<p>
Now it’s the supermarket too?</p>
<p>
Thinking about the tours we’ve been on so far, I think that’s true. At a SUNY school in May, the young (male) tour guide was a wrinkled mess. We passed another male student - also a wrinkled mess. I whispered to DD to remind me to teach DS to iron before he goes off to college. Later at U of R, the female guide was wearing flip-flops. It’s hard to walk backwards in flip-flops, and she said they weren’t supposed to wear them on the tours - they kept coming off. Other than that, nothing stood out about anyone’s attire enough to be memorable.</p>
<p>Nightchef, you KNOW the reason you’re giving up now is that you’re afraid to admit you’d have trouble choking down a lamb chop while looking across the table at drops of sweat rolling down Mr. Delveccio’s hairy belly. And you KNOW that the analogous situation with germophobes would be just being extra sure you treated them as well as all the other people you know by not sneezing or coughing right on them. The surgical masks would be analogous to expecting everybody to wear those Muslim women’s outfits with just the face or eyes showing.</p>
<p>“Now it’s the supermarket too?”</p>
<p>I should have kept in mind that not everybody here might have a high-school-level ability to read between the lines. The points in question are whether or not what other people wear generates a response in one, and if one should ever consider the effect of one’s appearance on other people.</p>
<p>“UCLA/UCB/UCSD”</p>
<p>Now THAT’S what I call a random sample!</p>
<p>^^ Gotta refer to what I’m most familiar with. Not random but a sample nonetheless - including the college that receives the most applications in the country (UCLA) and as a result has a large number of tourers.</p>
<p>
Now you’ve taken to insulting people’s reading comprehension? You brought up the supermarket, and what people wear there. The POINT is not whether my clothing generates a response in you, but when and where I should or shouldn’t give a carp.</p>
<p>This has been a fun thread to read (mostly, anyway… except a few judgemental sounding comments). </p>
<p>"My husband really truly wanted to pack the identical clothes for a trip to Rome as he did for the previous year’s trip to Disneyworld. To him, ‘vacation is vacation.’ " - If seasons were similar, I might do the same. Of course I’m a practical engi-nerd, big on comfort not style. I would check on cathedral dress codes, etc… but typically I have a variety of casual clothes (and shoes!) that are comfy but not sloppy. </p>
<p>“Thinking about the tours we’ve been on so far, I think that’s true. At a SUNY school in May, the young (male) tour guide was a wrinkled mess. We passed another male student - also a wrinkled mess. I whispered to DD to remind me to teach DS to iron before he goes off to college.” - I hope you were kidding. All you really need to do is teach the kid to buy reasonable fabrics and then pull things the clothes out of the dryer while still warm. If he didn’t iron in high school, he’s not gonna do so in college.</p>
<p>Most people dress casually at the umich tours, too. I was not only present for my own tour but am taking summer classes now and see at least five different tour groups every single day.</p>
<p>^^lol, I iron practically everything, and H is so fanatical about his clothes that he re-irons things which were just hanging in the closet. DS and DD will have to learn to iron, that’s all there is to it.</p>
<p>Wow!! From the invisibility cloak, to terribly dressed tourists. DS went overseas this summer to visit DHs family. I didn’t pack for him and did wonder what ended up in the suitcase. When I saw pictures everything looked clean, cargo or kacki style shorts and t shirts. Not an inch of boxers so the belt must have made it (personal pet peeve of mine!). At the formal event his tux somehow made it there without looking like a wrinkled mess :). He did say he was outside a castle with a college tshirt one day and a gentleman started yelling “oh, oh are you a student? Where did you get the shirt? Are you study abroad?”. He was a professor at the school who was a citizen of the country DS was visiting. I guess he was excited to see his school represented there.
