What widely held misconceptions to foreigners have about your country?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
81

[QUOTE=Lars Aruns]
Well, I’m from Italy. I’m not really sure about what stereotypes are attributed to my country, so just ask ahead and I’ll let you know.

Apart from the one about pasta: in Italy people do eat a lot of pasta.
[/QUOTE]

Let’s see…you’re all in the mob, you have a little old grandmother that only speaks italian who lives with you and makes huge meals every day, you talk with your hands and you’re all really good lovers. (no need to tell me if that last one is false, I’d be happier going through life believing that) :wink:

I don’t actually believe any of those (except the last of course), but have heard them.

82

Scottish people:

wear kilts all the time,

eat nothing but deep fried offal,

are really tight with money,

all have ginger hair,

are completely incomprehensible,

are all begging on the streets of London,

are prone to aggression with knives and broken bottles,

were colonised by wankers, and

invented the modern world and everything in it.

There’s a bit of truth in all of those, maybe.

83

I’d be curious to hear about the Italian-English stereotypes and how they’d be different, considering that what most Americans consider to be Italian is supposedly from Sicily.

84

New Zealand is not an unspoilt verdant paradise with sweeping snowcapped mountain vistas everywhere: most of what you saw in Lord Of The Rings was shot either in the middle of nowhere, or in the middle of somewhere with the power lines and suburbs carefully out of shot. Most people live in cities, which are the same as cities elsewhere: some nice bits, some rough bits, pollution, traffic jams, muggings, murders and graffiti. And we have a huge suicide rate. It’s a nice enough place to live, but don’t expect some pristine pastoral utopia.

85

[QUOTE=fetus]
I’d be curious to hear about the Italian-English stereotypes and how they’d be different, considering that what most Americans consider to be Italian is supposedly from Sicily.
[/QUOTE]

I’m not quite sure what you mean here - do you mean British stereotypes of Italy? If so, they’re more heavily influenced by first-hand experience, albeit through the rose-tinted views of pleasant holiday destinations. Some of them certainly have a hint of truth about them (scary driving, maternal devotion…), but some are just loopy. Some Brits seem to get the impression that nobody in Italy never actually does any work, that they’re just laid-back and sit around in cafes all day. This perception is in no way due to the Brits sitting in those cafes all day themselves.

86

[QUOTE=fetus]
I’d be curious to hear about the Italian-English stereotypes and how they’d be different, considering that what most Americans consider to be Italian is supposedly from Sicily.
[/QUOTE]

I can tell you about Italian-Scottish stereotypes. They all own ice-cream parlours, or fish and chip shops! In fact, a lot of the best of these are/were owned by Italian families who migrated to Scotland in the early 20th century - mostly from the north of Italy. A lot of the original immigrants were escaping a peasant life to go into mineworking and steelworking, but a lot of families quickly established themselves otherwise with cafes and suchlike. The Forte family - who ended up very rich with hotels - started of with small establishments in mining areas of Central Scotland, for example.

87

[QUOTE=alice_in_wonderland]
Another Canadian one.

No, you REALLY don’t want to bump into a grizzly bear during our hike.

[/QUOTE]

That’s funny. I found myself explaining the same thing to my cousins who were over from Europe: You really do not want to encounter a grizzly in the wild if you are on foot. I tried to explain it to them: “Take a pit bull dog and multiply by thirty. That’s a grizzly bear.”

I’ve encountered a few large black bears in the wild while on foot and that was very scary. I would literally poop my pants if I rounded a corner and ran into a grizzly.

88

[QUOTE=MelCthefirst]
Whilst I agree with you on most of your foreigner misconceptions, I have to say that Japanese people in the northern area I lived do eat dog, but it would be unusual for the rest of Japan. Also, Japan is very homogenous in many areas - in the towns I lived there was only one family that was half Philipino half Japanese and they only came back to the town because the parents split. People who were different, ie me and the aforementioned family were very rare.
[/QUOTE]

I’ll be honest and say that it’s the first time I’ve heard of people eating dog in Japan. But as you say, that’s an extremely local thing and absolutely unthinkable in most of the country. That actually goes to prove my second point about difference. If you go to rural areas, you’re going to find lots of hamlets where everyone has the same family name. You can still find kids who have never seen foreigners.

