Kudos ! That’s an excellent boozer. Spent many a happy evening in the upstairs bar. Lovely, lovely…
I’m reminded of a classic newspaper headline from a long while ago that’s indicative of an earlier mentality (I wish it were an U/L but it’s repeated by so many usually reliable people…):
‘FOG IN CHANNEL - CONTINENT CUT OFF’
those poor souls on the mainland !
On Americans in America: I remember being on a mammoth Greyhound bus trip and stopping somewhere in the arse end of the mid-West. The eaterie had one of those ‘eat as much as you can for $5’ deals so as an impoverished student I got seriously stuck into spaghetti and meat balls while the not un-alluring young waitress hovered with her own dumplings boiling over the top of her uniform. Finally, she made her gambit:
“You speak v-e-r-y- good English. Where a-r-e y-o-u from ?”
I’ve been trying to think of a good comeback line to that ever since.
Coldy - When you mention the Belgium border, is it something that I should have noticed? Would we have had to go through border patrol? Was I even more lost than I thought?
We didn’t go through anything like that unless we snuck in the back door. I have my map here, my real one, not the useless PIECE OF CRAP Kraig printed off the internet and as far as I can tell by my chicken scratch, we drove through Leige (or at least we thought we were in Leige) and stopped in Reims France headed for Paris before I figured out we were going the wrong way.
How pathetically lost touristy that is?
Anyhow, I remembered another.
Standing in line to the Eiffel Tower elevator I hear the guy behind us tell his wife “It’s as high as the one in Vegas!!”
If you passed through Liege, you weren’t too far off at that point. Should have followed Luxembourg and Trier (that’s Germany already) after that, not Reims.
Before Liege, right after Maastricht (the last Dutch city you pass through), there is the border. The border stations are illuminated at night, and the 4 every-kilometer signs saying “Belgium ## kilometers” are a bit of a giveaway as well, I suppose. As is the different highway surface, illumination, and signposting. Ah well, we all make mistakes.
Y’know, having spent all that time in Russia, you’d think I could come up with more stupid American stuff than the following story.
Some fellow who was there for a semester (and fancied himself a pretty boy) decided he was going to cuss out a curbside book vendor for approaching a mutual acquaintance of ours. Unfortunately, the only two words in Russian he actually knew were “in general” (voobsche) and “do you understand?” (ponimaete?). So the entire tirade sounded something like this:
“Voobsche… voobsche… ponimaete? Voobsche.”
Oh no, wait. I got a good one. Rich kids who room with a Russian student in the dormitory. Of course they’re living like kings on the monthly stipend they got, as well as all tyhe gift money from parents and relatives, and buying all sorts of expensive food and stuff, keeping it in the apartment refrigerator. If you’re an impoverished Russian student living on a sucky stipend and whatever you can earn or get from your parents (who don’t have much more), what are you gonna do? Eat the food, right. So these two girls have their buddy - someone who didn’t event live in the apartment! - bitch this poor girl out about how she stole their food and how she’s going to have to pay them back for all the food she ate. In front of some 5 to 10 other people who were there hanging out. Reduced the poor girl to tears.
Poor old JFK. He still gets razzed about the jelly donut/Berliner quote, even though it’s halfway to being an urban legend. Ich bin ein Berliner is grammatically correct German for ‘I am a person of Berlin’, even though it would have been better to say simply Ich bin Berliner. Inserting the ein made it possible for some wags to make the “jelly donut” gibe.
A much more embarrassing gaffe happened during President Carter’s visit to Warsaw in 1977. He was at the mercy of his State Department Polish translator (whose native language was evidently not Polish). Carter meant to say “love for freedom” but his interpreter used an archaic word for love which literally translated came out “sexual desire for freedom.”
The dumbest thing I ever heard a tourist say? Picture this, I’m taking the train from Anchorage back home to Fairbanks. We’re passing through some of the most beautiful terrain on planet earth…mountains, streams, glaciers. As we pass over a river, a tourist next to me complains about how shocking it is that the river is polluted, and how they should keep it cleaner!
Um, no. That river is loaded with glacial runoff, yes it is the color of cafe au lait. But that’s not human caused, it’s because the glaciers grind the rocks to powder and the streams carry to runoff into the rivers and the rivers are full of sediment! Idiot.
