a lot of history in America, too!” I wanted to sink into the ground.
*because we couldn’t find Glendalough even with the GPS that came with our rental car. It avoided freeways as much as possible and took us through farmers’ fields all over Ireland, and I couldn’t figure out how to reset it. It took us past every landmark, farmhouse, and pub/bar that Michael Collins had ever set foot in when we were trying to get from Clonakilty to Dingle.
Martin
@HopefullyNotcassandra: I think we overlook the steady dehumanization of society overall, which we can generally bury, but in a stressful environment where you lack agency (school, planes, etc.) will more often push people over the edge to violence.
We too often look for direct cause and effect and it really doesn’t work that way most of the time. I wrote about this when explaining the Gaza protests that many of them were really fueled by things that were completely different – such as kicking homeless students off campus at Humbolt, etc. That pressure was building within the students and it escaped through the Gaza protests.
That was the hard thing to communicate to policy deciders – that hey, don’t chase efficiency here because it’ll add stress to the students, and the result of that is going to be everything from suicides to shootings. And they can’t see that cause and effect because it’s too indirect. I think Covid added a lot of that everywhere. I think Trumps re-election is to some degree a product of that.
The Audacity of Krope
I’d like to see a foreign country but I don’t want to see any foreigners…
The Pale Scot
@Matt McIrvin:
Python describes British Tourists
Bleedin’ Watney’s Red Barrel
mrmoshpotato
The Cards wang chunged the Brewers again! Go for the sweep!
opiejeanne
@Gin & Tonic: Personal baggage, as opposed to luggage and yes, I know you are being funny.
Rick Steves is the best for travel information, and his 10 day tour of Italy (Venice, Florence, and Rome) was the only tour we’ve ever been on and it was great.
Mike S
I’ve dealt with a lot of ugly Americans in my traveles but my favorite was my aunt in Indonesia for my brother’s wedding. She spent the whole time talking shit about the country and when a waitress couldn’t understand her she said “why can’t you just speak English!”
I said that since we were on Java island, where they found one of our earliest ancestors, we should all know how to speak Indonesian. She was an asshole and not amused. She ended up being told by my mother that she wasn’t welcome at the wedding anymore when she said she had hated my mother since the day she was born.
The Audacity of Krope
@opiejeanne: I do suppose that makes sense. I don’t want to write off bus tours completely. I imagine the agency and the group your with matter a lot, though, and only one of those is in your control.
And some places *are* minimally accessible.
opiejeanne
@Steve in the ATL: I don’t think Rainier is on that list, despite Craig Johnson/Walt Longmire’s affection for it.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Martin: yes.
in the way back, folks used to explain, but never excuse, bad public behavior with references to weird weather, bad traffic and encountering nasty people. Other than Covid, nothing has changed except the weather has gotten much weirder, the traffic is more torturous (and we refuse to build workable passenger train travel in large swathes of our county) and people are nastier.
The GOP plan for all of this is absolutely nothing while actively work to make everything worse while insanely labeling this insanity “common sense.”
HopefullyNotcassandra
@The Audacity of Krope: Disney comfort level, perhaps? Idk
opiejeanne
@The Audacity of Krope: Trust me, it was a move born of “desperation”. We were pleasantly surprised.
Baud
@montanareddog:
He’ll never make it as a MAGA if he doesn’t learn to make up a victimization.
Sister Golden Bear
@montanareddog:
Back in the 90s, I took an overnight train from Budapest to Krakow and three Israeli women who outraged about me having a two-berth cabin while they had a three-berth cabin. Never mind that I’d paid for a high class of cabin….
Somehow it came up that their visas didn’t include Slovakia, which we were transiting—meaning they could’ve been thrown off the train when it reach the Slovak border. I politely suggested that in light of this maybe they shouldn’t make a scene with the conductor about the issue. They weren’t pleased, but I guess maybe they took my advice since they were still onboard when we reached our destination.
When I did a tour in Turkey more than a decade ago, I took a boat trip in Antalya to a nearby scenic bay. The crew carefully timed the tour so that we just leaving when a boat filled with Russian tourists—blasting deafening bad techno—arrived. The captain and our local guide had some choice words about how much he hated the Russian tourists.
karen gail
I have never traveled abroad but have traveled extensively across this continent and have discovered rude obnoxious tourists who are US citizens; or believe that they were, at many different locations. Fortunately, I tend towards museums, national monuments and out of way places where the “ugly Americans” rarely visit.
When my father lived in San Francisco every trip to visit was sure to spot some “ugly Americans.” I can only imagine how they would react the same way when visiting other countries. If they were that horrible to those who lived in Chinatown they must have been worse where very little was in English.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Mike S: dang! Your aunt was in one heck of a miff that day. Did your mother ever forgive her (if you don’t mind saying)
bbleh
@mrmoshpotato: @The Audacity of Krope:
1. People start doing it.
2. The Orange Guy finds out and gets irritated cuz nobody’s introducing HIM with a grand title.
3. Some minion quietly explains to him what it means.
4. He laughs and orders it to keep happening just to watch JD squirm.
The Audacity of Krope
And commensurate Epcot levels of cultural exchange.
Professor Bigfoot
And the Cavs dominate the Heat to take Game 3 in convincing fashion, 124-87.
montanareddog
Nobody has mentioned the ugliest tourist of them all:
I am sure there are other examples.
opiejeanne
@HopefullyNotcassandra: On a Disney cruise*, I was in the hot tub one evening with my daughter who worked on the cruise and was the only reason we went on it. Three “Christian” midwestern women joined us and my daughter left soon after because they were so annoying. At one point they started in on the evil of Hollywood, despite Disneyland being there, etc. and I couldnt’ stay silent. I said, “Excuse me, Disneyland isn’t in Hollywood, nor is it even in Los Angeles County. It’s in Anaheim, in Orange County.” They left in a huff.
