Do ugly Americans/Europeans really exist?

Europeans won’t mind if you support your soccer team loudly, except perhaps when their team is playing yours. Tou won’t be as loud as they are used to. In the Euro 1996 championship in England I was a Scotland vs England game where the jingoism was threatening, but that can happen even between club teams. I’d have no problem with Germans singing Deutschland Uber Alles, especially since it is played before the game as their national anthem.
Dutch polite can be rude and brusque, but it’s not aimed at you, it is just they don’t consider these things as important. I never once saw a Dutch man hold a door open for a woman or offer to help her with a load, and they are contemptuous of foriegners who do as they see it as superficial and old-fashioned. Although the Dutch women seemed to lap up a bit of chivalry.

French people have a heirarchy of rudeness. Ordinary French people will mostly be lovely to tourists. Ordinary Parisians are contemptuous of other French people. The rudest French people are Parisians whose job it is to help tourists, especially the clerk at railway stations that have a British or American flag next to them. Tourists assume that is to indicate English is spoken, but in reality it is where English speakers queue to be berated for the amusement of the French people queuing. If you speak fluent French in any foriegn accent they are merely contemptuous and sarcastic, but their full ‘Fawlty Towers’ strop starts on your first minor grammatical error.

Rude, insufferable, obnoxious american tourists do exist, and I have first hand anectdotes that are cringeworthy, but like Teacake said just your default volume can be disconcerting. I have equally as many tales of Britons abroad, and certainly I stop talking English abroad whenever I hear a British or an American accent.

Well the British aren’t that rude really, but if you invite them into your house they might still be hanging around 800 years later. :smiley:

I once saw an “Ugly Canadian” tourist in Canada! I was on my French class’s big field trip to Quebec in a shop in Quebec City. This loud “American” woman was arguing in English with the young clerk over something and the clerk called for his supervisor. They started talking in French and the woman flipped out and started demanding to speak to someone who knew English and that they should speak English and were rude to speak French in front of her since she couldn’t understant it and they could “be saying anything about her”. As an American I was embarrassed by her. Then when I was my turn I got to talking to the clerk (in French) and found out that the woman was from Alberta! :o

Crap, you’re right, I didn’t get the O level in the UK, I got it in Germany (at 14). This proves I am clearly not smart enough to adapt my spelling. :slight_smile:

Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger, this is my worst pet peeve.

I truly irritates the crap out of me (and American in Australia) when people, who understood perfectly what I was asking for, and have noticed my accent is not the same as theirs, takeit upon themselves to correct my pronuncuation. That is rude. I don’t do it, and I would never do it unless I truly did not understand the the word you were saying.

I’d also like to echo above that I, personally, am not responsible for the invasion of Iraq, Afgahnistan, or anywhere else, that I, personally, did not torture prisoners in Abu Grhab, and that I never, not even once, voted for George Bush (either one.) So kindly get out of my face about it, Australia. Seriously. There’s absolutely NO good answer I can give you - either I grovel, and that’s just dumb, or I deny my heritage, which I won’t, or I tell you to fuck off…and, oopsie, that makes me An Ugly American. :rolleyes:

And as for rude tourists, in Sydney I really haven’t noticed any - my fellow countrymen make me cringe but only because they WAY overtip in a culture that really doesn’t tip much. But that’s not rude, per se, it’s just failing to find out anything about where you’re going. And I think the bartenders, waitstaff, bus and taxi drivers are all pretty much ok with being handed unexpected amounts of cash.

As for me, I once had a meltdown about the lack of Crisco in the middle of a grocery store (because I wanted to bake something that my mother bakes and I needed it and I was homesick and tired and…nah, no good excuse, I just lost it…) It was not my proudest moment, but I was hardly a tourist, I’d been here several years. Nobody would have known that, though.

My American accent in Australia is taken for Irish at times.

That’s…odd?

From Theodore Dalrymple comments, it sounds like English football fans are the world’s worse. Not only rude but violent.
http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/000966.php

BTW, I live in Orlando also. I don’t work in the tourist industry, but my friends that do , don’t seem to have a high opinion of Canadians. I get the impression that they are regarded as lousy tippers.

I also find it interesting that a lot of tourists seem to regard Orlando as a cheap place to shop. I see tour buses pulled up, not only to the malls, but also Walmart.

My family lived in Sydney and Melbourne for 3 years, (I have also spent a fair bit of time in many countries in Europe where tipping is not the norm) and I can’t EVER remember a tip being refused, although it can make you stick out as a visitor to anyone who happens to take notice…

In general, I have been treated with great warmth in the vast majority of my travels, and on the couple of occasions where I felt I was getting the cold shoulder for being an American, I was quick to get up, hit the door and head off to another cafe or bar down the block where I felt more at home.

