Service without a smile

Mrs Walles and I seem to have developed an odd affliction: when we go out to restaurants recently the waitress brings the bill to the table before we've even finished our mains, leaving no opportunity to order dessert.  Now anyone who knows us will attest that we certainly look like people who could be persuaded to peruse the dessert tray, so it seems likely we've just struck a couple of people who want to finish their shift.  Either that or they've decided we look like we've already taken advantage of the dessert tray enough and are withholding it from us for our (in their judgement) own good.

The other night we went to a favourite eatery.  We hadn't been out to dinner in a while and we planned to do the thing properly, but we were denied dessert again.  We'd also been going to order a little something to take home for lunch the next day, but we couldn't do that either.  I guess we could have piped up and said we wanted to order something more, but why should we have to?  And besides, then we'd be dealing with a snotty server and who knows what unsanctioned extras would find their way into the coffee?

This actually hurts her more than it hurts us - we just paid and left and picked up desert from Dunkin' Donuts.  She didn't get as big a tip as she might have, partly because we didn't appreciate the service, and partly because she missed out on 15% of whatever dessert, coffee and lunch would have cost.  It all goes to show that tipping isn't necessarily the good motivator that is supposed to be.  And also that it's easy to find bad service in America.  But - and I may have said this before - at least it's sincerely bad service.  Still, I think I'd rather have insincerely good service than sincerely bad service if it means the difference between a pleasant night out and an evening cut short. 

Cowboys and aliens

There are of course many words and expressions I use that are not used here - in most cases employing these results in a blank stare or a polite request that I speak English.  Occasionally, though, the lauguage I'm using has quite a different connotation from the one I intended and the results are more unpredictable.

There are a few words which have fairly innocent interpretations outside the US but which can be offensive inside.  For example the name of the British show I know as Spooks but which is called MI5 here, because "spook" is apparently a derogatory term for an African American.  Mind you, the sense of the word to mean a spy is also of American origin so I guess it snuck across the border and then got locked out.

Another good example is the word "cowboy".  Before I spent any time here, if I referred to someone as a cowboy that had, to me, negative connotations.  A builder who was a cowboy was a bad builder, and so on.  Thinking about it, I'm not entirely why this is so.  I suppose there is some idea that cowboys are here one day, gone the next, or perhaps it's an impression lifted from old westerns that cowboys aren't to be trusted.  Maybe it is just a pale kind of anti-Americanism.

It doesn't matter why the rest of the English speaking world uses "cowboy" in this way, what is interesting is that Americans don't.  To them cowboys are heroic frontier figures, independent, rugged, living their lives in the saddle with a quiet sense of pride and dignity.  They're almost modern knights, rounding up cattle instead of the bad guys (but if there are any bad guys about, you know that the cowboys will do the right thing).  I understand this, it's almost exactly the same as the legendary Southern Man which pervades New Zealand culture.

So you can see why an American would feel insulted to hear you using the word cowboy in a negative way.  Cowboys are the good guys, they get the job done, and done right.  I'm sure Mrs Walles feels this more acutely than most, since she has spent a lot of time in Montana, where cowboys still exist, and she's got the boots and hats to prove it.

Of course when we non-Americans employ the phrase we don't even think about such things.  But maybe we should.  I'll tell you one thing, once you've tasted the beef here you know for sure that the cowboys must do a good job.  The real cowboys are definitely not "a bunch of cowboys".

A disclaimer

In writing this blog I'm bound to attribute a lot of things to Americans that don't really apply to all Americans - indeed I've probably done it already.  I don't mean stereotypes, which I hope to avoid, but the danger of generalising from the people I have encountered to those I haven't.  Because they aren't all the same.  Far from it.

Take, for example, the classic stereotype that American service is excellent, but insincere.  I believe there are places - though I haven't personally visited them - like Los Angeles and Southern California generally that this is true. Visitors to those places have the stereotype reinforced each time they go.

I can personally attest, though, that neither part of the stereotype applies in heartland Pennsylvania.  Here the service can be good or bad, but either way it is generally very sincere.  They're good, salt of the earth types, and I just don't think they have any time for putting on a show.  Even in New York City, where service generally depends on how much you're willing to fork over, I have many times experienced spontaneous and sincere offers of help - the hotel doorman who hails you a cab, or the theatre usher who offers to take your photo.