The best Dixieland band that I have ever heard outside of New Orleans was playing upstairs that night. I met a lovely Brazilian girl there that night as well, but that should wait for another thread…
This story doesn’t really fit in the OP category, but it cracks me up, and I haven’t gotten to post here yet, so I’m gonna sneak it in.
Me and my friends took a couple years of German in High school. We didn’t take it very seriously so we were real far from fluent, but we understood the basics. One day we were walking downtown and there was a German business man who didn’t speak a word of English trying to get directions to some place. He was obviously very frustrated and had been trying for a while. Being good samaritans we went over to help. My friend told him we spoke German and asked if he needed help. He got a look of relief and said something Along the lines of(I appologise for my crappy grip on German spelling and grammer) “Hast du in Schule gelernt?” (did you learn in school?) My friend(as I found out later) misunderstood and thought he said something like “enschuldigen Sie”. My friend who was a total hothead interpreted this statement meaning “Will you excuse yourself!” I understood the guy’s question and was digging deep in my memory to remember how to ask if he needed help, when my friend, surprising the hell out of me and the German, screamed 'Well F*** you too, I fing came over here to help you, Where the f do get off telling me to excuse myself" The German guy understood the general gist and started screaming back, until the point they were about to start to swing. About that time I figured out exactly what had happened, and was simultaneously trying to stop the fight, and explain what happened in both languages, while laughing my ass off.
The moral is that all you people who think we Americans should learn a few words in foreign languages should realize that we can do even more damage that way.
I’ve been to Germany to visit family many times and toured around Europe now and then, so I’m sure I have played the part of the dumb Canadian or American (I’ve lived in both places) a lot. Mostly to others amusement. Most of which I’ve suppressed. A recent example was exclaiming to a bunch of overprotective relatives on a cold, rainy evening, “Ich bin nicht kalt!” (knowing perfectly well what I said-- the instant after it came out of my mouth) which I’m sure they were glad to learn.
Ironically, my biggest stupid-appearing moments occured when people didn’t realize I was just a dumb tourist. I was born in Germany and I must look like I belong there, and either knowledgeable or harmless or like a parks employee, because I have had quite a number of German speaking tourists from other parts of the country come up and ask me in rapid German for directions or information. All I can do is stammer that I don’t know, at which point they hear my accent and look at me like I’m an idiot. Sorry!
Once I did actually know the directions to wherever this lady wanted to go, but once she realized I was a foreigner I don’t think she believed me. sigh
That’s happened to me here in Ireland too. I was walking down the street about five minutes from my house when a car pulled up and the driver asked me if I knew where such-and-such Church of Arbour Hill was. I gave her directions to Arbour Hill (which is about three minutes from my house, parallel to the road we were on) and said “there’s a church there, but I don’t know what it’s called.” She gave me a snotty smile and said “With an accent like that, I wouldn’t expect you to know” and drove off, pulling over to ask the next person walking down the road!
I only take comfort in knowing he would have given her the exact same directions I did …
Picture your Aunt from Botswana coming to meet you for the first time, then exclaiming, “My, how handsome! You look just like a photocopy!”
It may have been MEANT as flattery, but paintings, sketches and photos are mere representations of nature’s work, and (unless you’re an artistic genius like Michaelangelo or DaVinci) you can’t come CLOSE to expressing the colours, shadows and light in the limiting form of art.
Not even photography.
You can take a picture of the Grand Canyon, and you can talk about it in facts and figures to anyone… but that person will STILL NOT UNDERSTAND until they gaze at it with their own beady little peepers.
ruadh, I can top that. While I was doing some shopping in downtown Amsterdam, a guy once asked me for directions. His accent told me he was from the vicinity, but not Amsterdam itself. A provincial, so to speak.
Now, bear in mind that I’m from the south of the Netherlands, and although my Dutch is pretty much without accent (right, Aghris? :D), my ‘soft G’ slightly gives me away as a Southener. This shouldn’t be too much of a problem, as Amsterdam has a wide range of inhabitants from all over the Netherlands, and indeed beyond.
I give the guy complete and detailed directions to wherever it is he wants to go. He stares at me for three seconds, then says: “Yeah, right. As if a stupid hick like you would actually know where that was!”.
Huh. Oh well, rise above it.
