I just checked – yep that is what the university claims.
But don’t get too upset, this is hardly a major issue in my life. It was just on a list of (8? 10?) things that people often assume.
pdts
If your point is that it’s Americans specifically who irk you in that way then I don’t see how Nava’s point proves it. Because how many Americans are running around in Europe doing professional office type jobs compared to citizens of other EU countries, for whom getting the work permit is as easy as falling off a log? She’ll hopefully be willing to sketch in a few further details of the shadowy Flamenco and pallella loving person in her anecdote. Because if that person’s not American, it doesn’t do much to support your hypothesis that we alone get all giddy with excitement on meeting a foreigner compared to the jaded and cosmopolitan Europeans.
“Western Europe”, indeed. The other person probably thinks you want to play a guessing game when you give an answer like that.
I’ve had the payehyah thing come up in several countries (the US, the UK, Switzerland and Germany); it’s not “an American thing” and it’s bothersome.
The ones asking and actually waiting for an answer don’t bother me, I assumed a long time ago that when I’m abroad I’m a sort of cultural ambassador; but Og save me from the ones making assumptions and/or launching into rants, which can range from the innocuous if headache-inducing “I loved Madrid! What is your favorite museum? I loved the Reina Sofia although I don’t like modern art but it was real cool but we didn’t have time to go to the beach and I hated the food but loved the tapasblahblahyadda” to my evil Conquistador ancestors. I am willing to swear on the holy book of your choice that my ancestors did not, to the best of my knowledge, butcher any Native Americans, either north or south of the Rio Grande: they were busy fighting the French (when Lorraine was German), fighting the Germans (when it was French), fighting their Italian neighbors from the next city-state over, joining the Tercios and going to burn down a few Dutch cities, or just staying put and hoping War would kindly go elsewhere.
And Spectre, pdts has already said he doesn’t consider it exclusively-American. It happens to him in America most often because it’s where he happens to be most often. If I had never gone to Germany, it wouldn’t have happened to me in Germany.
Citizens of EU countries do not need work permits to work elsewhere in the EU. So it’s even easier than falling off a log. And actually, there are hundreds of thousands of Americans in London, and similar if smaller communities in other major cities.
Please see my previous few posts for why I don’t think it’s just an American thing. Also notice my previous references to the Japanese. But yes, it is more prevalent in the US, or maybe that’s just confirmation bias on my part.
As to your second part, how else would you suggest I communicate politely that I don’t want to talk about it?
If I say ‘the UK’ then the game is up if they start the monologue (not to mention the ones who get huffy and say ‘I know that! I meant where in England, of course’).
I’ve also tried giving comedy answers, like ‘the moon’ but that gets me nowhere.
Seriously, what is the polite thing to do here? Just grin and bear it, as the price of living overseas?
pdts
Thanks for putting the monologue better than I could 
pdts
Oh, another time it bothers me: when the ones asking are diverting us from the subject at hand. For example, we’re starting a meeting about business procedures; during introductions, it’s mentioned that I’m from Spain, and someone pipes up with an “IlovedMadrid” rant. That particular thing has happened to me in Germany and the US. We’re in the middle of a business meeting. In the middle of a business meeting, you do NOT talk about football (either the real kind, the kind with the melon-shaped ball or the kind with the armors), you do NOT talk about baseball, you do NOT talk about the last movie you saw and you do NOT talk about your vacation!
I think it’s part of the same Cultural Difference which leads to things like my American manager spending the first 25’ of our half-an-hour “approve Nava’s vacation dates” meeting making small talk (according to my American coworkers, it’s supposed to put you at ease; for me, it had the opposite effect) before finally getting to the subject at hand - in Spain, the vacation would have been approved first and then we might or might not have made small talk.
Obviously in a business meeting, as in many other work situations, there’s the issue of time, and the fact that everybody is supposed to be focusing on some decision or task. I’d expect most people to be aggravated by this type of thing; I touched on it in in pdts’ concurrent thread running over here. It’s not the sort of thing which will win you professional advancement or social popularity in the U.S. either, even if you’re just dealing with other Americans. On the other hand, when circumstances aren’t so pressing, and someone mentions they’re from somewhere, we by and large don’t think it inappropriate if someone else says they visited there once and really liked it, and possibly goes on to mention one or two things they liked about it. I’m not saying we like people to get all giddy and gushy, as if to say “SQUEEEEEE!!! Madrid! Oooh, what a gorgeous city. Used to go to this cafe just off the “PLAH-Ssa MAYor”…” and so on.
It’s a fine line, I’m sure. But absent the time wasting, or the squeeing, if the foreigner objects to someone saying they went to their country or city and liked a couple of things in particular–I don’t know, it reminds me of the way one might react on receiving a nice but rather personal comment from a complete stranger, the idea of whose being attracted makes one acutely uncomfortable. Or, as if the speaker is bringing up the hearer’s personal private business. Take this hypothetical cafe off the Plaza Mayor, if I went there a couple of times when I visited, it then became a part of my life, too, albeit a small one compared to someone who lives there. I’m not saying I get this from your answers specifically, but I feel it in the whole strain about not bringing up where a person is from.
pdts as for grinning and bearing it, or otherwise dealing with it–I think it’s just a question of having to deal with people you don’t want to know particularly, and whose conversation happens to be one-sided or monomaniacal. We all run into bothersome people now and then. My strategy is to try to tune them out, but, human nature being what it is, that doesn’t always prevent unwanted encounters.
