Essay: THE FOREIGNER DISCOVERS AMERICAN (AND VICE VERSA)

JAPANESE girls at Natural Bridge, Germans at the pool sides of a hundred Holiday Inns, an Italian family at Radio City Music Hall, British motorists at Old Faithful—these are the newest innocents abroad. Since 1961, when Congress, hoping to reduce the balance-of-payments drain, set up the U.S. Travel Service as the nation’s first official tourist bureau, the number of foreign visitors to America has more than doubled. This year 1,200,000 of them (excluding border crossers from Canada and Mexico) are busily proving for themselves the truth of Lord Bryce’s 19th century axiom: “America excites an admiration which must be felt upon the spot to be understood.”

In A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles were asked “How did you find America?” “Turned left at Greenland,” came the reply. Most of America’s new visitors have considerably more complicated responses, though often not as sophisticated a grasp of geography. Accustomed to driving from one country to another in a day, European tourists are invariably overwhelmed by the vastness of the U.S. Not long ago a Frenchman who wanted to see Yellowstone took the first plane he could get to Wyoming. It landed at Cheyenne. He got out and grabbed a taxi to go to the park, only to find he was still 485 miles away. Nearly half of all incoming tourists land in New York, and Niagara is often the farthest point west they and their budgets reach.

The cost of getting to the U.S. is the main obstacle for foreigners, but even when the ocean has been hurdled, money remains a persistent problem—”the largest we have,” says USTS Director John W. Black. Yet Sylviane Mathieu, a pretty blonde doctor from Limoges, found that she could get by on $10 a day for food and accommodations after having budgeted $15. Foreigners complain that there are no middle-priced hotels in many U.S. cities: only the expensive and the grubby. By contrast, the motel—”the word that blisters the night sky of the American suburbs in vermilion, green and harlequin Catherine wheels,” as Kenneth Allsop wrote in Punch—is widely appreciated as a sybaritic haven of sterilized glasses, heaped towels, ice-cube machines and coffeemakers.

Dr. Oshima’s Bisonburger

Tipping is a two-way cultural shock. Just as Americans resent the outstretched palms of European bellhops and waiters who have already received the compulsory tip added to hotel and restaurant tabs, foreigners in the U.S. cannot easily get the hang of the American freelance system. Another shock comes when a visitor tries, as he sometimes does, to haggle bazaar-style in Saks Fifth Avenue.

Foreign tourists report plenty of pleasant surprises. U.S. taxis are generally less expensive than in other parts of the world, and the driver who shuts off the meter and says “Let me show you my city” is practically an American archetype. Museums are by and large free. Foreigners frequently note a “basic honesty” in money dealings, rarely complain of being shortchanged or cheated. Visitors marvel at American highways, cloverleafs and bridges, admire U.S. drivers for “staying in lane,” and deplore ubiquitous billboards. They are horrified at the amount of food piled on their plates and at the haste with which Americans eat, but usually leave ecstatic over American salads and agreeably surprised by California wines. Meat, particularly “steaks big as blankets,” impresses visitors, but when Japan’s Dr. Chozo Oshima sampled a bisonburger, he had to pronounce it “not for the Japanese palate.” Since television in most of the world is government-owned and often without advertising, tourists are fascinated by American television, particularly the commercials, which left Swedish Visitors Inga and Rune Svensson with the impression that “Americans live on Bufferin.”

Some of the things visitors like—or dislike—surprise their hosts. Being able to take a grocery bag of food up to a hotel room is an unaccustomed freedom, and so is walking on park lawns. A general from inflation-plagued Brazil was pleased that “during the five weeks I was in New York the prices stayed the same.” The attention given a family traveling with children is a boon. “You could take 50 restaurants in London,” says one Englishman, “and not find half a dozen with high chairs.” Almost to a man, visitors are irked by the difficulty in buying that tourists’ essential, postage stamps. Where they find them in commercial machines, it strikes them as almost immoral that a quarter will purchase only four 50 stamps. The Greyhound bus, with its unlimited-travel $99 fare, is much admired. “People talk to you in the bus, and they tell you about their lives,” says Parisienne Janine Kraus. “It’s like a Russian novel.”

Tourists grow weary of being told that something, as Inga Svensson puts it, “is the tallest or the biggest in the world.” The Svenssons were delighted to discover that American movies run continuously, but appalled at the debris under their seats. In one movie theater, Rune’s feet literally got glued to the floor in the sticky residue of gum, candy and spilled soft drinks. Baseball bored him: “They just kept throwing the ball and missing it.” Except in New York, visitors note, no American ever seems to walk anywhere. One English hiker set out across the Golden Gate Bridge, was chased by police who assumed he must be planning to jump.

Rosemarie Earth’s Instant Friends

A U.S. Travel Service arrangement that lets foreigners visit American families demonstrates a degree of hospitality that surprised many tourists. Rosemarie Barth, a West Berlin secretary, looked up acquaintances in Denver and reported that at once their friends “called me by my first name, which I liked very much.” Language is always a barrier, but a Brazilian doctor says that his wife managed to spend $200 in a dress shop “on a total vocabulary of ‘pink,’ ‘blue,’ ‘white,’ ‘my size’ and ‘how much.’ ” Other U.S. pluses, by consensus: ice cream, San Francisco, corn on the cob, roadside picnic spots, “houses that look like the ones in the movies,” and the variety of the population—”white, yellow and every shade of black,” an Italian visitor noted. Tops among minuses are rude customs officers. Others: slums, dismal trains, violence, plastic flowers, women in hair curlers, “magic ringers” vibrating beds, difficulty in finding information booths and public toilets.

The most subtle U.S. shortcoming, however, is probably America’s vast and innocent unawareness of the tourist’s presence. This is partly because tourists are so few against the whole teeming scale of U.S. life, and partly because in the U.S. subconscious, international tourism still means “we go” more than “they come.” And even as it becomes the most important factor in the G.N.P., the U.S. service industry—salesmen, waiters, barbers, policemen, drivers, pilots, hotelkeepers—is still struggling psychologically to accept its role in dealing with tourists. Catering is not quite yet to the American taste, and the service trades are not much attuned to the insecurities of diffident, inarticulate foreigners.

And these new Columbuses have a particular need for sympathy. They come to the U.S. for serious discovery, for searching out the American character; as yet only a few of them, emulating Americans sunning on the Riviera or skiing in Switzerland, seek the vacationer’s pleasures of summering in New England, fishing the Minnesota lakes, hiking through the California redwoods or luxuriating in a Florida hotel. Anticipating the crush of tourism that is to come, the U.S. must learn to recognize the foreign visitor and make him feel wanted and welcome. It should not be a difficult task for a nation that was built by tourists who came and stayed.