*That Disney cruise was a great experience. We didn’t have any kids with us and didn’t have to be around kids at all.
mrmoshpotato
@bbleh: If the Kremlin’s bitch wants a title, his fat, orange, fascist ass is welcome to Orange Shitstain.
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
I’m a Negra Modelo man, myself.
bbleh
@mrmoshpotato: can you make that sound a little more … noble? Like, what’s “shitstain” in Latin, or maybe Norman French? Or I suppose German — he’d like that
How about … “His Lurid Feculence”
opiejeanne
@karen gail: We lived in Anaheim, 2 miles from Disneyland, and our youngest worked there so we bought season passes for several years. We saw bad behavior from people all around the world, especially visitors who forget that there is a human inside that costume, but sometimes there were very amusing moments like the little boy on the tram from the parking garage to the ticket gates who turned to his mom and said, “This is the best ride in the whole world!”
JoyceH
@The Audacity of Krope: When I was younger, I always imagined that I would travel and just waft whenever the fancy took me. Turns out I didn’t even get a passport until I was 70 and by then I wasn’t too grand for bus tours. I would avoid the big bus tours, but the small groups are delightful. No more than 18 people and you have a guide and a driver who know the way and have all the tickets and hotel reservations and the guide has a charming line of patter. I’ve taken two small group tours, one in England and one in Italy, and going back to England this fall. Same company different tour.
montanareddog
@bbleh:
Skiddius Marcus?
no body no name
JD Vance fucked a couch and killed a Pope. These are facts.
VeniceRiley
People ask me where I’m from. I say California.
bbleh
@no body no name: [Groucho Marx voice:] and it ain’t like the couch felt too good afterwards either.
The Pale Scot
Are you mad!!
Steve in the ATL
@lowtechcyclist: concur. BTW, yesterday you mentioned getting an e-bike. I assume you’ll be changing your nym?
Martin
@HopefullyNotcassandra: A lot has changed though. Every time a corporation hits a financial friction point whether it’s declining revenue or demands by investors for higher profits, they have a pretty high likelihood they will make things worse for customers.
Last year I had to make an emergency trip back east. Changing planes in DFW, the airline moved the gate for my flight to a terminal on the other side of the airport. I got that notice during my first flight, I went to the new gate, and it said it was going to a completely different city. The airline computer said flight 1 at gate A and flight 2 at gate Z but the airport computers said flight 1 at gate Z and flight 1 at gate A. Nobody knew where they were supposed to be. It was very stressful because getting from A to Z was like 10 minutes – plenty of time to miss the flight. When we asked the neighboring gate staff, they said they couldn’t help us because they could only talk to us about their flight (gate B).
I spotted a pilot, asked if they were the pilot for my flight, and they said they were and they were going to California and I verbally announced to everyone there that this was going to California. There was a dad there traveling with his 3 young kids who were all clearly exhausted who was in tears because he knew there was no way he could get to the other gate if he was in the wrong place and was so relieved he was in the right place.
None of that was necessary. None of that stress was needed. It was all due to some effort to deny the company’s staff agency to help, for the airport to optimize their gates, for the failure of programmers to ensure that the airline and the airport information matched, and so on.
You cannot keep pulling the line tighter and tighter until it snaps. People need agency, they need predictability in systems, they need courtesy and recognition and so on, and at least in the US, almost everything is self-interested in pulling the line tighter because we constantly externalize the reason why it snaps, rather than recognizing that we’ve pulled the line too tight.
JoyceH
BTW, is a 40 vehicle motorcade standard these days? If so, I’m surprised. I would have thought a dozen, maybe fifteen tops.
frosty
@Toeless Flenser: OTOH, in 2004 we were at the Grand Canyon when John Kerry rolled in. I asked the Ranger if they were going to close the park on the only day we would be there. His answer: “We close this park for nobody.” They closed one or two of the stops on the South Rim, that was it.
WaterGirl
@mrmoshpotato: Am I blind? I don’t see where to enter your zip code.
opiejeanne
The second time we were in Paris, doesn’t that sound grand? in 2014, we went out around 8pm looking for a place to have supper, just wandered around until we found a likely spot. There was a line outside, but they were just there to smoke so we got a nice table pretty quickly. Not far away there was a table full of loud people who had had a bit too much to drink and were trying to be best friends with the waiter as he took their order, who was very polite as they tried to joke with him. After he left, one of the women looked over at us and asked very loudly if we were from the States. I nodded and asked if they were from Texas. She was astonished that we had figured that out. Their accents and the way they were dressed were a pretty big clue. I don’t mean they were dressed for a rodeo, but they certainly weren’t from the west coast. The women had on way more jewelry than you’d see on the street.
I wish I could remember the name of that place because we’re going to Paris in May and I’d go back in a heartbeat. We are going to revisit Au Bougnat which we discovered in 2012, around the corner from Notre Dame, on the corner of Rue Chanoinesse.
karen gail
@JoyceH:
I had trouble wrapping my mind around that 40 vehicle motorcade; why on earth would the VP need something that big? and why in the hell is a VP traveling with that many people?
Mike S
@HopefullyNotcassandra: kind of but I think it was more for my cousins’ sake. She adored all of them and they loved her. My parents took a few of them into our home over the years when they couldn’t deal with her.
When my mother passed away every cousin told me how lucky I was to have the parents I had. They were right. I hit the jackpot with my father, mother and later with my stepfather. Every one of them were kind, caring people. It’s been 35, 5 and 11 years since they passed and I think about them every day.