Take a step back, however, and look at the whole country and you see a lot of culture differences from region to region, even village to village. Just look at the amazing variety of festivals there are. There are dialects that are not mutually intelligible. There are Okinawans and Ainus, Aomori fishermen and Shinbashi businessmen, Shingon pilgrims and Ginza hostesses. There are Karuizawa nobles and Naniwa yankees. There is Kiyoshi Hikawa and there is Merzbow, Seiji Ozawa and Kumi Koda, Yasujiro Ozu and Yasuda Dai-Circus…

At least five percent of the people around where I live are Brazilian. There are hundreds of thousands of zainichi Koreans. There is Alex Santos, Marcus Tulio, Ruy Ramos, Akebono, Konishiki, Musashimaru, Viktor Staruchin and Yu Darvish. There is Goncharov, Lotte, family-run Indian restaurants and the Turkish ice cream guy.

The misconception is not that there is homogeneity at the local level – there is. It’s not also that overall Japan is more homogeneous than American – it is. It’s the exaggeration of just how uniform the country is, where you end up with a caricature where everyone looks alike, thinks alike and talks alike. That’s the misconception I was pointing out.

89

[QUOTE=Alessan]

  1. The amount of people I know who own handguns. It’s not uncommon, but it’s hardly the rule, and most people who own then need them (for instance, their work takes them in or near the Territories).
    [/quote]

Yes, But I could say the same: the only person I know who owns a handgun has it for his job. (passenger airline pilot :eek: )

Fair enough.

Yes, but this thread is about debunking such misconceptions. I honestly don’t know how enthusiastic the average American is about guns. Do you?

90

A couple more about Canada - that our national healthcare is the best thing in the WORLD!!! (Michael Moore is partly to blame for that.) Our national healthcare is a system seriously in need of major overhauling.

French is indeed our second national language, but outside of Quebec, you can live your life comfortably without knowing a word of it, especially on the Prairies. I’ve know extremely few French/English bilingual people in my life. Maybe we all should be bilingual, but we just aren’t. This one kind of gets up my nose - whenever someone represents Canada, they usually use something French to represent us. That just isn’t an accurate representation of much outside of Quebec, and Quebec is not Canada. Heck, they barely tolerate being part of Canada.

I will cop to the foreign concept of Canadians being more cold tolerant, though. I WILL swim and wear t-shirts and shorts at much lower temperatures than a lot of Americans. :smiley:

91

[QUOTE=Lars Aruns]
Well, I’m from Italy. I’m not really sure about what stereotypes are attributed to my country, so just ask ahead and I’ll let you know.

Apart from the one about pasta: in Italy people do eat a lot of pasta.
[/QUOTE]

“Them Italians, they all thieves.” “Well, yeah, but they learnt it from El Gran Capitán.”

My experience in Italy was that they did eat a lot of pasta, much more than I expected - I was considered weird because sometimes I didn’t put cheese on it.

My brother came back from a trip to Italy and uttered the immortal words “I never thought I’d say this… but Mom, feed me veggies!” In Spain, a two-dish lunch consists of
pasta-based or rice based or veggies or salad
(if the first hasn’t been a salad, there may be a salad in the center that’s not counted as a dish)
fish or meat
dessert (cheese or fruit, usually)

In Italy (two stays, near Saronno and near Venice) the first always seemed to be pasta, veggies and salads being in the same group as the fish and meat. This would never have occurred to us; in Spain we have the idea that, while the French eat weird, the Italians eat “like us but more pasta”.

92

[QUOTE=Antinor01]
Let’s see…you’re all in the mob, you have a little old grandmother that only speaks italian who lives with you and makes huge meals every day, you talk with your hands and you’re all really good lovers.
[/QUOTE]

Let’s go through them in order:
[ol]
[li]No, it’s the politicians that are all in the mob! :-)[/li][li]Well, those who have grandmas keep in touch with them and often don’t live very far, and in these conditions them cooking meals for the extended family is common. I also knew many families that take in good old Grandma when she’s old enough to require some assistance. As for why the grannies cook so much, consider that ladies old enough to be grandmothers have been through at least one World War, when eating a lot was a good thing because tomorrow you might not have anything.[/li][li]True. In another thread I mentioned the joke about the best way to make an Italian shut up: you tie his hands behind his back.[/li][li]True as well, of course buffs fungernails, stares at them.[/li][/ol]

[QUOTE=Antinor01]
(no need to tell me if that last one is false, I’d be happier going through life believing that) :wink:

[/QUOTE]

Well well, whoopsie. :slight_smile:

