Quote:
Originally Posted by MolsonExport
The overseas drunken Canadian is only very slightly less obnoxious than the drunken overseas American. The reason being is that the obnoxious drunk American is more likely to start yelling about how the "United States is the greatest country in the WORLD!!" because of its military might and "freedumb", whereas the obnoxious drunk Canadian will nauseatingly argue that Canada is better than the United States simply because it is not the United States. Both are awful, but the latter lacks the "WootWoot USA! USA!" factor.
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It's definitely mostly a question of the type of tourist.
However I find that even the conscientious American traveler often has weirdly insular views of other countries. I think it is hard for Americans to distinguish between things that are American and things that apply around the world, or American views of countries versus what those countries are actually like.
Canada is mostly passive in the world and there's no expectation that Canada will be the best at anything, plus we know what it's like to be on the "outside", seeing ads and the like that are not for us.
Another minor thing I notice with French in particular is that a lot of English Canadians have a much better baseline than Americans do, even though the English Canadian baseline can kind of feel like 0 compared to Francophones. I wonder if Canadians on the whole do a little better with foreign languages. I guess the US is starting to have more bilingual Spanish materials so maybe this is changing.