Foreign Perspectives

The “Disney World effect” isn’t necessarily down to Disney World but rather a consequence of how the Americans see “abroad” through the eyes of the Disney parks, films, and occasional travel programmes (not forgetting that with only two weeks vacation time, the number of travel shows on American TV is correspondingly less than it is in Europe). Think of how a European would see America if their only experience was through films: everyone must eat McDonalds, you’re bound to get mugged and/or killed,…. Of course, we know that America isn’t really like that because we’ve been there or we know people who have been there and mainly they’ll have been there for a month long holiday, or indeed several of them.

So, just as in the Disney World version of France, everyone speaks english and accepts dollars. Except, of course, they don’t. Granted, I’m sure that there are very few Americans who arrive in France and expect everyone to accept dollars, but we’ve come across a number who were taken in by the American Express Travellers Check Card and had considerably difficulty in getting money whilst here. In America, just about everyone accepts Amex, which definitely isn’t the case around Europe. In fact, we’ve come across a number of Americans who were quite surprised to find that their credit and debit cards would work abroad and thought that they’d to get a special international use one.

Naturally, the two-week holiday time has a really major affect on how they go on vacation. For a start, all their holidays are effectively what would be called short-breaks in Europe and there’s a much greater concentration on packaged holidays which are in turn mainly a series of city-breaks. It’s therefore quite rare to see any Americans outside the cities and equally rare to see any travelling around outside an organised tour (DIY tours naturally take a little longer). This is another aspect of the Disney World effect where it’s possible to visit Europe in a day: it ain’t realistically possible to visit Europe in less than a month but you can visit individual countries inside the two-week period.

Then there are a whole bunch of assumptions that aren’t so obviously wrong if you’ve not travelled abroad before (and, for the most part, Americans don’t get further than Canada or Mexico). We beefed up our France FAQ in an attempt to address this but I’m sure that many things still need to be added. For instance, in the UK (which isn’t just England) and Ireland, they drive on the left, European electricity is 220V (not 110V) and uses a variety of plugs, American standard phone plugs don’t fit any European phone sockets,… One that we’d not thought about before yesterday was that air conditioning isn’t standard in hotels even in the south of France and even in those hotels that do have it, it’s usually not switched on outside the Summer period.

Apologies to those Americans who are well-travelled but the majority aren’t.