The Audacity of Krope
Yeah, I wasn’t being fair. Bus tours definitely have a role to play. I was just more focused on how some folk use them as a way to shield themselves from…culture? Learning? People?
I know what the type I refer to would say but I’m not choosing language to validate their xenophobia.
opiejeanne
@VeniceRiley: l have found that saying we’re from Seattle works well too. A lot of people in Europe have told me they’d love to visit there one day.
sab
@JoyceH: Ah yes. Savings for American taxpayers all the way. How many Meals on Wheels could that have funded?
frosty
@cain: It’s hard to beat the Aussies for loud, drunk, and obnoxious. Favorite memory: they’re standing on a table at the Oktoberfest, singing “Waltzing Matilda.” When the Polizei came to ask them to step down one said “Piss off, mate. Don’t forget who won the war.”
Then the truncheons came out and the Aussies were escorted away.
The Audacity of Krope
I’m pretty anti-alcohol and I wouldn’t dream of it banning it, even on flights. I know people who need to drink on flights and why. I can empathize.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@opiejeanne: I meant no disparagement of Disney. The parks are well kept, the lines are orderly, the bathrooms are clean and the experience is truly quite something. I just meant maybe some Americans think everywhere is like Disney, a complete fantasy created for profit?
JoyceH
I also remember being gobsmacked by the size of the motorcade when FORMER President Trump showed up for his arraignment. I’d bet money Obama doesn’t travel with a motorcade that size.
The Audacity of Krope
Acting like MoW recipients are victims. It’s their fault for becoming infirm.
You act like we’re entitled to food. If that were the case we wouldn’t throw out enough to feed a small country every day.
Miss Bianca
@Martin:
That was an insight I appreciated at the time and referred to quite a number of times afterwards.
zhena gogolia
@montanareddog: Those are good ones!
The Audacity of Krope
Everything in America is that.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@VeniceRiley: we do that. Europeans say their country. We say our city or state. I don’t think that makes us ugly? I hope not. I do the same. I just noticed the difference.
Matt McIrvin
@Toeless Flenser: I had a bus trip to the Seattle zoo delayed by Joe Biden’s motorcade. Kind of an interesting moment in the trivia-in-real-life sense.
opiejeanne
@Martin: When we went to Ireland out of LAX on an affiliate of Aer Lingus (American to Chicago?), we checked the gate number and got to that gate just as people were starting to board. I was puzzled by all of the women in Saris going to Dublin and why the flight was boarding so early. It turns out that that flight was going to Delhi, India. The gate number we had seen on the board in the lobby (?) was in error and we had to find the right gate. We heard the announcement then with the correct gate number, and several people grabbed their bags and joined us to find the right gate.
Steve LaBonne
@Professor Bigfoot: I asked this unfortunately on what was already a dead thread- if you don’t mind talking about it, how is your medical stuff going?
opiejeanne
@karen gail: It sounds like an invasion.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@The Pale Scot: I sincerely hope I am not. I certainly have not yet succumbed into pretending I am an olive while jumping into a pond, anyway.
bbleh
@JoyceH: @karen gail: it is absurdly, ridiculously over the top. In central ROME, mind you, which isn’t exactly freeway country.
It’s gotta be some toxic-masculinity thing, rooted in some truly pathological self-esteem issues.
What a fkin embarrassment…
The Audacity of Krope
@HopefullyNotcassandra: Not the same thing but on my dating app the other day, someone asks my ethnicity.
I say “Lithuanian, Irish, a couple other things. How about you?”
“I’m white.”
“That’s not an ethnicity.”
I politely finished the conversation, but I detected that that wasn’t going anywhere.
frosty
@Andrew Abshier:
When we were in Bolivia, knowing Spanish was a necessity. No one spoke English. It has to be one of the few places in the world where that’s the case.
The Audacity of Krope
@bbleh: it is absurdly, ridiculously over the top. In central ROME, mind you, which isn’t exactly freeway country.
One of the primary things I remember from traveling in Europe was just how many roads weren’t suited to two-way traffic. I frequently saw cars pull to the side or completely off roads to let others pass.
That must have been a nightmare for everyone.
zhena gogolia
@Martin: Yes, that gate-changing thing is so stressful.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Martin: unregulated capitalism is a nightmare. History and lived experience tell us this. Adam Smith (!!) tells us this.
For once there was a thing that was known as “common carrier.” If we had not decided to toss our “heritage” in the rubbish bin for “capitalism” your airport near-living-nightmare does not happen because the airline would be fined and its passengers could sue and win.
When MAGAs talk of our “heritage” I am almost positive they have no notion what they mean.
Our “Honest Public Services” Doctrine is another our Supreme Court recently trashed. I guess we really just needed that new invention the “major questions doctrine” for no reason our ancestors could fathom.
Matt McIrvin
@HopefullyNotcassandra: Air travel is much more optimized than it used to be, because computer networks (not even AI, just computers that communicate with each other) make it possible to do so, because fuel is (rightly) expensive, and because deregulation made everyone compete to just barely hang on with low operating margins–their profits are not guaranteed by official price-fixing and government assignment of routes like they were before the late 1970s. But it’s not optimized for you, it’s optimized for the airline.
It’s possible now for nearly every flight to go out full or nearly full, and they also don’t have to overbook quite so much as they used to to make up for no-shows, though some of that still happens.
That does actually reduce the carbon footprint of flying, per passenger, while keeping flying more affordable than it would otherwise be. But it also degrades the experience.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
There’s a reason we don’t out ourselves as fellow Americans when we run into American tourists abroad. We don’t fool any locals, they can tell we’re foreigners and often that we’re English speakers by the accent. But nobody ever takes us for American, not the locals and not the obnoxious people doing their best to uphold the worst stereotypes.