ETA: When people ask you where you’re from maybe the most disarming answer would be, “Right here!”
ETA I wanted to address this point too. I suspect a factor may be that the Americans who do make it over there to work, in these situations, tend to be mid and higher managers. I don’t imagine you get a lot of staff engineers from America over there, because there must be plenty of Europeans that are available to fill those jobs. In the higher managerial levels it doesn’t surprise me to see a casual attitude towards running a one-on-one meeting. The manager’s own higher-ups are not going to rake him or her over the coals for casual chitchat during a one-on-one with you, because, hey, if that’s how he or she builds the staff relationships that helps to deliver the results, then that’s fine. For your domestic employer to put you on a plane and set you up for an assignment overseas, with a hotel, per diem, and so on, is a massive financial undertaking, and not one that is undertaken on behalf of a low level staffer who hasn’t reached a point well beyond undue anxiety about the clock. (The quarters of the calendar, on the other hand, very possibly.)
Well maybe the whole work permit thing’s gotten easier for non-EU citizens as well then. “Hundreds of thousands of Americans” in London I would not have thought possible. Some of those people must be working fairly ordinary jobs of the sort I wouldn’t have thought non EU-citizens could get.
Make a show about having to do something else. Return to your reading your book which you’ve conveniently brought with you, or the paper you’re working on. Pull out your blackberry and pretend to ponder your schedule or your email. I usually have a book with me when I expect to have to wait in line anywhere. Go back to talking to the person or persons who are with you. If two or more people don’t want a third person to join them, it’s usually not difficult to prevent it, right? As for “politely”, that may not always be possible. “Do you mind!” coupled with a severe look should rid you of all but the most adhesive barnacles, and I for one wouldn’t see anything out of line in that.
Slight exaggeration on my part. Wikipedia thinks there are
182,000 (2008 ONS estimate)
people born in the USA living in the UK.
A very large percentage are likely to be bankers in London, and perhaps people married to British people.
No, it is still very difficult about for non-citizens to get an EU working visa. Though for the UK, if you are a skilled professional with a decent income, you should have a decent shot – the high skilled worker category doesn’t even require a job offer, I think.
Finally, I tried the ‘right here’ sort of answer. Trouble is that, as you rightly pointed out about the ‘Western Europe’ answer, it makes people think I’m kidding or want to play a guessing game.
pdts
The incident I related was indeed in the US: I was transferred there for a project, one of four Europeans in a team of over 200 people. I was not in a hotel, per diem, or anything like that, but I was subjected to some policies which would have made sense for a male manager with a non-English speaking spouse and 2.5 children, not for a single female techie in her thirties. I’ve never worked under an American who was transferred to Europe, but I’ve met engineers who had been transferred to Europe temporarily for a project (similar to how I was transferred to the US). Most of the people involved in the project were “line” engineers, foremen, managers at the shift or factory level, but we were changing the company inside out and upside down.
When I’m working on a multibillion dollar project and I’m juggling a minimum of three subprojects on any given day, more normally five or six, and getting vacation approved requires a meeting (why, for Christ’s sakes?), then yes, I’d like to get the meeting’s subject out of the way first so I can mark it “done” in my mental calendar, rather than having to add a series of tasks:
- come up with new vacation calendar,
- submit new calendar for approval, while getting a new meeting set up,
- have new meeting,
- restart again?
Why is baseball (baseball, Jesus on a pogo stick!) supposed to make me “at ease” when I’m trying to get permission to take my vacation in several blocks instead of a single one, I have no idea. Baseball, of all things…
We did the project on target, on budget and on time. But it wasn’t thanks to baseball.
ETA: to me, chitchat during a meeting is not weird. What’s weird is chitchat after people have been seated and before the meeting’s targets have been met. Again, according to my coworkers this was pretty much SOP for non-techie bosses, and supposed to “put you at ease”.
I seem to have been under a misapprehension about the kind of people who get posted overseas. Presumably there’s X% or Y% unemployment among a particular species of techie in both countries, and if a company in Country A wants to post somebody to Country B, Country B requires them to show there’s no B-ish techie with the skills and experience to do that job. After all, they’ve got Y% unemployment in that sector. Continuing on from this, I began to think that only the generalist managers would make it over, since they’re at the level where business knowledge supersedes technical ability in importance. Therefore I’d thought you’d have people like mid-size branch factory managers going overseas to open a new location in Romania, using almost entirely local staff except for themselves.
As for the subject of talking to people about where they’re from, it can be patronizing, which would be a good example of the dangerous ground to which pdts was referring. Still, it can also be mistaken as such, particularly since the speaker is very apt to mention only the wonderful experiences they remember, rather than the times waiting for a bus at 11PM on a February night. That might actually be an American thing; since it was suggested in the earlier thread that Americans tend to be less blunt about things like this, and omitting the not-so-good things they might think about their travels.
So the person talking to you about their trip to your country probably doesn’t mean to single you out as an X-ish person. In the context of race relations that would be analogous to “you people” comments, or like always mentioning to African American acquaintances that you like their music–unless you know them very well. We understand the objectionable nature of such comments because they’re directed at the people themselves and their culture. But in merely recalling sights of a place or details of daily life there, not so much. Done to excess it’s a bore of course, as anything would be. In any case, it’s not anyone’s obligation to like it and I don’t think anyone expects them to, any more than psychologists like the perennial “nut” or “headshrinker” jokes they must get all the time.