Random People I Met

[abka]

In Vienna the Williams college present Morty tagged along with our group for the day (he was really cool, and it was great that he took the time to come since he's an economist). The visit culminated with a snazzy dinner with a group of Williams's alumni and parents. (Which we had all packed dressy clothes for but the alumni turned up in jeans, so we didn't end up changing). I met the Korean ambassador to Croatia, he's currently in Budapest, but Croatia is under his territory. He has two kids currently at Williams. It was kind of random, I spent more time chatting with his wife, she's excited to go to Williams this summer for graduation, mostly because she will get to go shopping in New York, guess the shopping in Budapest isn't that great. That was kind of a random encounter.
They ended up pouncing on poor Emy because her parents are Korean. She said she also got a lot of practice hearing Korean in Istanbul because we always ended up next to a group of Korean tourists. We also all learned that Emma speaks to her parents almost completely in Finnish. Funny what you find out when you room with people.

In Istanbul we had a tour of a new private university and then went out to lunch with a group of students/former students who had worked on this archeological project to catalogue some fortress ruins (they drew every brick in every suriving wall and then created 3-D computer models, every brick, in detail). I ended up chatting with this woman a couple years older than us who was working as an architect. He boyfriend is a photographer who wants to move into film and so they had just been to a film festival and seen Bowling for Columbine (which I still haven't seen, but have seen a lot about) so we ended up talking about violence in America. She was great.

Also in the Netherlands a couple people from the group were having lunch and two men stopped and asked if they were American and they said yes (later we would start telling people we were Canadian, or just let Jamie answer, because he is Canadian, except that he lives in Texas, but oh well). So these two men had just seen Bowling for Columbine and were deeply disturbed and really wanted to talk with some Americans about this movie because they were so horrified. Good to see that the movie is getting played in Europe. Enough rambling for today.

Comments

[abka.livejournal.com]

We didn't avoid saying we were American because we were afraid of being discriminated against. I was treated no differently when people knew I was American rather than when I didn't talk and would sometimes guess English or German. Rather it was out of embarrassment and shame for President Bush's actions. I wanted a shirt that said "I'm American, but I didn't vote for Bush. He doesn't represent my views." It is Bush that made us (at least me) feel ashamed to be American, not the Europeans.

[grumph.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you didn't feel picked on for being Americans. But I still find it difficult to square an "arrogant" people with a population that hides in shame at its government and pretends to be something different. You didn't, after all, make a shirt or a button saying proud to be an American who voted against Bush, or what have you (jade_phoenix's peace flag is a nice example of a possible button). I don't mean this to be a personal attack. You acted in the manner that you felt best and such decisions are up to you.

My point is simply that pretending to be Canadian or moving (or at least joking about moving) to Canada seems to be something of a wide spread theme among Americans, and accusations of arrogance are hard to square with a population large portions of which hide in shame.

[abka.livejournal.com]

My interpretation when I hear "America is arrogant" is not that all American citizens are arrogant, it's that the American government is arrogant, and I think it's hard to argue that the American government isn't. I don't think that all Europeans lump us into one category, it was interesting to see so much coverage of the American peace movement on British t.v. for example. (Of course the news coverage preceded a t.v. show about "dumb things people do in dangerous situations" and of course all the video footage was of Americans, not that they said that explicitly, of course when you watch those shows here it's all Americans as well.)

[grumph.livejournal.com]

I not only don't think it's difficult to argue that US foreign policy isn't arrogant, but I make precisely that argument here.

Also see this well written (much better written than my rapidly tossed off post in the link above) article on how President Bush is not a cowboy. (http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=grumph&itemid=17005#cutid1) () (http://slate.msn.com/id/2077674) ()