MagdaInBlack
@karen gail: Dominance display
Also harder to figure which one he is in, if you’re thinking of some sort of “disruption.”
Matt McIrvin
@frosty: When I was in Rome in 1991, I remember meeting a couple of Bolivian girls who did speak English, but the thing I thought was interesting was that they carried on conversations with the locals where they were clearly speaking Spanish and the locals were speaking Italian back, and they seemed to be understanding one another.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@opiejeanne: I was on the stairs up to the roof of Notre Dame (before the fire) behind to grumbling Americans. I will give them this their grumbles were fairly quiet. It was what they were grumbling that surprised me.
Here is part of it
Guy “What idiot made such narrow stairs?”
Lady “A French idiot”
it went on like that until we hit the top.
Have a wonderful time on your third trip ! You are blessed.
zhena gogolia
Lots of good stories here.
I don’t have much to share. I’ve never done much touring — only a camping trip through USSR and Eastern Europe long, long ago, and in those days the worst, loudest tourists were East Germans. My other trips were Moscow, and I avoided tourist areas for the most part. I never saw any obnoxious Americans. (Lots of obnoxious Russians, but nice ones too.)
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@mrmoshpotato:
Mostly contractors in my area. There’s a counseling and therapy place that’s registered too. Would definitely avoid them lol
Professor Bigfoot
@Steve LaBonne: Hey— so far, I’m doing much better than I’ve any right to.
So far my worst problem is the wound on my wrist. I haven’t done any real exercise yet, but plan to start on the yard tomorrow (coincidentally, the forecast is warmer.)
Thank you so much for asking!
Matt McIrvin
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I think everyone can tell I’m American but if they try to guess my nationality, they’ll start with “Canadian” because the social price of mistaking a Canadian for an American is much higher than the reverse.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Mike S: years ago my nana told me we never lose those we love. Their love lingers in every breath we take over our whole lives. I love that sentiment just as I loved her.
prostratedragon
@JoyceH:
@karen gail:
Don’t know offhand what SecServ considers standard, but distnctly recall reading that Obama sometimes requested arrangements that used a lighter footprint, once definitely at a Punta del Este summit. There would have to be several trailing and following cars and a couple of medical vehicles maybe. But 40? Bet Biden didn’t have 40 in Kyiv.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@frosty: I have seen that too.
On the other hand, even loud, drunk and singing, Aussies are, in my limited experience, a heckuva lot of fun.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@WaterGirl:
Here’s a link to the actual PublicSquare website
I don’t know if you’re on your phone or not, but if you are, there’s a toolbar on the bottom of the screen. Click on “near me” and you will be taken to a map where you can enter your zip code
Jon D.
@Harrison Wesley: My favorite is the (possibly apocryphal) one about the Texas oilman who went into a three-star restaurant in Paris and ordered a steak and a Coca-Cola.
bbleh
@HopefullyNotcassandra: one gargoyle to another: “what kind of idiots make such fat, lazy tourists?” reply: “American idiots.”
opiejeanne
@HopefullyNotcassandra: No, I get it completely.
The fun thing about having those annual passes was that when you have been 4 or 5 times every entry after that is essentially free. We would go over to the park just for lunch, or for supper, and some of the food was really very good. Sometimes if she had a break our kid would get to have lunch with us.
When she was no longer a character in the park she was in Snow White, the Musical in that theater back by Toontown. It was a big production and she was the bluebird. We knew a lot of the cast members because she was dating one of them and she took us backstage to meet some of them. It was a big expensive production, with a rotating stage and a talking mirror that was made of slabs of mirror that moved when it spoke. Sir Patrick Stewart was the voice of the mirror.
There was a woman there for the show one time from someplace in the midwest, a large city with a “black neighborhood” “wrong side of the tracks” area. She asked mr opiejeanne if she could sit next to him, but he didn’t hear her say why: there was a very nice, well-dressed, well-behaved black family next to the last empty seat in the front row. I was so damned annoyed with her but I knew he hadn’t heard her comment. I sat in that seat and talked to them, asked the kids if they were having a good time. I was just hoping they hadn’t heard that woman. I should have gotten Katie to take her backstage since she loved the show so much, so she could meet the cast when they weren’t heavily made up; she would have seen that the actors were not just white kids, but also black and brown but I supposed she’d just shrug it off that they were some of the “good ones”.
The Audacity of Krope
Given all the bullshit the other side puts out about Biden; I’m choosing to believe Biden parachuted into Kyiv, dolo, before single-handedly expelling a regiment of Russian soldiers.
I’ll swear this to my dying breath and, outside Balloon Juice, I won’t even hint that I’m not being serious.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@The Audacity of Krope: not in my experience.
There is a lot of fantasy; nonetheless, not everything is for profit. Look at the proliferation of book clubs since Covid for one example. A lot of us do and make a lot of things for reasons beyond profit.
Jeremy Bentham used profit as a means of measurement because the other more valuable things (like community) were not easily quantifiable. The GOP wants us as shoppers or workers only, but our joy comes from so many more sources imho
and not everything in America is clean
I could show you some foul public spaces !
Matt McIrvin
@Joy in FL: In 1986, I went to London for two weeks for an international youth science conference–it was my first time out of the US. Toward the end of the trip, exhausted and slightly homesick, I took refuge in… the Strand Pizza Hut.
Not much to say about it. It was a Pizza Hut.
The year before last, I was in London again and when we were on the Strand, I was amused to see that that Pizza Hut was still there and took a picture of it. This was before I’d decided to stop giving Google my free labor, so I uploaded the photo to Google Maps as part of a “review” that said, “well, in 1986 this was a perfectly adequate Pizza Hut.”
For some reason, the Strand Pizza Hut became one of my most-viewed photos on Google Maps.
