Being Canadian, I often hear a lot of wild misconceptions about Canada/Canadians from those who live in other parts of the world. My brother went on vacation to Arizona last year and he found there were a lot of people who either thought they knew things about Canada that were way off, or they didn’t know anything and believed whatever they heard.
Needless to say, my brother had a lot of fun with this. He told some people he met that he lived in an igloo, and rode to school on the back of a caribou. They accepted this as fact without argument. He also convinced one poor lady that we didn’t have spring, but in fact “National Snow-Melting Day”, where everyone would go stand out in the snow, and the RCMP would come out with blowtorches and melt all the snow. There would then be great fanfare and feasts of whole roast moose. And she believed him.
Some others I’ve heard:
-Apparently, some people think our Prime Minister’s name is Tim Horton. (Tim Horton’s is a chain of coffee shops named after a long-deceased hockey player).
-We have snow 365 days a year.
-We all play hockey.
-We all dress and act like the McKenzie Brothers.
What are some erroneous things you’re heard about YOUR country?
MYTH : The United States of America is one of the most freedom-loving nations of the world.
FACT : The majority of the population of the U.S. actually hates freedom. A large percentage chooses to symbolize this hatred by chaining themselves to their wallets.
MYTH : The national pastime of the U.S. is Baseball.
FACT : Baseball is just an elaborate prank, established by Abner “Shekky” Doubleday, as an April Fool’s joke. Beaned by a pop-fly later the same year, he forgot to tell anyone.
MYTH : The U.S. military is the finest-trained fighting force in the world.
FACT : Every single U.S. combat victory since the early 80’s has relied solely upon the intervention of a small paramilitary band referring to themselves, cryptically, as the ‘A-Team’.
[ul]
[li]We worship our great fearless leader Lee Kwan Yew, who built our great nation from bricks of mud and straw, and mortared them with his very blood.[/li][li]We crave gum constantly, and chew rubber bands. Gangs make lots of money by smuggling gum strapped to their chests, and selling them on the black market. If they get caught, they are summarily beheaded.[/li][li]We are mindless drones that obey the commands of the great fearless leader, and sacrifice our children for the party.[/li][li]We strip and whip gays publicly, in the city square.[/li][li]There is a security camera in every bedroom, and secret police spring upon you if you are caught having anal sex. And then you both are stripped and whipped publicly in the city square (SAWPITCS).[/li][li]If you are caught littering in public by the secret police, you are SAWPITCS.[/li][li]If you are caught jaywalking, you are SAWPITCS.[/li][/ul]
Can’t think of anything else at the moment. Surely, it is to :rolleyes:
I’ll go Gibraltar seeing as I appear to be the only one here.
Gibraltar is an island.
People from Gibraltar are all of Spanish descent.
People from Gibraltar are all descended from inhabitants of the British isles.
It is spelled ‘Gibralter’.
It is spelled ‘Gibralta’.
People from Gibraltar are called Gibraltese or Gibraltans.
It is interchangeable with that other Mediterranean island, Malta.
Gibraltar used to be a British colony, but now belongs to Spain.
It is the southernmost tip of Europe.
Apes live there.
There are many more but I’ll stop there. The misconceptions are corrected as follows:
Gibraltar is a penninsula. It is connected to the Spanish mainland by a sandy ithsmus.
2 and 3. The inhabitants are descended from (or are) Genoese, Spanish, English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Portuguese, Maltese, Jewish, Indian and Moroccan immigrants, in roughly that order.
4 and 5. It is, of course, spelled Gibraltar.
The people of Gibraltar are known as Gibraltarians, or Llanitos.
Although we have links with Malta due to our similar histories, it is a very long way away and a completely unrelated entity.
Still British, in this day and age, in Europe, for 300 years.
The Spanish town of Tarifa is the southernmost point of Europe. Gibraltar is the second southernmost.
The so called apes are in fact tail-less monkeys, the Barbary Macaques.
…and something that always surprises people is that it is only three and a quarter square miles in size, with a population of just 29,000.
Not sure if some of these are actual honest misconceptions or just dumb stereotypes:
There is no such thing as decent food in Britain.
There is a common dish called ‘kidney pie’.
Brits all have bad teeth.
The terms England and Britain are interchangeable.
Myths I’ve heard about Dominican Rep. from people that have never been here.
It’s a tiny island in the Caribbean. (It is small, but bigger than Puerto Rico).
It is the same as Dominica (Actually Dominica is a tiny island and has nothing to do with us).
It’s the same as Haiti. (We share the same island but are different nations with different languages and cultures).
Everybody makes a living out of been baseball players or drug dealing. (Far from the truth).
Heard in Europe: The official religion is Islam. (There’s no *official *religion, but over 95% are Catholics, the remaining are mostly Christians of other denominations).
Californians talk like each sentence is a question? I don’t know where they got that crazy idea? I was working this morning? And a tourist asked me if I commute to work on a surfboard? I told him, “We’re in San Jose? The ocean is like an hour away because of traffic and stuff? And right now the weather isn’t so hot? So you might not want to be wearing shorts because there is a storm right now?”
People do not eat sushi all the time (I get take-out sushi every couple of weeks or so, which is probably above the average)
Adults who watch a lot of anime are considered weird
Most people do not study martial arts
Life is only insanely expensive if you want to live (and eat) like you’re in American suburbia
However:
There are girls in sailor suits everywhere. There are also boys in Prussian military outfits. Why those two styles were picked as the standard school uniforms, I have no idea.
You can find dried tentacles next to the Slim Jims at 7-11.
You can find shirts and products with hilariously bad English on them, but not quite as much as before.
The trains are packed tighter than you could possibly imagine. At least, the Tokyo suburban commuter trains during the morning rush are.
There are “pushers” to get people in the trains. They are not, however, former sumo wrestlers. They’re just the ordinary station staff, and are usually pretty thin, since it’s more important to be able to run quickly from door to door helping people in before the train has to pull away.
Everyone does carry a camera, but that’s only because they’re now standard on mobile phones.
The following are in response to actual questions I have been asked (on an MMORPG) when people found out I was Australian.
No, we do not all have pet kangaroos. No, even if we did you can’t ride to school on them.
1a. In some areas a person may have a pet kangaroo, but it’s fairly safe to say that if they’re living in a city, this is not going to happen.
1b. Yes, we have cities. With tall buildings and sealed roads and everything.
Shrimp are tiny live food for tropical fish, not something you’d throw on a barbeque. I believe you mean ‘prawn’.
2a. No, I don’t know anyone who puts prawns on a barbeque either, but I dare say it’s probably done somewhere. I’ve known people who put crayfish on a bbq, which’d be much the same thing.
… Uh, why yes, I do have ADSL connectivity. (I once followed this response up with: but it’s really hard to use because we don’t have enough electricity to power both the modem and the computer, so I need to go afk for five minutes every hour in order to use the bicycle-powered generator. sigh They believed me.)
Whatever the hell accent you’re imagining at this moment, forget it.
No, are not all stamped out of some ‘blonde bikini chick’ mould down here. Amazingly, our population is as varied in appearance as yours is.
5a. So don’t tell me how you ‘love the way Australian women look’. sigh
Yes, we have a lot of really nasty lethal critters in this country.
6a. No, they will not beeline for you as soon as you set foot on Australian soil. If it was that dangerous to live here, we’d all be dead.
There is no way you’re going to have ‘an Australian holiday’ in only two weeks. Do you have any freaking idea how big Australia is, and how far apart the cities are?
7a. Sure, you can drive to Perth from Sydney. No, it’s not a day trip. :rolleyes:
There are many, many more, but I can’t think of them off the top of my head.
