You mean Norwegians and Danish and Germans and Finnish and Swiss aren’t all blonde? Darn! Excuse me while I inform several million Spaniards…
For some reason Austrians are expected to have dark hair. It’s like the Anschluss was about using Schwarzkopf products or something.
The embarassing thing is that the Hasselhoff thing isn’t completely wrong, just 17 years out of date and a bit blown out of proportion.
Two things came together ca. 1989/1990. The TV market had been liberalized a few years before and private broadcasters grew in importance. In their early years they kept their programming cheap and relied on game shows, soft porn and imported series. I was nine to ten at the time and series like The Fall Guy, The A-Team, Airwolf and Knightrider on those slightly forbidden channels were unbelievably appealing because they were so different from the children’s programming on the public channels. Among the kids of the time Hasselhoff was a star as an actor. This ensured more attention than he deserved as a singer and provided part of his audience as a singer. Add to that an unhealthy appetite for unoffensive emotional pop music in large parts of the population combined with media that were happy to promote a safe international family-friendly star and the inevitable happened. That his success in Germany was so disproportionate also helped because the German market was important to him and he would actually appear in person relatively often.
I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m gonna have to ask for a cite, here.
Do you have references for US (or Israeli, or anywhere for that matter) gun-ownership statistics? It seems the gun-control debate in this country (US) is so bogged down in ideology that one never sees such things.
Funny, I don’t recall any widely held misconceptions about the US from my travels abroad. Nor from foreigners visiting. I’m sure they exist, though.
Well, ok, that version is ALMOST true. You will be billed later. But all of the hospitals are used to having a certain percentage of people being unable to pay. The debt will eventually get written off, and you’re not going to go to jail or anything for not being able to pay it. It may hurt your credit, though.
True. We are legally unable to turn someone who needs medical care away, which is really, all in all, a good thing. It’s one of the big issues in our current illegal immigration shitstorm, though. People come over from other countries, knowing they’ll be given good medical care, and never intending to pay (or knowing they’ll never be able to afford it). I fully support treating these people, because I’m human and because I believe healthcare is a human right, but it leaves a lot of hospitals in the lurch. A certain percentage of patients won’t be able to pay, this is true, but when that percentage goes higher than the system can handle, then we have problems.
Anyway, I think there’s a caricature of Americans abroad–we’re all fat, we have no culture, we’re xenophobic and ignorant, etc.–but I’m not sure many people actually believe it. It’s certainly true of some, but not of all. The one myth I hope no one believes is that we all support George Bush. That’s never been true!
I am really disappointed upon hearing these two things.
As for myself, I’ll skip the US, since there’s so many US Dopers, and go straight to India.
[ul]
[li]Not everyone is so poor they have to scrabble in the dirt for their food. Their is a middle class, and an upper class, and the flithy rich. Their percentages are small but growing.[/li][li] While there are child brides the age for marrying off young women has grown older with the years.[/li][li]Not every marriage is arranged.[/li][li]Not every person is vegetarian.[/li][/ul]
I’m sure there are many more but these are the most common.
It’s not uncommon to find ice on the ground here in Tampa on the Fourth of July. It’s usually been spilled out of a drink or someone’s cooler.
I remember dialing into a BBS in Texas (ooh, I’m old) and using the new-fangled “chat” feature to talk to a local user:
“Canada? Wow. How are you powering your computer?”
“I have a 3.5mhz Z80 with 80k of RAM.”
“No, how are you powering your computer? Do you have a generator?”
Heh.
She’s possibly thinking of Henrik Larsson, whose father is from Cape Verde.
I don’t know - there is a TV show hear, Top Gear, that a few months back did a piece about a road trip from Miami to New Orleans, full of those those sort of caricatures. It was obviously tongue-in-cheek, but I on some boards I frequent (not this one) I was to depressed by how many of my countrymen seemed to think that there was a lot, rather than a tiny tiny amount, of truth in it. And there is a widespread idea about Americans being poorly educated, which goes completely against my experience, and arguably against fact (America having so many top universities, accounts I have read of how much better educated American troops in WW2 were than their British counterparts). But most of the Americans I have interacted with are either on this board or people on work assignments in the UK, who probably tended to be college educated, so mine might not be a representative sample.
Didn’t know that. He definitely looks less black than Martin Dahlin, though.
Some of us, me included, would love to hear about this.
That one! You been a mind reader for long?
He knew you were going to ask that.