(#1 is a picture of a roller coaster at my local amusement park, with a car doing the loop-the-loop.)
opiejeanne
@bbleh: I wonder how much luggage they brought with them.
montanareddog
@Matt McIrvin:
Not the only “siblings” where that is the case. Australian pub in Amsterdam. Backpacker comes in and sits at the table next to us. Waiter comes over, backpacker places his order and then asks the waiter which part of Australia is he from? Waiter replies “Perth. Which part are you from?”. “The New Zealand paaart!” sputters the furious Kiwi backpacker.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@HopefullyNotcassandra: two
is it autocorrect, or me? Sorry for the typos
Princess
@Martin: The problem is Americans like and admire billionaires and think maybe one day they’ll be billionaires. Bernie and AOC are trying to change that but I expect them to fail.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@bbleh: that made me chuckle
thank you.
ironcity
@Steve in the ATL: McDonalds in Moscow a couple blocks from Kiev station. Need Egg Mcmuffin without cheese (wife is lactose etc.). “Egg McMuffin” is universal, I bet “Big Mac” is also. “Nyet” what is Rus for “cheese”? Shit, I don’t know. Ummmm. “Nyet fromage.” Just right, like back home, maybe better. 3 languages for one breakfast sandwich and says a lot for everyone being inventive, open and exercising some goodwill.
The tour of Moscow conducted in Spanish was a treat too….turned out the driver was in a Soviet SAM battery in Cuba for a few years… “Peter the Great” became “Pedro Magnifico”.
Steve in the ATL
@Matt McIrvin: sounds like Scandinavia, where the Swedes, Finns, and Norwegians manage to understand each other in their own native tongues. If you can tolerate the sing-song sounds of Norwegian!
Steve LaBonne
@Professor Bigfoot: Very glad to hear this! Stay healthy. Don’t even get me started on the catheter wound. I had to have a cath before my valve replacement surgery in 2021. They first tried my wrist and couldn’t get the damn thing in. Then they switched to my neck and the unsuccessful attempt to get it in there was so goddamn painful that even though I was heavily sedated they could tell I was in great distress and gave up. They finally succeeded with my groin. Honestly the actual surgery was an anticlimax after that shit show. But the cardiologist did say afterward “your arteries are gorgeous” so that made it almost worth it.
Princess
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I’d be shocked if people can’t tell you are American. To me all Americans stand out because you dress like no one else on the planet, especially on holiday. (Nothing wrong with how you dress but it is distinctive.)
HopefullyNotcassandra
@opiejeanne: as the song goes, that kind of bigotry has to be carefully taught.
opiejeanne
@Matt McIrvin: We were late looking for lunch in Paris after 2pm and out of desperation went into a Pizza Hut near the Palais Garnier opera house. It was a revelation! They had a very attractive wall of wine, their salads were fresh, and the pizza was very good.
Also, a friend had dared us to go to the McDonalds when we went the first time, and it was NOTHING like what they serve here. The food was actually good food, and on the menu was the ubiquitous ham sandwich on a baguette with butter. I sent him a French postcard from Paris, after I explained what the joke was. He was young and had never heard about them before. I didn’t see any really racy ones, just mildly racy if you were from the 1920s.
Wapiti
@Andrew Abshier: Had a (newish?) waiter in L.A. explain that the “Spelligrino” water came in a half-liter bottle. When they had moved on to another table, my spouse pointed out that the waiter might have only read the label: S.Pelligrino, and never heard it called San Pelligrino.
zhena gogolia
@ironcity: сыр
opiejeanne
@Princess: As Mark Twain put it, temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
zhena gogolia
@Princess: People in Russia always thought I was from the Baltics, which I took as a compliment.
Matt McIrvin
@opiejeanne: a revelation on my trip to Japan last year is that in Japan, if you’re jet-lagged out of your mind and getting hangry, you can buy good pre-made meals at 7-11. The chain is unrecognizable from its American counterpart apart from the logo.
suzanne
@The Audacity of Krope: I know. I’m laughing because much of the US prefers Mexican beer! Budweiser is terrible.
lowtechcyclist
@Steve in the ATL:
I did in fact order an e-bike off Amazon yesterday. (Wasn’t sure if I mentioned here that I got beyond the virtual window shopping stage.) The e-bike is really a car substitute, for running short errands, rather than a bike substitute. I won’t be riding the e-bike instead of cycling. So I’ll be keeping my nym.
sab
@suzanne: There are so many worse American beers than Budweiser. Coors, for example.
opiejeanne
@Matt McIrvin: That was how we viewed that Pizza Hut. Only recognizable by the logo. But all of Paris was like that. I don’t think we had bad food anywhere in France. The excessively rare steak I got in Orly was my fault, miscommunication. The waiter saw that I wasn’t eating it and the chef came out of the kitchen to explain it to me. I thought I had ordered medium rare, but it was blue/bleu/raw inside. I was apologetic and he was sympathetic. I don’t remember if they took it away to cook it a little longer.
Sister Golden Bear
In non-ugly American news (WaPo story via archive.is):
Baud
@Sister Golden Bear:
WWJD?
lowtechcyclist
@HopefullyNotcassandra:
The hard part is getting the pond to believe it’s a martini.
frosty
@Steve in the ATL: Nicely played!
Professor Bigfoot
@Steve in the ATL: Ay caramba!
This was my third in two weeks and they went through the same wrist every time.
Heh, the first time I expected them to go through the groin, so I’m lying there, waiting, and I ask “when are you going to start” “Stop talking I have a wire in your heart!” (I STFU, too).
The third was outpatient— arrive at 9 in the morning, home about 6.
