Wednesday, June 1, 2011
How to entertain - and not entertain - foreign guests
by Tom Kando and Anita Kando
As European-Americans, we have hosted European visitors to America innumerable times, and we have also been hosted in Europe countless times. These mutual visits have been a two-way street and a lifetime of enjoyment for both sides. But people make mistakes.
Many people don’t understand that when one visits another culture, thousands of miles away, one should be exposed to that culture’s fortes - not to its pathetic attempts to replicate the visitor’s own culture.
Yet, over and over again I have seen (1) American hosts showcasing to their European guests American imitations of European things, and, conversely, (2) European hosts treating their American visitors to European mimicry of American things.
The impulse is commendable. Hosts want their guests to be comfortable, to feel at home. That is their idea of hospitality. But it’s a mistake.
Let me give you some examples:
1. When our daughters went to Belgium on a three-week student exchange program, their hosts desperately searched for, and finally located, a Mexican restaurant, thinking that this would make the girls feel more at home, like in California. Our daughters reported that this was the worst Mexican food they had ever tasted. On the other hand, when their hosts took them to eat mountains of mussels with Belgian fries buried in mayonnaise, they had the feast and the delight of their lives.
2. Conversely, when the Belgian exchange students came to spend three weeks in California, some of them were taken by their hosts to (1) a Hershey chocolate factory in Oakdale and (2) a Budweiser beer factory! Of course, the students (most of them experienced Belgian beer guzzlers) laughed: You see, Belgium makes the world’s best chocolate, and the world’s best beer, bar none.
So here is my advice to anyone in such a situation - on both sides of the Atlantic:
If you are a European hosting American visitors:
Say you are Dutch and you are hosting friends from the US: show them the Keukenhof tulip fields, the Rijks Museum, the Van Gogh Museum, the Red Light District, the polders dotted with windmills, show them anything Dutch, but don’t drag them to the Great American Disaster - a burger joint in central Amsterdam. Don’t try to compete with American hamburgers, you can’t win.
Don’t drag them to a shopping mall. Theirs are bigger.
Don’t try to impress them with your wildlife. They got mountain lions, coyote and rattle snakes outside their backyards.
If you are an American hosting European visitors: Say you live in California: drive them to Disneyland, fly them to Vegas, show them Death Valley, the Grand Canyon, Lake Mead, Hoover Dam, but don’t shove the Sacramento Crocker Museum down their throat, or even the San Francisco De Young museum. Don’t try to compete with the Louvre, the British Museum or the Museum of Natural History in Vienna. You can’t win!
Don’t drag them to the Hearst Castle. It pales in comparison with Versailles or Schonbrunn. It will bore them.
Don’t take your Parisian friend to Sacramento’s best French restaurant.
Don’t take your Italian female relative shoe shopping.
Don’t offer American cheese to Dutch guests.
Play to your strength, not to your weakness! Europe and America are both magnificent, each in their own way. Don’t bring coal to Newcastle. People don’t travel to see poor replicas of their homelands! leave comment here
5 comments:
Tom,
This is really good advice. You should submit this piece to travel magazines, and the NY Times Travel section. It would be great for many Americans to read it!
Jan
Thanks for your compliment,Jan.
The (big-time) media are hard to penetrate. I wish they'd pay more attention to some of what is being written by non-famous people. Sometimes we say pretty good things, but it's difficult to be noticed. We keep trying to be heard, though...
Tom and Anita,
What you said about entertaining friends and relatives from overseas is very true and amusing.
Thank you for your droll analysis.
I've been to that burger joint when I was a kid early seventies. In A'dam where I live and we also had Wimpy's. No Mac, KFC etc. yet. They had really good burgers. They came as ordered: red, medium or done perfectly, American size btw charcoal grilled, good French fries and a salad on the side. Meanwhile Led Zeppelin and other rock like them played loud, very loud. That was one of it's trademarks. And I remember pictures of the Hindenburg-crash and more. But that burger joint as it's is somewhat misplaced called in the article above was not that for al long time. I am pretty sure that they left A'dam already mid-seventies. They where on a location that you can miss doing a canal-cruise, because in the narrowest canal in A'dam, where they all go through, on the left hand corner entering it, you'd be looking in their kitchen. It then became a Argentinian grill an Italian pasta joint and I don't know what kind of restaurant there is these days. I try to avoid those parts of town. As a native, just riding my bike has become highly accident prone with all those tourists on their hired bikes on for most of them maiden trips.
Please, don't bike? Take the tram. But the Great American Disaster is exactly the kind of slow-food burger joint we'd love to see back. I could never understand why it quit: it was always a very highly recommended restaurant amongst culinary experts, like my parents. I've inherited some knowledge and love of things culinary, so I know what I write when I say that they probably would be amongst the best if there now. They where really good. And sorely missed. Regards, Remco Baggelaar A'dam = Amsterdam.
Bedankt voor je interessante opmerkingen, Remco (leuk dat een twee-jaar oud stuk nog gelezen wordt, trouwens):
I agree that the Great American Disaster had excellent hamburgers. Wimpy, less so I'm afraid. I used to eat at Wimpy's nearly every day, in the Leidse straat, just up from the Universiteits Bibliotheek on the Spui, where I worked. But Wimpy's burgers had a special taste, not the best.
You are right, the proliferation of restaurants in Amsterdam from Argentina, Italy and everywhere else in the world is a bummer. Places like the Damrak and the Leidse straat are a mess, hardly worth going to any more.
Biking? Of course, foreign visitors are clumsy and a menace, because they can in no way approximate the acrobat-level skills of the native Dutch. Every time I'm there, I see high-school kids texting (!) while they ride their bikes, housewives biking with an infant in front and one in the back of their bikes, octogenarians biking effortlessly in stormy weather, etc.
However, I grew up in Amsterdam, I am an avid biker to this very day, so I feel quite comfortable biking among the trams, the cars, the busses, the bikes, the pedestrians, in that wonderful chaos.
Aside from that, my article's general point stands: don't bring coal to Newcastle, if you get my drift...
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