No. of Recommendations: 2
Jeff, those are sweet and understandable "faux pas" of yours that show only that you paid attention to the differences in culture, appreciated and learned from it.
The "real dollar" story is one I remember quite well. We were at a restaurant in Portugal, having once again an amazing meal. Though we didn't speak Portuguese, our server was fluent in French, which my foreign language education professional parents handled fluently and I was proficient in. All of a sudden, we hear from another table "Why can't you use REAL money!," from a little old blue haired woman travelling solo. Since she was clearly distressed, and our server spoke no English, Dad got up and helped her out. He later apologized profusely for our fellow countryman and tipped the server well. Another life long lesson for my then 16 year old brain. There were many other times when I was older, typically on public transportation, where a fellow American traveler was talking about things they should not be, expecting that all around them was just as ignorant about foreign languages as they were, but I just ignored them.
But it's not always the Americans that are ugly. When I was 17 I was an Au Pair in France for 15 months. I joined Mom and Dad for a week in Paris when they brought a group of my classmates from high school, (I graduated as a Junior,) on a class trip. Mom was the French teacher at my high school. I was hanging out with my American friends in the Montmartre neighborhood, admiring the sidewalk artists, and of course acting like the bunch of small town high school girls we were. Assuming none of us spoke French, or perhaps not caring, the artist made suggestive lewd comments to us in French. Momentarily stunned when I used my considerable by then language skills to slap him up the side of the face verbally for his rudeness, he seemed to decide it was a great opportunity that I spoke French and continued with his suggestions. In France, American women were considered then as French women were considered here...loose and easy. It was not the first time I dealt with that in my time there, and I had learned to choose to accept that peculiarity as a strange unwanted compliment, but frankly it happened enough in their 7 day stay to my friends as well that they mentioned it as an issue when I asked then how they liked France. The inappropriate attention was not always verbal, and I learned to be very careful about being in a group when out and about. I tried to liken it to going to NYC and having construction workers yell inappropriate things across the street as you passed by, (a VERY creepy experience of mine at 16,) but this was a thing in small town France as well. And no, it wasn't because of the way we were dressed, but because they heard us speak American. The British Au Pair I sometimes hung out with did not experience the same issue, nor did my French friends who were dressed much more provocatively than I. I confess it was not only in France that I experienced this issue, (having done all of my literal face slapping in Europe,) but I suspect I should no longer have that problem today, 45 years later. :-)
Cultural differences, (and Mediterranean men,) can be tricky.
IP,
sadly with several other examples of the above, starting at 12 in Greece
