The racism of an Italian, whether they recognise it or not, is quite mind boggling.

Don't get me started......english.

Smiley's, what smileys? All I see Is a a series of blurred yellow circles.

My point exactly.

Yeah, right. We don't go killing innocent arabs as much as you do, these days. Who qualifies more as a racist, then?

The Italians gave West Ham Paolo DiCanio (a self confessed fascist by the way) forwhich, in spite of his political leanings, I'm eternally grateful. Italy is a fucked up place, but capable of producing one of the most brilliant midfielders that I've ever seen.

We're not racist. We're merely spineless.

None of which interests me in the slightest. Not a terribly good jewel of in a nationalist crown here, still I think the English are as muck as anyone else. No better, no worse.

God, from discussing the crappiness of the red-light district in Amsterdam (page 1) to the merits/irelevance of Paolo DiCanio. The internet is a weird and wonderful place.

Well, probably worse than most. The Empire gave us ample opportunity to exercise our more xenophobic impulses.

well maybe. but france gets nearly 80 million visitors every year. not sure how many million flood paris. say 10. 10 million. and to they respect your customs, speak your language, and try not to be obnoxious? no. so parisians justifiably get fed up from the fucking tourists demanding macdonalds and expecting than EVERYONE speaks their language. the australians get plastered in the plazas, the americans make faces at the food, i don't know what the english do, i suppose they are more polite than everybody else but of all the english people i've met (and i've met quite a few) none of them have ever bothered to speak a foreign language.

so i understand how parisians are FED UP with the hordes of tourists. not just english tourists, mind you-- my friends in provence bitched mostly about the dutch, who drive their trailers in the summer and spend the season there don't buy a single thing, carting every single thing from their own country and leaving only trash.

i felt the same every summer while living in d.c., the hordes of ugly pink tourists making a mess of everything in what i felt was MY town.

now if you go to a place, try to respect the customs, behave politely and make an attempt to speak their language, you get treated well everywhere.

anyway i just came to say that, goodnight.

Although i've chopped it down mercilessly, this is a great post.

I agree that English visitors to Paris don't make enough effort to genuinely engage with the culture. But I worry about any city that becomes so reliant on tourist money to survive. Paris thinks of itself as a world power but the reality is that it's most powerful asset is as a tourist attraction. This is now recognised as a fact by economists, who contrast it with other cities such as Beijing, Tokyo, New York, London, Riyadh, et al. Unless Paris wants to become the Orlando of Europe (along with Amsterdam, Athens, Rome and Prague) then it needs to look at itself beyond the next influx of tourists.

A lot of dutch people go to some camping in france with their own caravan, loading it up to the roof with dutch food. cheese, peanut butter and whatever else they'd normally have. it's perhaps the stereotype of the dutch that germans most like to make fun of. i couldn't think of a worse holiday myself, except maybe for going to a dutch tourist resort in spain or turkey where you can order pannekoeken, fries or kroketten... in dutch of course.

the thing that makes this thread a bit pointless is that it's so overly filled with stereotypes and generalisations that it's just lame. the ridiculously one-sided pro- and anti-france opinions, people equalising one district in one city to an entire country, etc... I mean all those great political conversations you had with the French were all about Rousseau and Montesquieu, right? Because nobody would vote for someone like Chirac and Le Pen there.

I've probably been the most guilty of this, but i'd like to blame my petty pejudices on four bottles of wine, rather than any deeper, more ideologically troublesome, issues. Only a fascistic tee-totaller would judge a man on what he said after four bottles of (i dare not disclose FRENCH) red wine.

ah, apologies... i thought that binge drinking was a thing of the past in the UK, now that the pub closing times have been extended. but it must be a habit that's hard to get rid of.

(i just had to throw in one more stereotype before i'm going to bed.)

Seeing as how I've only been outside of the country once, to Mexico, and I had a terrific time. I can't say I've ever been anywhere I didn't like.

Perhaps I could speculate on places I think would not agree with me, (or anyone for that matter, at least in its present state).

Somalia
Iraq
Zimbabwe
Myanmar
Sudan

I've never been out except to Mexico, and then I went to the rural area of where the indigenous people lived. And wow it was such a beautiful place, but now from what I hear it is chaos.

I could say Arizona, adn Vegas are the worst. Arizona because everyone gave me the eye. And Vegas because other than gambling there isn't much to do.

If I had to pick a worst of the countries I've visited, I guess I'd say Spain, but I'd still like to go back and give the place another chance, it wasn't all bad.

I hated Dublin the first time I visited it, purely because the vast majority of people I encountered were rude, arrogant and smug cocks. Dublin IS wildly over-rated still, in my opinion.

Spain can be the best of places, and the worst.