93

[QUOTE=Struan]
I can tell you about Italian-Scottish stereotypes. They all own ice-cream parlours, or fish and chip shops! In fact, a lot of the best of these are/were owned by Italian families who migrated to Scotland in the early 20th century - mostly from the north of Italy. A lot of the original immigrants were escaping a peasant life to go into mineworking and steelworking, but a lot of families quickly established themselves otherwise with cafes and suchlike. The Forte family - who ended up very rich with hotels - started of with small establishments in mining areas of Central Scotland, for example.
[/QUOTE]

Good points. Many of the Italians I met in Britain that have been here a long time tend to come from families of owners of restaurants or ice cream parlours. Many of more recent immigrants (we’re talking about a generation ago) ended up being hairdressers, don’t ask me why. Even now in Newcastle there are quite a few barbershops and hairdressers manned by Italians. Mrs Aruns doesn’t like them, she says they’re nosy and concentrate more on the conversation than on the haircut. :dubious: I am just passing the opinion, of course.

94

[QUOTE=Nava]
“Them Italians, they all thieves.” “Well, yeah, but they learnt it from El Gran Capitán.”
[/QUOTE]

Well, whenever Italians emigrated, they tended to end up at the bottom of the social pecking order, and thieves often tend to spring from among the ones at the bottom.

[QUOTE=Nava]
My experience in Italy was that they did eat a lot of pasta, much more than I expected - I was considered weird because sometimes I didn’t put cheese on it.
[/QUOTE]

Well, cheese (not any cheese, but Parmigiano or Grana, or maybe Pecorino in certain case) enriches the flavour and absorbs excess humidity (it can happen). Only for vegetable or meat based sauces, not fish or seafood! My sister puts Parmigiano on pasta with tuna and tomato sauce. Bleagh.

[QUOTE=Nava]
In Italy (two stays, near Saronno and near Venice) the first always seemed to be pasta, veggies and salads being in the same group as the fish and meat. This would never have occurred to us; in Spain we have the idea that, while the French eat weird, the Italians eat “like us but more pasta”.
[/QUOTE]

Well, there are pasta recipes with plenty of veggies, and rice recipes as well, for your first course. Vegetables also tend to turn up as side dishes, like salads, yes, and are supposed to accompany the second course (meat or fish). This in very general terms, mind you, there can be many, many exceptions.

I read about another commonplace about Italians, related to their famed loving capabilities: men have a high rate of mixed marriages abroad. That’s also true, local women just can’t resist us! As for why Italian men are so interested in foreign women, that must be because Italian women are so demanding. The average Italian woman tends to be an overdressed, over-made up and overreacting harridan with an aquiline nose and an overdeveloped sense of her own beauty. Think Nancy Dell’Olio.

For some mysterious reason an arms race of sorts developed, with Italian women being more and more inaccessible (I’m not joking, when I moved to the UK I was surprised at girls being so much more accepting of strangers accosting them, and hooking up so much more easily) and Italian men having to be more and more artful. A bit like predators and preys. Maybe for this reason, mixed marriages with Italian women and non-Italian men are much less common. A friend of mine, an Italian girl living here in the UK, said she had to give up on local boys (whom she liked at first) because they would give up quickly and never, in her opinion, making much of an effort if they saw she wasn’t going to fall in their laps.

95

[QUOTE=Lars Aruns]
Well, whenever Italians emigrated, they tended to end up at the bottom of the social pecking order, and thieves often tend to spring from among the ones at the bottom.
[/quote]

Oh, no, this refers to the ones IN Italy. Nobody in Spain would think of my grandmother as Italian, even though her lastname is Zanni. Italians in Italy are perfectly happy to overcharge anybody who looks like a tourist, but then, my foreparents had a blooming industry selling “a piece of one of Roland’s lances” to French pilgrims to Santiago just a few years after the battle of Roncesvalles…

Yes, but for us “pasta with veggies” is still “pasta not veggies.” Our veggies have either no carbs or potatoes for the carbs. I saw lentils a couple times in a 3-months stay, at home we’d have “beans” twice a week. About the only side dishes we use are salads (which can also be first dishes) and we get them out for the first, not the second. You know, “it’s the little differences…”

I still feel right at home in Italy, even if sometimes people look at me funny for not wanting Parmigiano on my spaghetti (lactose intolerance, if I have cheese every day there’s Consequences).

