I love how moving to Canada has given me a justification for my stories about everyday banalities.  I’m going to the store… in Canada!  It’s time to go to the dentist… in Canada!  I cannot buy Cheez-Its… in Canada!  (We have had a governmental crisis… in Canada!)  Whatever pleasant fiction keeps the narrative juices flowing, I guess.

My French class–in addition to reviving long-buried knowledge about the finer details of subjunctive use and the passé simple–is loosely organized around a business French textbook, and the diversity of the assembled class means that we have lots of wide-ranging conversations about the characteristics of and the differences between our respective home countries.  This means that, for example, I’ve learned about the traditional Easter celebrations of rural Peru, that a fair number of jokes about Socialism have been gently lobbed in the direction of the resident Cuban (who was like, and yet socialized educational and medical systems are a bad thing in the United States?), and that seemingly everybody believes that his or her own country is somehow warmer, friendlier, or more open than the one they’ve been transplanted into.

Last night, following the in-text example of a letter written by a Frenchman grumping about the dull precision of the Swedish company he’d transferred to, we made a chart of the different characteristics we’d noticed between our home countries and the Québecois we know and work with.  I refrained at first from volunteering my opinions about the U.S.–it really depends on who you are and what part of the country you’re from, I noted–but my classmates volunteered their opinions based on their perceptions.

Of course, they noted that Americans do not like to discuss politics with people they don’t know well, which explains why I was so thrown off when I moved here and strangers wanted to know what I thought about the election.  But guess what the first thing was that everybody agreed on about Americans?  That met immediate consensus, from the South Americans, to the Western European, to the New Zealander?

Not that we’re rude.  Not that we’re loud.  Not that we’re pushy.  Not that we’re fat.

That, as a nation, we’re polite.

I really thought that I was the victim of an elaborate joke.  “But it’s true!”  somebody protested.  “When you go to the United States, and you walk down the street, people say “hello” and “good morning” to you, even if you’ve never seen them before!”

So remember: smile and say hello to people you don’t know.  You might be doing more than you think to foster international diplomacy.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2008 at 9:39 am and is filed under bits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.