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Originally Posted by HarryT
Please don't think I'm singling out Americans - I'm not. I've come across tourists of every nationality who make me want to cringe, and the British are certainly no exception. I certainly don't think that Americans are any more prone to being "bad tourists" than any other nation is.
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There are two groups of tourists: the (often) well-to-do herds (often coach trips) and the family groups (size varying between 1 and 5 persons) The first group, I tend to ignore (usually, they only compare everything with what they have back home, and somehow, back home is always better...). The second group is great fun to be around and they are generally very interrested in the culture of the country they're visiting (I think the first group only pretends to be interrested, just so they can say at home "I've been in ....!".)
I always try to speak the language of the country I'm in (unless it's a real exotic one, like Poland, Slowakia or even worse, Hungary, couldn't even speak one word of these countries when we were there last summer. Luckily, nobody expected us to...) But the first thing I always ask, is what language they speak. My French speaking ability is less than nill, my German and English are adaquate. Generally, you can survive on a mixture of your own language, any other language you may speak and hands and feet.
(when I once ordered some traintickets in Hamburg, for the night train from Berlin to Vienna, I started in German and after two sentences the person behind the counter switched to English... Maybe the amount of English words in my German sentences gave away that my German wasn't really that good
)
I never expect people to speak the language of my country, but I do expect them to at least make a semblance of trying...
Quote:
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Originally Posted by fromt the link posted by Sparrow
An encounter with a rude taxi driver, or a Parisian waiter who shouts at customers who cannot speak fluent French, might be laughed off by those from other Western cultures.
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Personally, if something like that happened to me, I'd probably pick up my stuff and go somewhere else... And if I put that beside the study done here, about tourists from the Netherlands where the French complained about us not speaking
their language fluently...
