Why aren't you Americans coming to visit England like you used to? From the Times:
"The American tourist — a familiar sight in the streets of London, Oxford, Stratford upon-Avon and Edinburgh — is in danger of becoming an endangered species.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said that Americans made only 3 million visits to Britain last year — down from 3.6 million in 2007 — as the economic slowdown took its toll.
It meant that, for the first time in many years, Americans were not the most frequent visitors to Britain. They were overtaken by the French, who made 3.6 million visits, and the Irish, who made 3.1 million visits.
The figures reveal the extent to which the recession has strongly affected the tourism industry. The total number of overseas visits fell last year for the first time since 2001, the year of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain and the September 11 attacks."
Thursday, 30 July 2009
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15 comments:
I'll be honest. Most of my American friends don't come over because they had a bad experience when they came before. OR, they know people who went and had experiences. Most of this was in the time of Bush as president and relations between the Americans and the Brits (the people) was not on good terms. American's were not treated fairly when they visited.
And I guess also because of the recession in the US and England is more expensive than the US.
Hi Christina, Thank you so much for your comments. We love to hear from new people. Keep on talking....
Christina, "bad experiences", do you have any examples?
I must confess we often make and hear jokes about American tourists (as we do all other nationalities including our own!) but I always perceived this to have a theoretical basis and not a real one.
This is somewhat distressing to hear!
:-(
I would say that pointing out the expense is right, Christina. It is expensive for Americans to come.
I have to say that I often hear people say that Americans are given a hard time in England, but I have never experienced anything like that (nor do I know anyone who experienced this). Maybe we've got good luck or I live in a part of England where anti-American sentiment is not so strong. I meet lots of people here who love Americans and love to speak with us. They often say that they don't understand why I would rather be here. They are always talking about how cheap everything is in the US. Sometimes I can't get away from them when I have things to do - but that's definitely a better problem than the other.
Steve, you should know that some Americans perceive anti-americanism everywhere (this is not to claim that genuine anti-american sentiment does not exist here, or that Christina is wrong, not at all).
I remember on the silly expats yahoo group where someone made a stink about an advert for some tv show that referenced something about the US in a teaser advert. When the second part was released it actually was flattering the US, yet those people still made a big stink about it. I was surprised by the incapacity to laugh at one's self, but then the Brits' talents at this is one of the things that makes England such a pleasure. :-)
Those are interesting comments you make, Lisa. I run into anti-American stuff all the time, esp at work and esp during the Bush years. I have had to develop a tough skin or it would really bother me. I have learned not to take any of it personally. Whenever I go into the epats conference and tell the women that they will get thicker skins after living here a while & these comments will cease to bother them, some have interpreted that as weakness and say I should 'fight back' with observations about the UK. I reply that if I had to fight back everytime I hear an anti-American comment or sentiment, there would be nothing else in my life but that.
E, I am genuinely surprised at your comment; do you mean general banter in terms of joking about American stereotypes or specific/personal attacks, I have seen plenty of the former but never the latter here.
I think our humour is more acerbic than you tend find in the US (generally) although when I lived in New York I found it was more similar. Funnily, the humour was a big part of what I missed when I lived in the US, I found the nature of social interaction at work etc. somewhat "childish" and artificial initially, it was really frustrating since I felt like saying "cut the BS and tell me what you really think" all the time, after a while I kind of got the hang of how to get to that.
Of course once you get to know people out of work and they relaxed then the more differences seem to diminish to almost zero in my experience.
V. Interesting..
Steve, did you find American humor more childish than Benny Hill, John Cleese, and Mr. Bean? You shouldn't really expect to find anywhere on earth the equivalent of such icons of sophisticated British humor. Chasing lines of girls with their knockers hanging out, saying "wink-wink, nudge-nudge, say-no-more" and "blessed are the cheesemakers", pursing one's painted lips and engaging in silly pratfalls- those are hard acts to follow. It is easy to imagine a people used to such a high level of cultural humor being satisfied with less.
What's childish about the humour of John Cleese?
Jesus, Mel, do you even have to ask that? Of the ones I mentioned he most approaches some intelligence, but look back over that Monty Python stuff and tell me that's not just silly. It's okay if you are fifteen and stoned, but after that it is awfully silly. It's not that he is not funny at times, at least his humor doesn't revolve around what comes out of people's butts as is becoming more and more the norm these days.
Really, take a look at that Inquisition skit, or any of the others, and just watch them objectively. Look at that argument clinic skit. What is funny about that? Without the canned laughter you wouldn't even know which parts are supposed to be funny.
