We’re professional, we travel for a living, decoding culture for paying clients. But the very nature of our outsider status, our constant travel means that we don’t understand the nuanced etiquette that separates appropriate from not.
Over the years I’ve: pointed body parts at the wrong people; said the wrong things to the wrong people at exactly the wrong time; sat in the wrong place; touched things that should have been left untouched; and behaved in an otherwise wholly inappropriate way for that moment, place and time. And over the years I’ve developed strategies for minimising the risk of it happening again, and for when it does happen, recovering gracefully.
4 questions:
- When is the last time you breached local etiquette?
- What was the cost/reward of breaching local etiquette?
- How do you minimise the risk of committing a faux pas?
- How did you recover from the situation?
Photo: A gent from Covent Garden Carhartt.
3 Comments
I’m english and have a German girlfriend. So please don’t take this as blind prejudice. One thing that strikes me when I go over and visit is the lack of ‘small talk’ people engage in. Talking about the weather just isn’t the norm.
It made me reflect on the English traits: Small talk provides no hard information yet it does perform a social function.i.e. making people happier, expressing interest and caring. This doesn’t mean German people are not these things. Just different way of expressing it.
For the future I’ll make sure that I have things of substance to talk about.
Does small talk, in the English sense, exist in Shanghai?
Almost never in China from what I have experienced but I don’t speak Chinese so it may be a language barrier thing.
Small talk, rarely is.