The Ugly American

Last week the city I’m staying in had a large convention for an international group of insurance agents or stock brokers or something. Apparently this event is annual and held in different cities around the world. Normally they have 10,000 attendees, but due to the economy only about 4,000 attended this year. This is a large event.
So, as you can imagine my hotel was full. I have been in this hotel for a while now and have outlasted several of the housekeeping staff. I have also become friendly with the staff and can get them to give me some “behind the curtain” type of information.
For example they tell me about why the fire alarm keeps going off. (It seems some one was deep-frying burgers in their room. Once a day for eight straight days.)
They tell me about the guest who they had to evict, or the lady who caused $3,000 worth of damage to her room.
They told me about one of the guests having to be arrested. I actually saw this event start. The hotel provides breakfast every morning. They also provide a “reception” on three evenings a week. The menu rotates such that every Tuesday is the same thing. Same with Wednesday and Thursday.
On Wednesday the hotel provides hotdogs and burgers. It seems this group, I will call them Gastonians (since they hail from a foreign nation I will call Gaston.), had an issue with the menu. It seems they were reluctant to eat burgers and hotdogs because they didn’t know what they were. Ok that I can understand. I’ve been in some places where I really wanted to know what I was going to eat. The problem arose when the lead Gastononian, after leaning what the burgers and hotdogs were made of flipped out. “You have no food for Gastonians?” The young Russian kitchen lady said “We have food for everyone.” “We have no food.” “Sir, there is food right here.” Etc.
The problem was not that there was no food; it was that the food provided was unacceptable. It took about 20 minutes to get it figured out that these were non beef eating Gastonians.
This group had about 20 rooms rented. As such they sent over a five page dissertation about how the hotel staff was to treat the visiting Gastonian contingent. You know standard stuff like: bowing your head when addressing the men, removing yourself from their path when they walk down the hall. You know standard visiting businessman stuff. But, it never addressed dietary restrictions. It seems logical to me that if a group sends a list of expectations, dietary regulations should be described. I mean they will know their own needs better than strangers on the other side of the world. I know the people at this hotel and they would have made the effort to provide different meal options had they been told ahead of time. They have provided veggie pizzas for me rather than the greasy meat stuff.
The lead Gastonian apparently did not accept the explanation from the hotel staff, and was rude and loud for a long time. He apparently decided to drown his anger in a bottle for about six hours, and then made his way downstairs to the front desk. Long story short, the man was arrested and an international incident may have started.
This brings me to the point of the post; we hear how terrible Americans are when we travel. We hear that we are rude and demanding and about how we don’t respect other cultures. Alright, I am willing to stipulate that some of us are boorish, I have never met anyone who has admitted to acting this way and most of us are so concerned to be labeled as such that we go out of our way to not act American (whatever that means), but ok.
Ask me sometime about the convulsions at the elevator or the lack of changes of clothing. Just don’t tell me anymore stories about the “Rude Americans” overseas. I hardly think we have a lock on pathetic behavior.