Faulty Towers was a lot better, when he wasn't trying so hard. Overall I like him, but hearing a Brit call American humor childish really is an example of Lisa's fave "pot kettle black".
Hi Steve,
I totally agree with the artificiality of the interpersonal interaction in the US as compared with here, but I never thought of it as childish. Of course, here, as a foreigner, British honesty is cometimes coded in language that is not literal and if you don't speak the vernacular, you don't actual get it (fe "I agree with you up to a point"). But if you're English it's a lot less fake than the US.
I find it interesting that when you do finally get honest opinions in social situations from americans, sometimes you do get things like: lesbians and ugly women are the most vocal feminists, to cite a recent example. Almost as if once they are going to say something they really think, it's going to be some sort of irrelevant confession they want to get off their chest.
I have never heard anyone English say something like that has no bearing on the discussion. But I do wonder whether that's because the people I tend to speak to in England (my friends) are generally very highly educated. I wonder if I would hear more of this in other circles. Of course then it remains a mystery as to why I hear it in the US, my friends there don't say that sort of thing either, but I have heard it in bars and restaurants, all over the place really.
I think there are lots of differences between the brits and americans and life in the respective countries.
Hi Lisa,
I think you must be very fortunate if you rarely hear stupid stuff in the circles in which you mix.
I hear it all the time, on both sides of the Atlantic.
Mel,
I was really agreeing with Steve that there is a way in which Brits are more upfront/direct than Americans, in my experience, and that american culture has more artificiality in it.
When americans do drop the artificiality, I am often surprised at the sort of things that are said - those are the sorts of things which I never hear here.
I take it back; you know what I have overheard some of here in that same vein? Comments like asians are x, asians like/don't like y - the comments are always racial. Just like the racism in the states.
I will say I am lucky in that my friends tend to have outstanding minds; I had excellent discussions with a friend yesterday about cosmological theories and dark matter, and we talked about his theory that religion is primarily a construct to serve sociological needs, which was very interesting, and also explains why it has existed for so long and continues.
Most of the stupidity in my day to day life is reading online, although I am going to have to take my driving test here soon, and there's a lot of stupidity associated with that where it's far more straightforward than in the US.
GW: No, I think a lot of American humour is quite brilliant; I wasn't referring to humour in my comment.
I love Southpark, Simpsons, various sitcoms, stand-up, all first class.
As for Benny Hill, actually I think most people here found him to be crap and only amusing in a slow motion car crash kind of way, I think he went down rather better in the USA surprisingly. Same for Mr Bean, I can't stand him, most of his revenue comes from Europe I think?
If you want cutting edge UK humour you need to look at things like the fast show, little Britain, spaced, father ted, ab fab, red dwarf and so on, most of the sterile stuff that ends up on US networks isn't representative IMHO.
I would disagree with you about Monty python however, its great IMO; the continuing popularity of it seems to attest to this; BTW I don't think we had the canned laughter over here?
Lisa: Thanks for confirming my though, I wasn't just imagining it (always a possibility :)!
mel: Oh I agree, there is plenty of stupid stuff everywhere, I wasn't suggesting that it doesn't exist here or that we are better, just it was one difference I noticed when I started living in the USA; I fairly quickly learned to adapt, I hardly notice now, much like when you hear "have a nice day", it becomes background noise, rhetorical etc.
Oh goody gumdrops!!! A topic that interests me---humo(u)r, on both side of the pond!
Why all this "stupidiy"-bashing? Stupidity has been a linchpin of humo(u)r since the days of Chaucer! Where would we be without our dearly beloved STUPID fellow citizens, who provide such delight on a daily basis?
I'd go stark-starin'-barkin'-MAD in a society of boring intellectuals, each trying to be more sesquipedalian than the others, drivelling on about logic and studies and statistics *und so weiter*...*ad infinitum* (inserted arbitrarily and pointlessly to up my "intellectual rating" on this *soi-disant* brainiac site.)
My beloved Nancy Mitford nailed us Americans (she was a well-known American-loather, and small wonder; I ain't too fond us myself) when she wrote, in 1960,:
"Oh poor things, you can't dislike [American expatriates]...they are so mad and ill and frightened."
"Frightened of what?"
"Oh, somebody else being in on something first, falling down dead, a recession---I don't know, dreadfully fidgetty."
*Plus ca change, plus que c'est la meme chose*---not too different 50 years later!
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