[quote=Anaamika[As for myself, I’ll skip the US, since there’s so many US Dopers[/quote]
Well, I suppose:
[ul]
[li]We’re not all enormously obese.[/li][li]We’re not all oblivious to the effect we have on the world. We don’t traipse through the world thinking we’re the only thing that matters.[/li][li]We don’t all feel it’s the best country in the world. And some of us, even though we love it, do see its flaws.[/li][li]Not all of us voted for Dubya.[/li][li]We also are not oblivious to the fact that our respect in the international community has plummeted in recent years.[/li][/ul]
That’s what I can think of off-hand. Perhaps someone else can come up with others.
I don’t have any interesting observations about the US. (The number one question I am asked about the US by Bulgarians is: “Is America nice?” It rarely gets more complex than that…altough today my sixth graders wanted to know if there were any gypsies in America.) I’ll just mention the one I’ve heard about Bulgaria: that it’s really cold here. Because it’s in Eastern Europe, and as we all know, Eastern Europe is very cold. Yeah, it snows in the winter, but Bulgaria is in the Balkans - you know, southeastern Europe? It neighbors Greece and Turkey, which, of course, are famous for their freezing weather.
I’ve even heard something like this from my mom, who you’d think would know where I am. I said something about going to the sea, and she said “what sea? The North Sea?” Gah.
Thought of another one…
Myth: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police always wear their “Dudley Do-Right” red uniforms and ride horses in order to undertake their police duties. This may arise from episodes of “That 70s Show,” where the kids drive into Canada to buy beer; and/or from Michael Moore’s Canadian Bacon, or it may be older. But it’s untrue.
Fact: While RCMP constables do have the red uniforms, those are their ceremonial dress uniforms. You see them in such places as citzenship court, colour guards, and places where tourists gather (on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, for example). For everyday wear, an RCMP constable’s uniform is much the same as any other police officer: according to Wikipedia, it is “a grey shirt with dark blue tie, dark blue trousers with gold strapping, regular patrol boots called “ankle boots”, regular duty equipment, and a regular policeman’s style cap.”
The horses are for ceremonial use too: parades and such. Normally, the RCMP uses regular police cars for patrols, although it has other equipment (but not dogsleds) it can use as necessary. Overall, the RCMP functions as a police force that also has the scientific, technological, and other capabilities of the FBI.
The modern RCMP personnel and their organization are far, far different from the red-uniformed horse-riding buffoons that are portrayed in Dudley Do-Right cartoons.
I knew that, Spoons, but those dress uniforms are fabulous!
I have a rather localized US one – New Orleans, to be precise, concerning Mardi Gras. Yes, the debauchery happens – but only in part of the Quarter. You go outside of that area, and it turns into a family thing. You do not have to flash your tits for beads; in fact, in most of the city and surrounds you can get arrested for doing that. All you have to do is show up at a parade and you can get craploads of them.
Can we do localized ones?
If so, why does every tourist guide ever written present Montreal’s Underground City as some sort of magical grotto of wonders? Yes, it’s supposedly the largest one in the world, and yes, it’s quite convenient, especially in winter. But it’s malls, people. With tunnels between them. OOO A BABY GAP!!
And yet tourists are constantly asking me, in tones of breathless anticipation, “How do we get to the Underground City?” I shrug and go, “Just go into any of these buildings, but really, all it is is a bunch of malls…” Listen, go to the basilica, or the Canadian history museum, or the Old Port, or go climb up the mountain or something. I’m sure you can see malls at home.
That’s what I hate about traveling with other people. I was in a group of 40 college kids from Arizona, and I couldn’t believe all the people who wanted to “see” McDonald’s and Starbucks in Jerusalem.
Some local ones in California:
You would not be well-advised to wear swimsuits or shorts on all of our beaches all year round. You’d freeze if you tried that in San Francisco, even in the summer.
On the subject of San Francisco: San Francisco and LA are not close to each other. They’re between a 6 and an 8 hour drive apart, depending on traffic and road conditions.
Note to European tourists: It will take you about five days to drive across the US. And that’s driving 8 hours per day, on freeways/interstate highways, with no side trips.
Could that have something to do with the fact that foreign languages are not a mandatory subject in our schools? There are quite a few Americans who are very well educated, but who only speak English. I know educated people who speak only one language are less common in some other parts of the world.
So start sending us some XXXX! I tried it when I was in Australia, and like it, but I can’t get it here 