Honestly, I feel like I’m cheating, somehow. :D
opiejeanne
@Sister Golden Bear: I saw that a little earlier. He wasn’t perfect but he was the best Pope of my lifetime, other than the one that died 33 days after attaining that office. John Paul I, and it’s only speculation that he would be as good as or better than Francis because he didn’t live long enough for us to find out what he would do.
opiejeanne
@Baud: He would wash their feet.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@lowtechcyclist: absolutely true
@lowtechcyclist:
Trivia Man
@The Audacity of Krope: ask someone from new mexico what they deal with
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
I’m OK with that. The way I figure, I’m not flying for the experience; I’m flying to get from Point A to Point B, hundreds of miles apart, in a short time, and hopefully for a reasonable fare. I can deal with being cooped up for a few hours in order to eat breakfast in Baltimore and lunch in Tampa.
Steve in the ATL
@opiejeanne: brasseries are a good choice for off-cycle meals, but glad that your Pizza Hut experience worked out!
@frosty: I was worried it was too subtle….
Baud
@opiejeanne:
For free?
mrmoshpotato
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Yeah. It’s not well designed. But worth it to find Dump-humping businesses.
opiejeanne
@Trivia Man: Yes! I’ve heard those conversations.
And when we tried to send a package from Williams Sonoma to mr opiejeanne’s brother and his wife in Alaska I was told that UPS and USPS don’t go there because it’s not a state. I assured the woman on the phone that it is indeed a state, so she looked it up. Whaddayaknow! But they don’t ship to a PO Box. Yes, yes they do, In NOME, INSIDE THE ARCTIC CIRCLE. People pick up their packages at the airport.
opiejeanne
@Baud: Haha! I love you, Baud.
VeniceRiley
Watching the papal funeral. My old lady thought is “Where do all these people go pee?”
The Audacity of Krope
American brands abroad are so different.
I was shocked when I couldn’t get a milkshake at a McDonalds in Spain. Even explaining the concept got me funny looks. They were sure I was asking for a McFlurry.
Pizza Hut here is not so great, but I had amazing food at a Pizza Hut in Puerto Rico. Among the better French onion soups I’ve ever tasted and much better pizza than domestic. Yeah, I know Puerto Rico is semi-domestic but I don’t think it applies here.
Andrew Abshier
@frosty: If you visit Brazil other than major tourist destinations like Foz do Iguaçu or Rio de Janeiro, (possible São Paulo, too) ability in Portuguese is required. I spent a full year learning Portuguese before I went to Brazil last year and spent two weeks in the country speaking nothing but Portuguese. Outside of flight crews and one hotel employee, I didn’t encounter a single person who spoke English.
Melancholy Jaques
@JoyceH:
Which company? I’ve been looking at tours for the fall.
Matt McIrvin
@opiejeanne:
It’s been a very long time since I was in France, but I felt that way about Japan. You’d go to a hole-in-the-wall izakaya or a sushi or ramen joint and the menu would be very limited, the food might be simple, but everything would just be really high-quality, usually for shockingly low prices.
A bunch of experiences like “holy shit, this is what miso soup is really like? I guess I’ve never had proper miso soup before.”
opiejeanne
@Steve in the ATL: We were on foot and Google wasn’t what it is now, so finding a brasserie that was still* serving was difficult. There was another “fast food” place down the block where we had tried to grab a sandwich, not a company I’d ever heard of, the food was only ok and the service was atrocious so we weren’t going back there. The staff wasn’t French.
*Some of the brasseries didn’t serve after 2pm.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
Hey. Proof of life.
frosty
@Matt McIrvin: Spanish and Italian are close enough to do that. When I did my Railpass tour in my 20s, my traveling companion was a native Spanish speaker. He had no trouble in Italy. My high school French came back, and the German sort of did. We got around pretty well.
Hell, we could even communicate with the Aussies on their six-month Walkabout! Beer helped.
Baud
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
Better than proof of death.
frosty
@HopefullyNotcassandra: On the other hand, even loud, drunk and singing, Aussies are, in my limited experience, a heckuva lot of fun.
Yes they are. My use of “obnoxious” was a little over the top. We enjoyed watching the denouement of that performance, too.
Matt McIrvin
@VeniceRiley: reminded of our great good luck getting the hell out of London two weeks before the Queen died.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Good alibi.
Melancholy Jaques
@Professor Bigfoot:
And that with no Garland & Mitchell having a bad game
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I just realized that was 2022, not 2023, so I guess the “year before last” further up the page was incorrect. Crap, time flies.
Baud
sab
All this travel talk. I got to see at least Europe a bit in my twenties. Child of privilege and all.
My grand-daughter who died last month in a car accident wanted to travel. She had a few road trips, but really all she ever saw was Cleveland and Akron Ohio and Richmond Virginia
ETA If you can financially afford to help a kid with her dreams: do it. I didn’t, and I will never have a second chance to make it up to her.
Matt McIrvin
@frosty: My knowledge of French helped with *reading* Catalan, not so much with speaking it. Sounds like Spanish, but a lot of the vocabulary is closer to French.
My greatest accomplishment speaking Catalan was managing to order an ice-cream cone.
VeniceRiley
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah she touched Liz Truss like the Pope touched J Divans and that’s what happens.
I was and am here. Would not have been in that crowd on a bet.
Geminid
@VeniceRiley: The crazy memes showing Vance meeting Pope Francis began to appear immediately after Francis died. I like the one where Vance is holding a big scythe.
sab
@Matt McIrvin: Jackals were mostly assholes about the Queen when she died, and we lost a some UK jackals as a result. I miss them.
British Empire sucked, but the Queen did her duty in a very confined range of options.
coin operated
@Gin & Tonic: I was seated next to Rick (yes…call me Rick) on a flight from Chicago to Dallas. Just an all around good guy and willing to talk to anyone about travel. He gave the same advice about carry-on luggage.
