The French, rude? Busting Europe's stereotypes

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This was published 9 years ago

The French, rude? Busting Europe's stereotypes

By Ben Groundwater
If you think the French are rude, maybe take a look at your own behaviour.

If you think the French are rude, maybe take a look at your own behaviour.Credit: Alamy

"I hate the French," an English mate of mine once said. "They're rude. Went to Paris once and they were all rude. So I never bothered going again."

OK. This seems like a fairly sweeping statement after one weekend in Paris. You maywonder what happened to my mate. Was he abused by someone in a beret? Snootily told to go back to where he came from by a man with a pencil moustache? Ignored by a waiter? Sold a stale baguette?

He was vague on the details. What did happen, though, was that he and three English mates turned up in Paris in their Ben Sherman shirts for a bucks' weekend and proceeded to get as drunk as possible in as many venues as possible. Strangely enough, the locals weren't very receptive.

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"Do you speak any French?" I asked him.

"Nah."

So you're getting some sort of idea of why, after that one experience, my mate maythink the French are rude. And of course, it was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. He went over there expecting to hate the French and expecting they would hate him back. With an attitude like that he didn't have a chance.

And this is the problem for some first-time travellers to Europe. Not rudeness from the French: more the fact that you think you already know what to expect before you even get there.

All of the big destinations tend to be coloured by expectation. They're famous enough and popular enough to have garnered worldwide reputations that often don't match reality.

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Paris is full of snooty people who won't give you the time of day. Amsterdam is full of stoners and prostitutes. Barcelona is a haven for pickpockets. Rome is bulging at the seams with petty thieves. Zurich is boring. Prague is full of drunks on stag trips. The Greek Islands are overrun with backpackers.

I used to work for a European tour company, and every time one of our buses was approaching Rome, the same thing would happen: the tour leader would get up the front with a microphone and dole out 15 minutes' worth of very dire warnings about what to expect, crime-wise, in the Italian capital. They'd go on about Gypsy scams, about people throwing fake babies to distract their targets, about purse-snatchers racing past on the backs of scooters, and wily thieves dipping fingers into pockets on the metro.

The idea was to scare the inexperienced and usually hungover passengers into being hyper-aware of their security while they were in Rome, not least because it's a nightmare for a tour leader to have to help someone replace their passport and bank cards.

Perhaps because of these pep talks, or perhaps because petty crime isn't quite as rife in Rome as the TLs would have you believe, no one was ever robbed on any of the tours I was on.

There was another side effect, though, of scaring the hell out of all of those passengers: every single one of them left Rome convinced it was one of the dodgiest places on Earth, regardless of whether anything actually happened to them. And so they would have gone home and told their friends that, and their friends would have told their friends, and Rome's reputation lives on.

While taking care of your security isn't a bad idea, it's also worth remembering that reputations in Europe aren't everything. There might be the odd snooty Parisian around, but there are also millions of friendly people in that city who will be only too happy to give you the time of day if you return the effort and learn a few words of French. Even a smile will get you a long way. Parisians are not that scary.

Similarly, Amsterdam is an incredibly beautiful city of parks, canals, cobbled lanes and waterfront cafes. In a huge proportion of the city you'll never see a single red light or stoned tourist.

Barcelona has its problems with crime, but the vast majority of visitors are never affected by it. The Greek Islands have some beautifully secluded, backpacker-free hamlets. Zurich is great, as long as you don't want to go shopping at night. And Prague still has its pockets thus far untouched by the Brit weekenders.

The challenge for first-time visitors is to go to these places with an open mind, to ignore the reputations and the stereotypes and just experience a city or a country for what it is and what you find there.

If you don't expect Parisians to be rude, they probably won't be. Unless you're with your English mates on a bucks' trip.

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