Rome. I am in my hotel bar. There is a guy next to me. He’s from Missouri, he tells the bartender. Little town called Belton. He is maybe mid-seventies.
He asks the bartender for a beer. The barkeep speaks very little English. He pours the beverage in a pint glass, and leaves the bottle.
The old guy takes a sip. He thanks the bartender. Then he looks at me a beat too long. I can tell he wants to talk. So I smile, to let him know the door is open.
“You American?” he says.
“I’ve been called worse.”
We shake hands.
He says, “I’m from Missouri.”
“Birmingham.”
“You guys play banjos down there?”
“Only when we’re not winning national championships.”
The bartender brings my beer. Peroni. Sweeter than American beer, not unlike 7Up for adults.
“You visiting for business or pleasure?” he asks.
“Neither. I’m a professional porter. I carry my wife’s bags.”
“Been there. Done that.” He uses his thumbnail to start peeling the label on his bottle. “This my first time overseas.”
“Same here.”
“You enjoyed yourself?”
“I have, at times,” I said. “What about you?”
Shrug.
He glances up at the television above the bar. European TV is a different animal. Right now the television is showing contestants who appear to be water sliding in the nude.
“Can I be honest?” he says.
“I don’t know.”
“I came here with an American tour group. And so far, I’ve just been embarrassed. Wherever we go, whatever we do, my fellow Americans keep humiliating me.”
“How so?”
“Well, for instance, we were at a really fancy restaurant in Sicily, and there were several gals in our group who kept asking for ranch dressing on their salads. They were loud about it, they were demanding, and they made us all look like fools.”
I nodded. “Some people are quite serious about mayonnaise based condiments.”
“And another time, we all went to this restaurant in the Amalfi Coast, and all the smokers in our group wanted to smoke on the patio, even though the signs all said you couldn’t.
“Our people were so rude about it, they told the waiters and waitresses that we were spending enough money here that we should be able to smoke wherever we wanted. It was a big scene. I wanted to die.”
I took a sip. “The people need their nicotine.”
“And when we were in Capri, several in our group kept trying to bargain with the salesman in a leather shop. They kept trying to get 20 Euros off the price, like they were at a garage sale. It got embarrassing when they got into a fight with the merchant. They had to call the manager. I wanted disappear.
“Everything inside me wanted to say: ‘Come on, people, you paid a fortune for this tour, at the end of the day, what’s a few Euros more?’”
I nodded again. “Overpaying for leather is a form of hate crime.”
“I guess I just wanted to say to all the Americans in my group, ‘You know what, guys, we’re in someone else’s house over here in Italy. Don’t act so entitled.
“Don’t blow your nose in restaurants, or blow cigarette smoke at people on the street, or pass gas when you’re in public, or burp at the table. Jeez.
“You’re a guests in this country. You don’t act this way when you’re a guest in someone’s house do you? No. It’s just not nice. Are we savages? Where were we raised? In a barn?”
“No,” said the bartender with a smile. “You were raised in America.”
How about being nicer at home too? Could be a new form of seeing the world through different eyes.
So much for ‘soaking up the culture’. Guests are to be as chameleons, adapting to their host so as not to embarrass. It’s plain good manners. Selfishness and haughtiness are never a good look.
Grace never goes out of style and is the same in every language. Thank goodness this older gentleman was a better representative of America. A timely topic to discuss with our young ones as Thanksgiving and Christmas approaches.