“Good luck finding the Leidseplein then, sir. It sure is an obscure an hard to find square. Especially for dumb hicks like myself.”
(For those not in the know: the Leidseplein is one of the main squares in Amsterdam. Any Dutchman over 16 with half a brain will be able to walk there without any directions whatsoever.)
By the way, I’ve always been partial to the story where a friend (note, this didn’t happened to myself, could be a blatant lie) met an American and told him he was from Holland, whereupon the American replied: “Holland… isn’t that the capital of Amsterdam?”.
Well at least he got the right country with the right city, I’ve heard worse.
Darqangelle, I don’t see the “picture” thing as stupid either. I’m not sure the “photocopy” comparison is relavant, or at the very least seems to be requiring an unreasonable level of technical accuracy from casual conversation.
When my grandmother told my sister “Why, you look like an angel,” I’m reasonably sure she didn’t mean “Why, you look like a cute baby with wings!” or “Why, you look like a tall winged warrior with a flaming sword!” or “Why, you look like a Servant of the Almighty!” or even, “Why, you look like a 80’ bio-mechanical mech destroying Tokyo-3!”
“Pretty as a picture” is a fairly common idiom back north, (in the Massachusetts/Connecticut area) at least among older people.
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“I think the phrase Ugly American is unfair.” (In refrence to Joe Don Baker in Final Justice)
So why did this turn into an “Ugly American” thread? Weird… seems to be a trend in recent years! (Sorry, touchy topic for me right now, as I have been in the middle of “Yankee go home!” week here in Korea. The tear gas should fly any time now…but that’s another thread which I may or may not start…)
I have lots of stories of dumb foreigners (NOT all Americans, mind you!) in Korea… but in the interest of avoiding embarassment to other nationalities, I’ll limit myself to one that I did: our Korean secretary (a very pretty and innocent young woman) did a small favor for me once, and to thank her I sent her an e-mail. I thought I’d be clever and write it in Korean… well I screwed up, used slightly the wrong grammar and chose the wrong verb! “Thanks for _______ the other day!” (I actually don’t remember the favor that was done…) turned into “Thanks for taking off your clothes the other day!” Causing her no end of embarassment with her co-workers (none of whom actually thought she’d slept with me, but had fun teasing her!).
[hijack]I would like to take this opportunity to brag that I DID get from my hotel to the Leidseplein without getting lost (we won’t mention the assistance of cab drivers who know the route). From the taxi to the pub is another story that we will leave out of this thankyouverymuch. [/hijack]
I used to go to Penang Malaysia for work quite often. I’ve spent close to a year of my life there and after a while learned to speak a bit of Bhasa Malay. One of the first words that I learned was “matsalai” which translates as “a person of European descent” or “white person.” It’s a mildly derogitory word; your friend can call you one but a stranger can’t.
I was in the Batu Farengi area of Penag which is the most touristy part of the island with a couple of other white guys when we decided to get some ice cream. The manager of the parlor greeted us in English and then told one of the waiters in Malay to take care of the matsalais. He wasn’t being nasty, just kind of a smartass not thinking that we could possibly understand.
I turned to him and said, “Awas, saya faham sikit sikit Bhasa.” (Watch it, I speak a little Malay) The poor guy looked completely stunned and turned bright red. It was great. He appologized profusely and comped the ice cream.
I’ve been to Scandinavia several times, and fortunately I’m able to stumble through most conversations in Swedish or Danish. However, on my last trip to Copenhagen, a few young men approached me and asked me for directions. My protestations fell on deaf ears, apparently because I didn’t have enough of an accent.
“Hej, hvordan kommer man til Amalienborg?” (Hi, how do I get to Amalienborg?)
“Undskyld, jeg snakker ikke så godt dansk…” (I’m sorry, I don’t speak very good Danish.)
“Haha, ja ja, sikkert. Hvordan kommer jeg dertil?” (Ha ha, yes, you do. How do I get there?)
“Undskyld, jeg er ikke fra landet, jeg er fra Amerika. Det ved jeg ikke.” (I’m sorry, I’m not from here, I’m from America. I don’t know how to get there.)
At this point they accused me of lying and something involving dead pigs. My grounding in Danish insults isn’t all that solid.
(Far be it from me to disparage Danes, though- they’re some of my favorite people north of Germany and south of Norway.)
