Have You Ever Noticed?
Travelling around the world is one life’s great pleasures. But there are many countries where the inhabitants have strange little idiosyncrasies. Here are just a few countries taken at random where, like myself, you also might encounter quaint little national traits.
BELGIUM
Everybody likes the Belgians. But they’re funny in one way. When other nationalities tend their gardens, go to the beach, or play cricket, the Belgians go off to race their pigeons. Not just the odd Belgian. All of them! Do you know that there are more racing pigeons in Belgium than there are people? The French eat them, the Belgians race them. Pigeons last longer in Belgium.
HOLLAND
Great people the Dutch. Hardworking, kind, big-hearted - in fact it is hard to find fault with Holland, at least until you go to a restaurant there.As one American friend said “Gourmet’s they ain’t”. That’s not to say that Dutch restaurants aren’t spotless or that their produce isn’t daisy-fresh. It’s just that it seems that they don’t seem to take an interest in, let alone develop an obsession about, gourmet food. Simple food does them nicely and give a Dutchman a breadroll filled with cheese, meat or fish and he’ll get a gleam in his eye, and mutter something about how much he enjoys a `Broodje’ which is the Dutch name for this.
ITALY
I’m not saying Italians are bad drivers, because in each of them there’s a budding Fangio waiting to get out. In fact, they’re very good drivers. They need to be. Northern Italian road tunnels, for example, can make a bald man get an attack of dandruff if he drives a wide car and meets an Italian truck driver going the other way in a tunnel. It’s not that the Italian tunnels are badly made! Not at all!
They’re just too narrow and tight for comfort, and the sadists who designed them then decided to compound the problem by making sure that, unlike their French and Swiss counterparts, Italian tunnels are usually only lit at the entrance and exit, and pitch black in the middle.
GERMANY
Germans avoid hypochondria while they’re young and exercise, hike, and generally look after their physiques. But around the time they reach middle age, visits to the Octoberfest team up with a diet of delicious cream cakes, pork knuckles and high calorie sausages to bring out the Wurst on their figures. And that’s when they start to worry about their circulation!! The French health obsession is the liver, but the Germans have cornered the market on worrying about their `Kreislauf’ or circulation. Is the blood flowing fast enough? Does it contain the right minerals? Does it need adjusting? What do you do about it?
The Germans not only have this problem. They also have the answer, and this is the thermal bath. Wherever you see a German village that starts with `Bad’ it does not of course mean that it is no good! It just means that baths have been built there for the treatment of the psyche as well as to be a `drying out’ holiday for those who have over indulged.
ENGLAND
Those who are British and giggle about the Germans and their Kreislauf shouldn’t scoff too much. They, too, have an Achilles Heel. Theirs is the bowel habit. At about the age when Germans start to think more about Kreislauf than sex, the equivalent British weakness becomes the bowel habit. At that stage, regularity becomes all-important. When did they go last? When will they go next? Has the dreaded curse of constipation set in?
What other country in the world would enable the head of the family that owned the biggest laxative manufacturer in the land become so rich that he could afford not to worry about his family company and become the country’s leading orchestral conductor in the way that Sir Thomas Beecham did?
GREECE
Greeks are generally warm, friendly folk who will do anything for you. If you ever wanted to see how easily and quickly this could be changed, make the same mistake that I did at Athens airport and ask for Turkish coffee. I hope you get out alive.
SPAIN
A holiday in Spain will reveal that, although Spaniards seem to be quite normal in every other way, the hours they keep are not!
Mornings aren’t bad. It’s around lunch-time that things seem to go wrong with timetables. It’s bad enough trying to buy petrol at lunchtime in Italy or France, but in Spain the poor foreigner who doesn’t know the ground rules is likely to run into a brick wall if he wants anything at all. between noon and 4p.m. Cos’ that’s when the Spaniards go home for siesta.
I’ve heard stories about the other things they have time to do between noon and four, but it’s all hearsay and cannot be written about here. Officially they go home to eat and take a nap. We’ll leave it at that. And Spaniards dine late. Very late! They turn up for dinner around 9.30 to 10, but there’s no serious attack on the menu until around 10.30. It’s not unusual for a laidback dinner party to go on to 1.30 or 2 a.m. “So” you say, “When do Spaniards sleep?” It’s a good question, but I don’t know the answer.
TURKEY
Unless you go to Turkey, you’ll never meet the world’s best salesmen. I’ve never bought a used car or real estate in Istanbul, so I can’t vouch for that level of salesmanship. But if you want to meet Gold Medallist-standard sales people, walk into an Istanbul carpet shop.
One day some smart American executive will realise to what extent companies can capture the world market in their field if only they would employ experienced Turkish carpet salesmen. They’re the best in the world.