If they don’t want my patronage, you can bet that the next bar/shop/hotel three doors down sure as hell does, and often times would make me feel like a long lost friend in the process.

???

What did I say that basically everyone else didn’t say?

Here’s my personal stock answer, it might help you:

“Because we could and we wanted to. Now shut the fuck up or next we might invade whatever godforsaken hell-hole you call home.”

I live over in Pinellas County, and I work retail.

I hate Canadians, as a rule. The snowbirds largely bitch about how expensive this is or that is, or why can’t I buy this here cause I can in Ottawa, you know. And they’re rude about it. I’m sorry your home is a frozen hellhole 6 months out of the year, but that doesn’t give you the right to complain about every single thing here during your stay.

My brother has worked as a server for a long time, and no one in any of the restaurants he’s ever worked in ever got excited about the table of Canadians.

Rude foreigners? Well, I did know a woman who racked up eight hundred dollars worth of telephone psychic calls with the family she’d stayed with. Never heard an explanation as to why she thought that was reasonable; frankly I think she was a really inept con-woman. By inept, I mean that she picked a working-class family to mooch off when she came here. I guess that’s pretty rude.

I can’t say anything nasty about the foreign-born people I’ve known, and none of them are really ‘tourists’ in any case – mostly East Asian immigrants. The worst I could call any of them is ‘peculiar’, and that’s hardly bad.

I’ve never been further abroad than Toronto, which I love. It’s just enough like home that it doesn’t feel too weird and just different enough to remind me that I am very far from home. The Canadians I met were charmed and delighted to meet the Texan and ask her to say “y’all” and feed her poutine. I like it there, I could even live there, but it’s not home.

I’d love to cross the pond, but I have sworn to myself that I will not go to a country until I am at least conversant in the native language. The problem is, I want to visit France and Austria and Germany and Poland and Italy and the only not-dead language I know apart from English is Spanish, and I don’t know enough of that to really speak it well.

I HAVE heard stories of my friends who went abroad, though. Most of us are definitely not the sort to be ugly people anywhere, but I do have one buddy who called England ‘the most violent place I’ve ever been, to include the scariest parts of Houston’. He was apparently beaten rather badly at least once, though I can consider that he might have looked like he deserved it. But I know a couple of Americans in Scotland and they couldn’t be happier or getting along better, if their Facebook statuses are any indication.

I’m aware that people speak more quietly abroad and eat with their left hands. I have tried to practice this but I am not very good at either.

Reply here.

Canadians aren’t coming out so well in a lotta threads these days. :smiley:

Americans appear to be the only ones who call it the Chicken Dance; they probably were just unable to identify it. There’s also the little detail that some people will just refuse to play songs they hate, but my money would be on the first. I know it took us (“us” being Europeans from half a dozen countries) over half an hour to identify it when one of the Americans mentioned it during a company meeting.

My Australian accent in Australia is taken for British or American. My fellow countrymen… they may be nice people - salt of the Earth! - but they’re as dumb as a sack of rocks.

Isn’t this a straw-man until you exhibit that anybody actually cares about Americans doing these things?

Once more, I’d like to remind Americans that nobody really gives a shit what you do. Americans chanting “USA! USA!”? Who gives a fuck about Americans, really? It may surprise you to know that we all don’t live our lives in a state of perpetual offence over American sporting chants and various other minutiae. You just aren’t that important.

Really? Is it really your personal stock answer, Rand Rover? :dubious:

So how many people have you actually said that to, and by said I mean “out loud and in person”?

I think you are depriving yourself of some wonderful experiences for no good reason—Just because you can’t speak Polish dosent mean that the lovely people of Krakow or Wroclaw (for example) won’t welcome you with open arms and a hospitality that is hard to describe.

In general, people WANT to be friendly, and an open smile and a genuine spirit of openness on your part will have most locals treating you like a long lost friend within moments of meeting you…

Life is short—Don’t be afraid to travel and expand your horizons.

I know – and I really WANT to go, especially after looking at the pictures of my Polish coworker’s aunt’s home in the mountains. My heritage is German and Polish and I want to see where my great-grandparents came from, and I keep hearing about how lovely and welcoming and brilliant the people in Poland are, I just don’t want to be the twerpy American who can’t understand a word they say. :frowning:

I seriously doubt Polish people expect all visitors to their country to be able to speak Polish. (They aren’t French, after all.) I personally find your reasoning kind of silly.