No. of Recommendations: 11
My two "favorite" Ugly American" stories (well four if you count my contributions):
1) Back during the 1970's we were in Paris watching a couple of middle aged Americans. He was wearing Bermuda shorts, sandals with white socks, a bucket hat and had a camera around his neck. She was doing the screaming as she held up a fist full of US dollars; yelling at a French taxi driver whose car they had just let "But this is REAL money".
2) During the mid-1980's when all things were possible for the Japanese, a major Japanese electronics company was kind enough to take us as one of their 25 biggest resellers on an all-expenses paid, top-shelf 10-day tour of Japan. While taking the Shinkansen (bullet-train) from Tokyo to Kyoto, some of the American guys apparently had too much to drink and started rolling beer bottles noisily down the length of the carriage. There is no describing how embarrassed I was - especially considering the fact that Japanese take this sort of behaviors socially appalling.
A few days earlier, I had committed by own faux pas. We were taken to a geisha show and, at the bar, before the show, our hosts asked what we would like to drink. For no reason that I have ever figured out, while there are a number of very good Japanese beers and the bar was stocked with a broad variety of Western booze, I ordered a Guinness stout. Everyone got their drink except me and I decided to say nothing and watch everyone else take their sips. About ten minutes later, a waiter, accompanied by the club's owner, brought me a bottle of Guinness on a silver tray. Apparently, I had ordered something they didn't have in stock. Rather than have my hosts lose face by telling me that, they had found a bottle somewhere at some other bar and brought it to me. I now had to both show my appreciation for the wonderful elixir, yet not drink all of it - which would have forced my hosts to buy me another bottle of what must have been the world's most expensive beer.
About a decade later I visited the same firm in Tokyo and three of their executives took my wife and I to a hotel restaurant for lunch. Accompanying one of the fish dishes, the restaurant served lemon wedges in small clamps with perforations for the juice to run out. A said I hadn't seen that gadget befor3e and said it was "clever". They wanted to buy them from the hotel and present them to me and I objected strenuously (as I figured the hotel would take advantage of them and charge an arm and a leg to sell their "silverware:. Anyway after a while, I prevailed. Later that day, my wife and I dropped into Takashimaya department store and bought half a dozen of them for about a buck each. Three months later, I was at my office desk when a FedEx envelope showed up with a Boston hotel as the return address. Inside was a hotel shoe-shine mitt holding six lemon squeezers. I guess the executive waited until the next time he visited their near-Boston American headquarters and took the opportunity to save face for the company. We now have a matched set of 12 lemon squeezers (which I can't remember ever using).
Jeff
