So, a little background. I used to work as a manager in the leisure industry, then poacher-turned game-keeper I started a career teaching undergraduates how to manage leisure and tourism. I gave it a year and it took 25 before I rolled up my scroll and turned back to poaching. Nowadays I spend the summer escorting (no, not like that) tourists from North America around Europe and what used to be the United Kingdom under Queen Elizabeth II and is now a rather Dis-united Kingdom, but at least under a king – Charles’s III, the Charles that neither has flamboyant hair and headgear nor a head separated at the neck. But I digress… Between May and October much of my time is spent planning, accompanying, expanding and fixing the experiences of these interested Americans and Canadians. I say ‘fixing’ because my frantic under-the-water paddling is seldom seen as, Swan-like, I work behind the scenes to make stitching seem seamless.
Sometimes my fixing is of my own problems, like when I turn up for a tour in the evening, twenty four hours too early, thus without a hotel room or bed for the night. This is why you have children and encourage them to move around as adults. Always the chance they are just an hour or so away with a sofa to spare. Sometimes it’s organisational glitches like a company card that doesn’t work, or a missing piece of equipment. But most often it’s either unexpected hiccups (from late arrivals to cancellations to violent public protests) or, and this is my preferred challenge, working out how to make the visitor’s experience more than memorable and in the best way.
The downside of this nowadays is that it involves travelling without Jackson at my side. Of course we could stay in touch on DogsApp, if there was such a thing, but I find the two dimensional me on a cellphone screen doesn’t make sense, and if I do something like call or whistle, he heads for the door, toy in teeth, to greet the phantom me that’s never there. Like a phantom limb you want to scratch, even if you’ve not seen it for some time. And when things go too far awry, and stress rears its head, I miss the settling, calming effect that the well-behaved version of Jackson has on me. The not-so-well-behaved version, of course, I’m delighted to leave in my partner’s care, while I get a good (if short) night’s sleep on the road. Sounding like a parent? You bet. That’s what it’s like having a dog, let alone a menagerie.
While on the road, I’ve often compared managing the tourist menagerie as herding seagulls – far from the relative safety of only three dimensions herding cats, the untied state of Americans offers distinct challenges. For a start, there’s the north/south thing, the blue and red, the (very) different states, the MAGA hat, baseball cap and the stetson, the culture vulture and the shopaholic, the itinerant latecomer and the obsessive timekeeper, the conspiracy theorist and the unwavering optimist, the good, the bad and the beautified (they’re never ugly). The colour they add to a tour is way beyond red, white and blue, and I love what I do because of, rather than despite, the diversity. I just need to to remind myself of that, when the technology, timings or temporary hold-ups let me down.
This season, this year it was no different than before, except I was fast becoming something of a chameleon, adapting to the needs and characters of those in my ‘care’. And, while chameleonism is a useful skill, observation can be another to inform and entertain as I navigate the diversity of inputs to engineer a successful outcome for all concerned.
So, some initial empirical observations on our cousins ‘separated by a common language’ from North America – yes I must be even handed (ish) as occasionally my charges are Canadian, even if sometimes they just pretend to be Canadian to present what they feel ought be a more palatable image to the outside world. Now, perhaps there’s a certain logic to making observations throughout the day, or even throughout the stay. So, let’s go from stay to the day-to-day and take it from there.
Pre-arrival our friends seem rather polarised – a not unfamiliar trait in the American psyche: the enthusiasts and the passers-by. The enthusiast is straight on social media as soon as humanly possible, either asking questions – does Scotland use the Euro, should I bring a bigger suitcase, is there a laundromat? ; or expounding and enthusing about the delights to come. The passer-by lets life’s travelator move them along and they’re often moved emotionally in the process, without letting the stresses and strains of travel get to them. Que sera sera. There’s also, of course, the technophobe, who refuses to use communication tools at their disposal and all too often misses out on the marginal bits that make all the difference. Don’t think that these behaviours are unique to the North American tourist; Brits and others can be just as likely to do the same. But it does set the scene. When they arrive they’re almost without exception immensely grateful for whatever lengths you go to to smooth their transition onto foreign soil. This is particularly true if they’ve already experienced hiccups en route (or N route as they like to say). And they do like to share their travel stories, often life stories a little too, which makes meeting such a wide range of people fascinating. Usually. Sometimes scary. Particularly the overly-colourful and imaginative conspiracy theorists.