David Collier-Brown
I confess as a teen I once twisted the tie of a chap with an American accent who was berating Black Canadians in a Canadian city bus. (“Twisted” is a local euphemism for grabbing the tie and twisting yourself to tighten it, thus choking him.) That was a looooong time ago.
Martin
@Princess: I don’t think that’s it. I think Americans see billionaires as better vehicles for opportunities than government, and I Democrats aren’t fighting that perception.
See FDRs agenda for how you fight that.
The Audacity of Krope
Billionaires only exist as a function of the denial of opportunities. Every billion dollars in their possession constitutes thousands of lost opportunities and the power their billions brings them is lost societal opportunity for decisions to be made on the basis of real expertise or public support.
karen gail
I have been thinking about ugly Americans; liked the post that listed all the things that make Trump the worst of the worst when it comes to being an ugly American. Many in US consider that they are the only ones who are American; ignoring that US is only one country in The Americas; we have North America, south America, Central America.
It isn’t just the MAGA crowd that considers the US as the only “true” Americans, but many of the people in US have the same mindset. The President of US is spoken of as “the leader of free world” ignoring all the other countries that are free; I have seen the mindset of those who somehow believe that by being President of US a person is the most powerful person in the whole world. Trump seems to optimize that belief; he acts like he is the mob boss of the world and all should be bowing to his might and power. This belief that somehow white people in US are better and more powerful than any other people in the world creates or helps to create the ugly American that so many see.
BellaPea
I don’t mean to offend any of our Asian BJ friends, but man, I’ve come across some extremely rude Asian tourists during my travel. While I was waiting for a restroom in Versailles, these two older Asian women (I think they were Chinese as a busload full had just unloaded while we were waiting to get in) in line kept staring at me and making remarks to each other in their own language. I just about told them both to F-off. When we were touring the Vatican last year, this big group (again probably Chinese) of tourists came through and literally strong-armed their way past my husband and I and our guide. Pretty tacky.
Another Scott
Meanwhile, …
Yes, please don’t do that!!
Best wishes,
Scott.
David Collier-Brown
@ironcity: I did some capacity planning forRevenue Canada once, in Ottawa, just across the river from Quebec.
You didn’t have to know more than one language: sentences were about 50% of each, and everyone could figure it out quickly. (I do speak French, but particularly badly)
The daughter of a friend is in Montreal and has spoken “franglish” from about 2 onwards
Enzymer
@montanareddog: I’ve done the equivalent in France. I thought I was ordering grilled veal chops, it was actually fried calves liver! Nothing like overestimating your culinary French
Princess
@zhena gogolia: people always think I’m German which I don’t love but I understand why.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@sab: I am so sorry for your loss. I will heed your advice.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Martin: I am saving various FDR-wonderfulness for just the right moments. I hope I can spot them when they arrive.
Matt McIrvin
@Martin: We figure billionaires are smart. They’re so rich, they must be smart! You ought to at least be able to manipulate them with self-interest!
So many of them have behaving stupidly over the past year or so that I think it’s destroying that image. Bill Ackman, God, I hope artificial intelligence can help him out because as far as I can tell he is a profoundly dumb person.
Jay
@karen gail:
Has Xi called yet?
Steve LaBonne
@David Collier-Brown: My ex-wife is a Bombay Parsi. I could always follow her end of her phone conversations with her mom or others back home because they spoke about half in Parsi Gujarati and half in English without any awareness of switching languages.
karen gail
@Jay:
I saw a cartoon showing Great Wall with lock on door and Trump pounding on door.
I don’t expect China to do anything but ignore Trump; while he lies and tells everyone how much calling and begging China is doing.
dnfree
@The Audacity of Krope: I don’t know how old you are, but bus tours might be more appealing to you when you’re older and no longer feel as comfortable navigating foreign countries on your own.
The ones we have been on have been through a university alumni association and attract people who are intellectually curious. Last year we visited the areas of Italy associated with Dante, accompanied by a very knowledgeable professor as well as local guides.
Steve LaBonne
@Jay: I imagine he calls Trump all sorts of things. Just as we do.
Jay
https://lexisantamaria.substack.com/p/billionaires-shouldnt-exist
Enzymer
@Matt McIrvin: indeed. I have gotten along in Italy with my high school Spanish.
Gin & Tonic
@Steve LaBonne: When you are fully bilingual you really don’t notice the back and forth.
Steve in the ATL
@Princess: your fault for showing up on a Panzer!
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Baud: You say that now before I feel good enough to give you crap over not working for your Meadowcrat endorsements for Baud!2028.
dr. luba
@Sister Golden Bear: To be fair, EVERYONE hates russian tourists….
kalakal
Not quite tourists but since the Falklands War a British garrison has been stationed there. Both the squaddies and the locals speak English but they don’t really mix, the troops think the locals are a bunch of hicks and the locals think the troops are a bunch of yahoos
The troops were reprimanded for referring to the locals as ‘Bennies’ ( Benny was a dim witted character in a popular soap opera). When the BBC ran a story on it they found the locals referred to the troops as ‘Whennies’ . When asked why it was a reference to the squaddies converstional style vis
‘ When I was in Northern Ireland, When I was in Cypress, When I was in…’
Meanwhile the troops had taken to calling the locals ‘Stillies’ – the explanation? ‘They’re still Bennies’
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
I’ve been mistaken for a Belgian, a German, a Scotsman, an Australian, the list goes on…
lowtechcyclist
@opiejeanne:
There’s no place like Nome!