96

Well, while I was in Canada, I met a few people who had misconceptions about the Caribbean. Afew of them are:
that all the islands in the caribbean are very close together(Well the Caribbean stretches from Florida to Venezuala. Takes me 3-4hrs flying to get from the northern most island, Grand Bahama, to the Southern most Island, Trinidad)

same climate( Wrong, Febuary in Nassau,Bahamas is cool and dry. Port of Spain,Trinidad is hot and humid)
same culture(Trinidad has a different ethnic makeup compared to Jamaica or Barbados)

All countries in the Caribbean are single Islands(false)

97

[QUOTE=Nava]
Oh, no, this refers to the ones IN Italy. Nobody in Spain would think of my grandmother as Italian, even though her lastname is Zanni. Italians in Italy are perfectly happy to overcharge anybody who looks like a tourist, but then, my foreparents had a blooming industry selling “a piece of one of Roland’s lances” to French pilgrims to Santiago just a few years after the battle of Roncesvalles…
[/QUOTE]

Oh, that. Well, what can I say, if you go to, say, the Colosseum in July when it’s 40 degrees without taking any water with you, and then decide to go to the convenient seller right next to the entrance of the Colosseum, it’s not surprising they charge you through the nose, right? That’s not so much about Italians, it’s about tourist traps and overcharging tourists that don’t know any better. I found ludicrously high prices in London and in Oslo, should I now say that all English and all Norwegians are thieves? :slight_smile:

98

[QUOTE=Lars Aruns]
Good points. Many of the Italians I met in Britain that have been here a long time tend to come from families of owners of restaurants or ice cream parlours. Many of more recent immigrants (we’re talking about a generation ago) ended up being hairdressers, don’t ask me why.
[/QUOTE]

That’s easy – in post-austerity Britain of the fifties–early sixties, Italian meant style. If you went to an ordinary barber’s, you came out with a short-back-and-sides, looking like your dad. If you wanted a Tony Curtis you had to go to an Italian. And then you went to somewhere like Minchella’s in South Shields, and drank frothy coffee, listening to Elvis Presley on the jukebox.

[QUOTE=Lars Aruns]
Even now in Newcastle there are quite a few barbershops and hairdressers manned by Italians. Mrs Aruns doesn’t like them, she says they’re nosy and concentrate more on the conversation than on the haircut. :dubious: I am just passing the opinion, of course.
[/QUOTE]

I think that’s just a “hairdresser” thing, rather than an “Italian” thing.

99

Brits don’t all have bad teeth… most kids these days get sent to the orthodontist at 13 for braces if they need them.

I, for one, have lovely nashers.

100

[QUOTE=featherlou]
French is indeed our second national language, but outside of Quebec, you can live your life comfortably without knowing a word of it, especially on the Prairies. I’ve know extremely few French/English bilingual people in my life. Maybe we all should be bilingual, but we just aren’t. This one kind of gets up my nose - whenever someone represents Canada, they usually use something French to represent us. That just isn’t an accurate representation of much outside of Quebec, and Quebec is not Canada. Heck, they barely tolerate being part of Canada.
[/QUOTE]
Well, it’s the fault of the character Blacque Jacques Shellacque on the Bugs Bunny cartoons. :wink:

Seriously, your post (and I think it was Ginger’s somewhere above), remind me of the times I’ve been travelling and encountered someone who, after finding I’m Canadian, asks me to speak French, or compliments me on my French-accentless English. A former business associate from Boston, who made her first visit to Canada for a series of meetings at our office, told me how relieved she was to find that everyone she met up here spoke English–she was worried that we’d all be speaking French, and she wouldn’t understand a word. Other associates visiting from the US and overseas who knew English was the language of our business have expressed surprise that they weren’t hearing French used outside of business, such as in the company caf, or in bars and restaurants.

I don’t know where this misconception comes from. I’ve been coast-to-coast in Canada, and except for Quebec, have never had a problem using English. (I will admit to trying my French in Quebec, although more often than not, I botch it somehow and the person with whom I’m speaking turns to English to help me out.) Even in the French-speaking areas of northern Ontario and New Brunswick, everybody speaks English willingly enough. Most ironically of all, I know more Francophones here in Alberta than I ever did when I lived in Ontario, and they simply accept that English is the local language–although they do have a few laughs when I try to practice my French with them. But they are nice about it and helpful too.

You may be right with your idea that the PTB always select something French to represent us. Let’s not forget Raymond Chretien (from Quebec and the PM’s nephew to boot) was Canada’s ambassador to the USA for some years–wonder if his posting had anything to do with how the US saw us? Though it wouldn’t explain how the rest of the world thought we were French.