Americans overseas who embarrass all Americans

I think that's a very extreme example. We see more of this sort.

You have my sympathy. :sigh:


But, to be fair, tourists in general are obnoxious. When I lived in a tourist destination in Tennessee, we coined a term "touron." Tourist + moron.

The stupid git in the OP reportedly works here.

There are dereogetory terms everywhere. Grockle is used in the west country/south coast. In Cornwall they go even further, an Emmet is someone who is NOT from Cornwall. Guess we're all Emmets now.

Australians of that certain age can be just as bad. I was in a pub in Galway one day, when i was briefly living in Ireland, and a tour bus full of Americans and Australians of the Dubya-Dubya Two generation burst in the front door. All of us headed out the back door. When we were just leaving the alley behind the pub, we could still hear them shouting for drinks.

Is the word "ugly" just a synonym for "obnoxious"? Well, since the U.S. had 55,000 Americans die in the effort to save South Korea from invaders 60 years ago, perhaps it is acceptable for some Americans to be obnoxious in South Korea? Also, I encounter many immigrants here in NYC that have no concept of the British or American penchant for getting in a line, and not pushing ahead (queues in Britain). I should add the non-western habit of not using a handkerchief (finger closing one nostril and blowing out). Also, the habit of not holding a door for the person behind you seems to be a western social mores.

There is so much subjective obnoxia in the world, if one is judging from one's own social mores. Let's not forget about eating with one's fingers (well, we need the oil, so we'll forget about this one).

Oh, I forgot that speaking Chinese requires one to raise and lower one's voice to speak correctly. In effect, hearing a person shouting in Chinese in a subway car is not always appreciated.

Considering there are a number of countries that would not exist, except for the presence of the American military, why be so fussy about us? (Americans have died in behalf of foreign nations, and many times never got anything back but a perfunctory thank you, in my opinion. I do not include France and Britain in my list of ungrateful nations.)

A few years ago I travelled to Indonesia on a business trip and my group and I (a bunch of techie engineers from the East Coast of the US) visited one of their natural area, a dormant volcano.

First of all, the Indonesian people didn't seem to have much respect for their own national park, but even more noticeably, the group of Japanese tourists who were walking ahead of us on the nature trail through the supposedly pristine natural environment, were littering the whole way. We could see them eating and drinking and just throwing their trash right on the trail.

I was particularly surprised since I had always thought the Japanese were one of the more fastidious and "nature aware" people around. But this group certainly wasn't.

I think there's a lot of "ugly" to go around.

While there might be a lot of "'ugly' to go around," there are few countries, I believe, that have "redeeming factors" that makes the "ugly" of little consequence. Most countries are totally self-absorbed, and have allies in name only, I believe.

It might be that the classifications we are using are too broad. For instance, instead of saying "ugly americans", it might be more accurate to say, "ugly rednecks", or "ugly bankers". Maybe that group of Japanese were unrepresentative of the general population. Maybe that was a tourist group of traveling anarchists or something.

That's not so hard to understand, if you live over here. You see, in Japan and Korea, staff are hired to pick up trash daily, so the hikers know that someone will be along shortly to pick up all their trash. I had a hard time with that for a while, but eventually figured it out, since the parks weren't, after all, huge trash heaps. While I still think individual responsibility for one's own trash is better, I've come to understand that traditions differ and are not necessarily inferior for being different.

There was nothing in your link that says the man was an American. All it says is a "black man".

I can't think of an upside to this thread and wonder why you posted it.

Exactly!

You beat me to the punch, Setanta.
Out of fairness to Americans, I was just about to declare that people from my own country can be an embarrassment, too.
When I used to travel a lot more, I used to avoid Kuta (Bali) for that very reason. It was (probably still is) full of Australians behaving badly. Horrible.

But hey, to be fair to everyone, I don't think bad behavior in public is necessarily the characteristic of the citizens of any particular country, really .... it's just that you cringe a whole lot more when they are from your own.

The most embarrassing moment I can recall, off the top of my head: standing in a ticket que at a railway station in Amsterdam quite a few years ago, I struck up a conversation with the woman who was standing behind me. Who turned out to be an America & who turned out to be very LOUD. After declaring that Europe was a real let-down, not half as interesting as she'd expected & that she couldn't wait to go home ..... she declared extra loudly, "This city is so DIRTY!"
Agh.
It was kind of mortifying to be associated with her in any way.

Just pandering to U.S. haters, and Americans with a guilt complex.

I've met creepy people from all over, including creepy Canadians, despite their penchant for bragging about how well they are received around the world.

I don't have any studies or anything to back it up, but I don't think any one country has a monopoly on the production of assholes.

The local news says he's American, so I went with what they said...

Ooops. Didn't know all threads were supposed to have upsides. One potential upside would be increasing people's awareness of what constitutes rude and overbearing behavior so that they might choose to act differently, regardless of nationality.

Ehh....maybe that's too much to expect. Probably be better just to let the thread die. Bad idea, I guess.

Don't worry yourself too much, FBM.

Besides, you can't encourage or will a thread to die.
Once you've started a thread, it has a life of it's own.
If it wants to die, it dies.
If it wants to keep going, it keeps going.
It is now entirely out of your hands!