Sunday, November 16, 2008

Etiquette 101: What the World Thinks About Us

I was reading Conde Nast Traveler in the hope of someday getting to travel to just a tenth of the places the issue highlighted and came across a great article about American etiquette. The Article provided some interesting insights about American culture and where exactly foreigners get lost in our in your face, overly friendly, desparate need for persocal space culture. Unfortunately the most interesting part on the artcle is not available online, my favorite part were the exerpts from foreign guidebooks to the US. These exerpts were the most telling because each exerpt was from a different country explaining how the french, british, and chinese explain US culture and customs. These explanations said the most about what they think of the US, the best I thought was the French hate that we take picking up dog droppings so seriosuly, maybe not the most telling about our culture as our conversation habits but walking around Nice and Paris a certain sidewalk decoration was hard to avoid!

1 comment:

John Hervey said...

haha, it's funny you mention the French and their issue with picking up dog-doo..I noticed that they also don't like to use leashes. I could swear I saw the 3 same dogs just wandering around the neighborhood of Paris, in which I stayed, for the entire week I was there haha.