Learning to avoid cultural gaffes

In Japan it’s rude to remove splinters from your wooden chopsticks by rubbing them together. In Belgium, air kisses, a common greeting, come in threes, so you shouldn’t turn away before the last is bestowed. And imagine the trouble you could get into in Bulgaria, where nodding your head up and down means no.

The small gaffes travelers make often pass unnoticed — or uncommented upon — because people everywhere are increasingly aware of the strange habits of foreigners. But sometimes worlds collide when travelers misstep, negatively affecting the way they’re viewed and treated and exposing fundamental differences between us and them.

When this occurs, we experience “profound discomfort, without knowing where it comes from,” says Raymonde Carroll, author of “Cultural Misunderstandings: The French-American Experience.”

The French, for example, ignore and don’t smile at strangers. This behavior, which can make American visitors to France feel unwelcome, reflects the value the French place on close relationships. They reserve smiles for people they know, she says.

Travel author and public television host Rick Steves has observed Americans blundering in Southern Europe and Ireland because of the way we perceive time.

“We treat it like money, to be saved, spent, wasted,” Steves says. “But there, time is to be enjoyed.” This may explain why many Americans interpret as aggravatingly slow, even disrespectful, the service in European restaurants, where waiters leave people alone to enjoy their meal instead of rushing them. “There, slow service is good service,” Steves says.

Food and eating can be cultural land mines. The Italians, for instance, are “very peculiar” about food, says Flavio Frontini, who was born in Bologna and teaches Italian at Glendale Community College. “Italians have specific hours in which to consume their drinks,” Frontini says. They drink cappuccino only at breakfast; after that, it must be espresso, following, not during, the repast.

In Russia, cold weather and hard times are at the root of misunderstandings between tourists and locals. “Leaving your overcoat on indoors is a huge mistake,” says Greg Tepper, founder of Exeter International, a Tampa, Fla.-based agency that specializes in travel to Eastern Europe and Russia. “It implies that your hosts do not properly heat their homes.”

Saving face and behaving with humility are paramount in China, Japan and Korea, but it’s hard for travelers to know how to respect these virtues. Talking about your position and accomplishments at a party is one example of not being humble, says L. Robert Kohls, author of “Survival Kit for Overseas Living.”

“In the U.S., we build ourselves up in order to get ahead, but you’re certain to get off on the wrong foot if you do it in Asia,” he says.

Mexicans are a little like Asians when it comes to self-expression. “To most Mexicans,” says Carl Franz, author of “The People’s Guide to Mexico,” “our Yankee tendency to go straight to the point comes across as aggressive, rude and very heavy-handed.”

You can learn of such habits through reading or by talking to people who have recently been in the country you’re planning to visit. Developing communication skills helps avoid misunderstanding, but it’s even better to understand, in a general way, why cultural mistakes arise.

Travelers make them, Carroll says, “by thinking the world is everywhere as they know it.” It is only natural for a person born and raised in a certain place to believe that his or her ways of behavior are the correct ones.

Then we smile at someone on a Paris street, are ignored and become chagrined or insulted. But that moment can be a great opportunity. When it comes, Carroll says, we should stop, focus and try to turn distress into discovery.

What would it be like, we should ask ourselves, to live in a world where people smile only at friends, cappuccino is strictly a breakfast drink and discretion is the rule?

It can take years to answer such questions.

Meanwhile, we can only go abroad prepared and well meaning, remembering that, as Carroll so aptly says, “Tourism is an act of love.”