Gloria DryGarden
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: I ve been taken for Swedish or Dutch, while traveling in Italy, relying heavily on my spanish. Even when asked, I refused to say where I was from.
russell
who the hell needs 40 SUVs?
Gloria DryGarden
@Matt McIrvin: I did that. Spanish with Italians in Italy, mixed with perhaps 10 words of Italian. The cognates and pronunciation are quite similar, the conjugation systems also seem similar enough. It definitely worked. I sure wasn’t going to try English and reveal I was American, oh my god no. I was 21, a tall Swedish looking young thing, long blonde hair. Nope.
I knew what some people said about the young women of USA, and I wasn’t having any of it.
prostratedragon
@Steve LaBonne: Noticed this frequently in Satyajit Ray’s Bengali movies. Not just words, as in many nonEnglish movies, but entire sentences.
Gloria DryGarden
@sab: my grandmother paid for my year as an exchange student. I remember in my senior year of high school, writing letters to relatives, asking for financial help. I was so grateful, and looked forward to coming home and telling her all about it.
I wish I had also asked for help to think through how to afford a summer in nyc, taking dance master classes, while I was in my 20s. It was such a dream of mine, as a dancer, and you have to do it young. I was never going to be a professional dancer, but it would have been a huge jewel in my memories; I would have loved it, and gotten better as a dancer.
What a wonderful idea, to help young people do the adventures that their younger bodies can handle, that won’t wait until they are older/ financially stable.
im sorry about your young relative. Sudden death, and especially when someone is so young, it can really hit hard.
YY_Sima Qian
There are poorly behaved tourists from every country, because there are assholes in every large enough population.
10 years ago, I went on a expedition cruise to northern Spitsbergen. The cruise operator & the expedition ship were Dutch, so the passengers were a mix of mostly Dutch, Germans, Brits, & Americans. I had gone on a cruise to Antarctica w/ the same operator (the same ship, in fact) less a year before, so I had expected the same crowd. Unbeknownst to me & the other Western passengers, half of the cruise was booked by 3 large tour groups from the PRC. This was the cruise company’s 1st attempt at capturing the exploding outflow of Chinese tourism.
I was traveling alone, so I roomed w/ an engineer from Leica, which was collaborating w/ the cruise operator, the engineer doubled as a photography instructor during the cruise, & used the opportunity to field test some of the Leica equipment still under development.
Now, Leica (& Hasselblad) has become a status symbol for well heeled Chinese nouveau riche w/ some interest in photography. After one of the evening photography workshops, a middle aged man from Northeastern China, playing to every stereotype there is of the uncultured new money from the Northeast, asked the Leica guy how much to buy one of the prototypes off his hands. The Leica engineer tried to explain that it is not for sale & not on sale, yet, but it would be in a few months & can be bought in any Leica store anywhere in the world. The Chinese guy would not let it go, & kept raising the offer price. I had to intervene by explaining that allowing a prototype to be lost in the wild is a serious matter to any company, & the Leica engineer would lose his job. Eventually the Chinese guy’s wife & a couple of his travel companions got embarrassed & had to drag him back to his cabin.
YY_Sima Qian
@kalakal: When my Antarctic cruise stopped at Stanley in the Falklands, I took a stroll away from the crowds to the residential backstreets away from the shore. Taped to one of the front doors was a hand drawn outline of the Falklands, a giant middle finger between the two main islands, & the caption:”British to the bone. The Falklands are ours, fuck you Argentina!” I guess the residents hear about the cruise ship coming in from Ushuaia. But there was only one Argentinian couple among the passengers, & out expedition leader was Argentinian.
Then again, on the wall of the Argentinian coast guard station at Ushuaia, there was a mural of a burning Union Jack, w/ the caption of [something something] “… Piratas ingleses”.
Soprano2
When I was in high school I dated a guy who lived in Branson. You should have heard him talk about tourists – “tourii”, he called them. The traffic in Branson was so bad then, he lived 3 miles from work and it took him over 30 minutes to get there. He hated the way they drove because they didn’t know where they were going (this was long before the internet). I would occasionally remind him that if not for the tourists he wouldn’t have a job. 🤣🤣
Kayla Rudbek
@mrmoshpotato: there are at least three yarn sellers that I recognize listed on that website (they’re vendors at Maryland Sheep and Wool, so now I know who I am NOT spending any money with next weekend). I posted this to #knitsky which is the feed that a lot of the Bluesky knitting community is using. Two disappointing ones and one that doesn’t surprise me because I always got the creeps in at their particular booth.
Kayla Rudbek
@Princess: Mr Rudbek and I get identified as German when we bike tour in Europe, but I think it’s because we use Ortlieb bike panniers which are German.
ironcity
@David Collier-Brown: Late lamented Punch magazine had a recurring column called “Let’s Parlier Frangleis,” where the typical conversational exercises used in language lessons were written in a mix of both languages, with resulting miscommunication, hilarity ensues.
The few times I have been to Ottawa I was very impressed by the manageable size and human scale of the city.
ironcity
@The Audacity of Krope: Then again, it sometimes goes the other way. The KFC in Windsor looked like the U.S. and the sides were as at home, but when you got to the chicken, oh dear. The Colonel would never have let the skinny pieces into the herbs and spices. Learned our lesson and never went to another U.S. fast food place. Didn’t have to with every pub having a plowman’s available at all reasonable hours.
opiejeanne
@ironcity: I’m sure the Pizza Huts in England would have been as dismal. France and especially Paris are very different.
MarkPainter
I was in London during the runup to the invasion of Iraq and witnessed a large antiwar demonstration. Nearby were a couple of young Americans. The young women expressed amazement that anyone would oppose invading Iraq. The young man explained it to her this way: “It’s like abortion. You try to do the right thing [i.e., by opposing abortion], and they get mad at you.”