The point is that attitudes vary widely in the US and it is a point I didn't really appreciate before I came here.  Of course I didn't think Americans were all cookie cutter duplicates.  But I didn't appreciate that their differences from one another might outweigh their similarities.  I'm still not sure exactly how diverse they are, but it is a lot more than I expected.

The differences cut across each other.  There are geographical differences, ethnic and racial differences, language differences, religious differences, educational differences and who knows what other kinds of social differences.  There are individual idiosyncrasies, too, but if you look carefully you can identify characteristics that are common among, say, New Yorkers, or rural Pennsylvanians or urban Jews.  Take the whole nation, though, and it is a lot harder to pin down those commonalities.

I'm not sure why this is.  Individualism is a virtue here, but is that a cause or an effect?  It is a documented fact that before independence the thirteen colonies that made up the fledgling United States (pop quiz, can you name them?) had more to do with the mother country than with each other, so even in the beginning this country was diverse.  More recent immigration from far-flung parts of the world was no doubt another contributor.  And when the land itself varies so much, from snow-capped mountains to vast plains to deserts to forests to swamps, you would expect the people to vary to match.  Enough of my half-baked theories, though.

The upshot of all this is that it is hard to generalise from the Americans I meet to Americans in general, and I ask you, gentle reader, to keep that in mind.  When you see me boldly state that Americans do this or think that, always attach a footnote in your head reading "at least the Americans I have encountered".  And if, by chance, you happen to be one of those Americans I haven't encountered, feel free to correct me where I stray from the truth.

Don't save the sceptical treatment just for me, though.  Do it whenever you hear a weary traveller report on their experiences.  I remember in New Zealand often listening on the radio to talking heads just returned from LA or, rarely, New York or further afield, reporting on the attitudes or behaviour of the American people.  Now I know just how suspect those reports were.

Mind you, that hasn't stopped me from doing pretty much the same thing in this blog.  Just consider yourself warned.

They say TO-MAY-TO, I say TO-MAH-TO

One thing that I really didn't anticipate coming to America was the language barrier.  True, it isn't a very high barrier, but it exists and it can be frustrating.  It's especially frustrating because it's a bit like a two-way mirror: I can usually see through it as if it wasn't even there, but to those around me it is all too apparent.

This is all television's fault.  The schedules of every English-speaking country outside the US are stuffed full of American shows.  We foreigners have all been exposed to a wide variety of American accents and words for years and years.  We have no trouble understanding them and many of us even have quite an ear for different regional accents.

But the opposite is not true.  There is very little British television on US screens, and virtually none from Australia or New Zealand (but they do exist - Planet Green seems particularly fond of them).  The net result is that while I've been listening to Americans talking all my life, most Americans have never heard a New Zealander speak.  Never heard my accent, my idioms or the little phrases with which, I now realise, Kiwis pepper their speech.

Of course people here are too polite to say they don't know what the hell I'm talking about, but I'm reliably informed that many of my interlocutors are just smiling and nodding when I speak - and sometimes I catch them at it, for example if I ask a question and receive only a look of panicky bewilderment in reply.  Otherwise I wouldn't know: I can understand them and it is very difficult to remember that they can't always understand me.


That's not to say that there aren't occasions where I have trouble understanding people, but generally only with vocabulary: slang that I don't get or words whose meanings have a subtly different meaning in the US.

Linguistic differences can get in the way, but they aren't all bad.  There is an upside, which I'll get to next time.

Dining out on dining

There are many remarkable things about food in the US, not least the scale of things.  For example they have the temerity to call this a sandwich:

If you look closely you can just see the bread peeking out from beneath a mountain of corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese and thousand island dressing.  Technically I suppose the bread makes it a sandwich, but only in the way that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic.  By the way that particular combination is a Reuben sandwich for the uninitiated and it is delicious - just make sure that the bread, even token bread, is rye and toasted.  They don't have to be monstrous, that's just how they make them at the Carnegie Deli in New York City.