So, all in all DS didn’t look too bad for an American Tourist.</p>
<p>The tours are now complete and I was the best-dressed male in each location. Today, though, the school had scheduled meetings with an admissions counselor, a professor, and the Dean who had International Students under his purview. His Deanship was wearing a suit, so it was good to be well-dressed. The funny thing though was that ShawD is a US resident but a dual Canadian/American citizen and the Dean went on and on about how it was important for the Canadians to deal with foreign students as if they were people and get past the stereotypes. I get it for Chinese students fresh of the plane from China and who now come in the same numbers as Americans, but how fixated are Canadians on stereotypes of Americans? [I say this as an American married to a Canadian. I’ve served on boards in Canada and we have a vacation house there.] Who knows?</p>
<p>Lol, shaw. We live right next to Canada, so we are used to seeing Canadians and to going over there. They are pretty regular, except they dress better, don’t tolerate garbage all over their streets, and say eh? alot. (my stereotypes, of course).</p>
<p>“how fixated are Canadians on stereotypes of Americans?”</p>
<p>My mother was Canadian, as a kid I spent a lot of time staying with relatives in Canada, & I live near Detroit so get plenty of Canadian TV/radio. When I was a grad student at the U of Toronto, a professor (who was originally from France) told me to be careful…that you don’t have to go very far beneath the surface of most Canadians to find some serious anti-American sentiment. Judging from what I see on CBC, I’d say Canadians often have some Euro-style resentment towards the American military’s exploits of the past 50 years, they think Americans have too many guns, & they tended to hate G.W.Bush. One-on-one, they seem too polite to be confrontational, but in a group many don’t mind booing the US national anthem at hockey games. It’s always interesting to see Super-Canadian hockey commentator Don Cherry (whom I’ve never seen in shorts) go on a PRO-American rant whenever Canadians get abusive to Americans.</p>
<p>To somebody who had a bird’s-eye view of both the 1967 Detroit riot and the Boston school busing turmoil of the 1970’s, it is interesting to see just how passionate Canadians can be about women’s issues. It’s like their internal racial issues are so minor that the full force of their righteous indignation goes towards women’s rights, equality, and safety. When I was living in Toronto, there was some sort of huge pro-woman parade or rally, followed by a big indoor banquet/dance, from which men were excluded. Seemed like the majority were so blinded by passion that they missed the irony.</p>
<p>P.S., I was also in Canada during the Voice of Fire fiasco, in which a top Canadian art museum spent a good chunk of its annual acquisition budget on a hilariously simple painting by an American…don’t blame Canadians for hating Americans for that one…</p>
<p><a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_Fire[/url]”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_Fire</a></p>
<p>[Voice</a> of Fire: Are we over this yet? - Arts & Culture - Macleans.ca](<a href=“http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/01/21/are-we-over-this-yet/]Voice”>http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/01/21/are-we-over-this-yet/)</p>
<p>Schmaltz, I do think that there are subtle but profound cultural differences. The US West was settled by men with guns, Canada’s West by the Mounties. The US enshrines individual rights, including the right to own guns, in its Constitution while Canada enshrines group rights rather than individual rights in its Constitution and has a much greater confidence in the government to provide law and order. Universal health care is assumed in Canada to be a minimal standard for a civilized nation. The US has almost a reverence for rule breakers, who in one transformation are the US’s entrepreneurs. The US has been the most innovative nation in modern history and likely in the world and it follows from the culture. And the anti-US sentiment was very strong, Schmaltz, and is still there but in my experience much more diluted at this point. [This may be because Canadians are not longer forced to listen to hours a day of Annie Murray and Gordon Lightfoot, who were for a while the only Canadians who seemed to be deemed acceptable for the Canadian content law]. Canadians hated G.B. the second, but so did all of the rest of the world (except the PMs of Australia and the UK) and roughly 50% of the American voting population.</p>
<p>But, I don’t have a strong sense that people in Canada would interact with a person from the US and only be able to focus on the cultural differences. There is just so much cross-fertilization. That really did strike ShawD as funny.</p>
<p>Yes, but that cross-fertilization is kind of a one-way street (you don’t see Detroiters becoming more Canadian), and the Canadians know it. So they would seem to have a toxic brew of resentment towards what they are becoming…a combination of self-hatred and hatred of their role model to the south.</p>
<p>Their version of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is peace, order, and good government…which wraps it up pretty clearly.</p>
<p>It always amused me how Europeans (don’t know if Canadians did this or not) called GW Bush a “cowboy” and thought it was an insult. Imagine a guy from Texas being insulted by being called a cowboy.</p>
<p>It’s not an insult to call a cowboy a cowboy, because he’s supposed to act like a cowboy. It may be an insult to call a president a cowboy, because he’s supposed to act like a president.</p>
<p>And I hasten to add, in case it isn’t obvoius, that when Bush’s detractors used the word “cowboy” they were alluding to the Hollywood stereotype, not the real thing.</p>
<p>I have to revise my earlier comment, based on the experience of our Tufts tour a few days ago. Temperature was just in the low 80s, but when the tour was done & we went back into the admissions office I promptly took off my cap.</p>
<p>I felt a little sweaty after the tour, and the cap made me feel hotter.</p>
<p>So it appears I would be in the “cap off” camp, after all.</p>