Eating habits are an education from breakfast onwards. So many ways to hold a fork and knife. For some it’s like trial by silverware – whether wooden, plastic, metal or even silver silverware. So many seem unaccustomed to using what we call cutlery, never mind being asked to decipher a place setting. But then why do we call it cutlery anyway this side of the Atlantic? It’s not like we use everything to cut. And then there’s plate-loading. When faced with a bufffet-style breakfast, of course you want to try a bit of everything… but all on one plate? A fried egg lies with fruit salad, a croissant cuddles up to a wee dod of haggis in another corner of the same plate, and I hold my breath when they approach the muesli and milk, plate in hand… . Whether about economy of effort, or a strict one visit policy back home, I find myself mesmerised by the growing towers, cities even, of self-served breakfast, waiting for the tower of cards to collapse into a mushy mess, but it never seems to happen, and they come back for more the next morning. Porridge and a Bloody Mary anyone?
Trying local food is often one of the explicit aims of the traveller, a purpose that warms my heart, as something of a food adventurist myself. The seemingly unfamiliar in the US can be so familiar until we realise we just have different names for similar things – oatmeal (porridge, porage), chocolate croisSANT (pain au chocolat); or that we just prepare things differently – bacon in the US, for example, implies to me that pigs have only bellies and no back, shoulder or other anatomy that can be cured to perfection. Exposure to oak smoked back bacon can be a source of fascination, and perhaps a little discontent when returning to home soil. Hamburgers (those hamless patties we call beefburgers) are revered back in the States, and can be ordered anywhere from blue to blackened, whereas here a burger is, well, a burger, and you get what you’re given. So between the US and UK, meat’s a two-way street.
There’s always an initially welcome enthusiasm to eat authentic, ‘local’, typical British, English, Irish, Scottish food, and so on. I say ‘initially’, because it makes me start to wonder what really is authentic and typical anymore? We eat a lot of pasta (Italian), rice with our wonderful Indian, Chinese, Far Eastern food; French fries (Belgian) with our take away burgers (American). Potatoes with everything doesn’t cut it any more, except in the chippy or from the freezer. But then, on reflection, we do pies well – raised, sweet and savoury; there’s the ‘fish and chips’ experience that has to have mushy peas, tartar sauce, salt and vinegar; the Scottish equivalent of a fish, sausage or haggis supper, and the mythical deep fried mars bar that tourists seem to love to seek out – once … only ever once. We’ve become so international that British hot food like bangers and mash, the Sunday roast, are consigned to special trips and tourist traps. The ‘full English/Scottish/Irish breakfast’ is still a cholesterol-laden institution the ‘average’ American tourist is keen to engage with, but exploring or explaining the components can be a step too far. The ceremony that goes with food is maybe more attractive to them than the reality of the fare: Address to the Haggis anyone? Of course. Now, could I have broiled chicken please instead?
The draw of the drink is hard to miss. Warm, craft or cold beer; whisky with or without an ‘e’ and in Scottish (not Scotch) or Japanese ownership; liquor and liqueurs. All a source of fascination and conversation. Soft drinks vs soda or pop, ginger and Irn Bru in Scotland. Sweet iced tea that isn’t sweet enough for North Carolina, ‘full sugar’ Coke that simply doesn’t have enough sugar and has too many sweeteners. More mystery. Tea at breakfast or all times of day? What? You drink coffee too?! And then there’s all those mealtimes: breakfast, elevenses, lunch that I grew up calling dinner, afternoon or high tea? Dinner that a lot of us call tea. Supper that’s either cocoa and fancy biscuits or a meal in itself. Followed by a nightcap, and it’s back to drinking. So many things to fascinate or confusticate.
International-Eyes.org 