"EvelynVogtGamble(Divamanque)" wrote in message
...


wrote:
hopitus wrote:

On Jul 2, 4:18 pm, wrote:

"EvelynVogtGamble(Divamanque)" wrote:

Lesley wrote:

In the end they almost wanted to come back and hire me as a tour
guide.... but after all the things I told them when I mentioned
the
Minnie Lansbury clock they asked "Is she related to Angela
Lansbury" (Sort of Minnie was her grandfathers first wife when
the
clock needed work done she put 5K or so into the fund) and shot
off
to take photos

....And then we wonder why American tourists have a bad reputation
in
Europe! At least, in the UK they are justified in expecting the
natives
to speak English. (One of the prime complaints against us in other
countries.)

I don't understand. What did she say that was objectionable? I mean,
she was on the right track, wasn't she? Minnie *did* have a
connection
with Angela, if not by blood, then by marriage, so how was this an
example of being an obnoxious tourist?
You are right; she did NOT say anything objectionable. What I believe
Lesley
was LOL pointing out was not a big deal of Merkin tourists being
"obnoxious"
but simply pointing out that as tourists out of USA , they have the
attention
span of a gnat when someone *they ask* on the street (a stranger, if
you will)
tries to inform them of the answer to their historical
question......they run off
to shoot photos of the local sights . Kinda airhead behavior but not
obnoxious,
just thoughtless.
Feel free to disagree with my interpretation.

OK, no problem. I don't disagree. I was just thrown off because first,
the story didn't sound very bad to me, and then Evelyn was talking about
people expecting people to speak English? What did that have to do with
anything?

Americans abroad! Unfortunately a great many American tourists address
French and German and Italian natives in English and expect them to reply.
Without taking the trouble to at least learn "Do you speak English?" in
their language (Along with "please", "thank you", "pardon me" and a few
other polite phrases - plus a few like "where is the lavatory"?)

That last one is easy. About 25 years ago my kids (who were adults) and I
visited six countries in Europe. We did know "please" and "thank you" in
several languages, but other than that, our non-English was what little we
remembered from high school Spanish (and we didn't visit Spain). However,
we learned early on that in any country we visited, all you had to do was
look slightly desperate and say, "Toilet?" (pronounced twa-LET) and we were
understood and directed to the nearest loo.

We're all voracious readers, so we had picked up a few phrases we didn't
realize we knew. Other things we finally figured out. For instance, in
Germany, every so often we'd see an arrow-shaped sign saying "Einbahn". We
had picked up a few of the "bahn" words, but that wasn't one of them. For a
few days we wondered what the einbahn was, but we never found it. Finally
we realized the sign meant "one way".

Joy


Joy