"What happened to the Ugly American, the one with the loud shirt and the loud voice, expecting the natives to speak English? Has he been shouldered aside by the Arrogant French?
That’s the conclusion one could draw from a survey this month of 4,500 hotel owners around the world who rated the French the world’s worst tourists, bad at foreign languages, arrogant and tight-fisted. Spaniards, deemed noisy and messy, came second in a field of 27. Americans ranked 9th on the list of the top 10 best."
That’s the conclusion one could draw from a survey this month of 4,500 hotel owners around the world who rated the French the world’s worst tourists, bad at foreign languages, arrogant and tight-fisted. Spaniards, deemed noisy and messy, came second in a field of 27. Americans ranked 9th on the list of the top 10 best."
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I knew we Americans got a bad rap. The Ugly American stereotype is one conjured up from ignorance. Honestly, almost all Americans we came across in our travels were anything but the loud and obnoxious bumpkins we are portrayed as. In fact, most of our fellow countrymen seemed eager to immerse themselves in a new culture and tended to be very mellow. For example, we encountered many cheap and loud foreigners in Pamplona last year that spoke English. Problem was they weren't Americans; they were Aussies. In the streets of Madrid there were plenty of drunk bubbas stumbling about in English. Yanks? No, they were Brits on a bender with their mates. Maybe in the non English speaking parts of Europe people assume all people who speak English are Americans thus we are guilty by association. Who knows.
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