Big portions don't really confound me - my appetite can hold its own here - but there are lots of little things that took my by surprise.  Like the convention in restaurants that you hold on to your knife and fork between courses.  If you leave them on your plate they're whisked away and don't return, so you pretty much have to lick them clean and sit them on your napkin.  I still get caught out by that one.

My biggest restaurant faux pas so far happened after I'd already spent several months here and dined out a number of times.  What I hadn't done was to order salad - for one thing it comes out at a weird time and for another who needs salad when you're tackling with the mutant sandwich or a steak the size of a tire?

This time, though, the salad came with whatever I'd ordered.  Fine.  Then came the fateful question: what salad dressing did I want?  I should have asked for a list, that's what I usually do, but I got cocky and just went for it.  I knew what I wanted, what any reasonable Kiwi would have asked for.  "Mayonnaise" I said.

It didn't help that this was one of the unusual occasions when we were out with a large group.  As I recall the table fell silent and all heads turned in my direction.  I could sense concern for my mental health from several of my dining companions, worried perhaps that I might suddenly turn dangerous and have to be restrained.  The waitress looked faint.  Somebody repeated back "Mayonnaise..." and then added "...on salad?" with a tone of both distaste and incredulity.

Because, you see, Americans don't put mayonnaise on salad.  They put it on sandwiches, they make other salad dressings from it, like ranch or the aforementioned thousand island, but they definitely do not put it straight on salad.  If I can save one person from the humiliation of asking for mayo with their salad in a US restaurant, this blog will have been worth it.

They did bring me mayonnaise, in the end, because another thing restaurants do here is take customers wishes seriously - more on that another time.  I think it may have hurt them on the inside to do it, though.

I eventually recovered from the embarrassment.  I've even ordered salad since.  With ranch dressing, thank you.  And I always ask for a list of the options if I'm not sure what they are.

Penn's Woods

Before I left New Zealand my impending departure would often become a talking point, even with people I had only slight contact with.  Reactions were mixed.  Many people weren't sure where Pennsylvania was, and said as much; far more amusing - or perhaps worrying - were the people (more than one) who were excited that I was going where the vampires come from.

I assume (unless there's something they haven't told me here...maybe that's the reason we keep so much garlic in the house) that they were getting confused with Transylvania, the region of Romania where Bram Stoker set Dracula.  I laughed to myself but the joke was eventually on me because when I finally got here the extent of my own ignorance became clear.

It wasn't only ignorance.  There were plenty of things that I didn't know about the US and life here (there still are, and they pop up every so often to confound me), but there were also things that in a way I did know but nevertheless didn't expect.

Take that confusion between Pennsylvania and Transylvania, for instance.  They both end in -sylvania, Latin for "woods".  Transylvania is "on the other side of the woods" and Pennsylvania is the name Charles II gave to the vast region of woods that he granted to William Penn - "Penn's woods".  That should have tipped me off that there would be some trees here.  I'd also read Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, recording his hiking of the Appalachian Trail through several eastern states, including Pennsylvania.  Again, just the title should have been a sufficient hint.

And yet it came as a great surprise to find that vast tracts of Pennsylvania are covered in trees instead of, oh I don't know, rolling hills or something.  Maybe this comes partly from growing up in Central Otago, where forests are something you visit in the car.  New Zealand, too, was once largely covered in trees until farmers turned up.  Here, though, even after the farmers took their share the trees are everywhere.  There is a stand of them in the back yard and visible beyond the next row of houses are woods which stretch on and on out of sight.

These aren't evergreen forests as you find in New Zealand, either, but largely full of deciduous maples, oaks, hickories and dozens of others. I'm used to these trees as interesting ornamental plantings in parks and gardens, and I think that the very idea of millions of them growing in the wild didn't quite register before I came here.

It's not just Pennsylvania, by the way, but most of the eastern part of the US that's this way.  Outside the towns the trees generally rule unless beaten back by humans.

That's one of the reasons I'm writing this blog - to draw attention to the unexpected things about America.  Some are like the woods: the evidence was all there but I never joined the dots.  Mostly, though, it's things that Americans only rarely refer to in books, movies and TV, presumably because they are considered too mundane to mention. They can't be blamed for that: when you're so close to the action it's easy not to see the wood for the trees.