going dutch in budapest

I was at the ITIC conference in Budapest last week to give a talk on 'global etiquette' based on Going Dutch. The feedback afterwards from the variety of international delegates was extremely interesting. One told of a presentation at a conference in China not being as effective as it might have been because they used their normal blue balloons to decorate their stand. After a local pointed out that blue is the colour of mourning, the balloons were changed to red, the colour of good fortune.
Another delegate, an Australian doctor, told me that she'd been working in Jordan and found that as a woman some of the local doctors didn't want to return her proferred handshake. Puzzled and a bit offended by this, she mentioned this to some American colleagues in the evening, who were instantly up in arms: 'Which doctor? We need to have a word with him?' Truly a double-whammy of intercultural confusion!

bmi intercultural guides

I've been working with the airline bmi to produce a series of cultural guides to a range of new destinations they're flying to, from Almaty, Kazakhstan through Tbilisi, Georgia to Khartoum, Sudan. The idea being that business travellers can get up to speed on local customs and manners before they arrive. It's been interesting expanding my knowledge of global etiquette, and also fun being able to concentrate on individual places. Have a look at http://www.flybmi.com/businessguides Who knows where this kind of initiative may lead?

use your thumb

Eating with your hands is one of the subjects I cover in the book. What would be frowned on in Finland is de rigueur in India. I recently found this take on the subject ...

http://www.indax.com/eating.html

the international office kitchen

Here's an intriguing piece, on the vexed subject of sharing an office kitchen. This comes from the US, but I wonder to what extent these frustrations apply in all cultures?

http://www.ajc.com/business/content/business/stories/2008/07/01/office_kitchen_etiquette_0701.html

indian manners

I was on a panel last night talking about travel writing. Afterwards a woman who had spent a lot of time in Goa came up to add her thoughts on Going Dutch. In her experience, she said, people generally don't go in for saying 'please' or 'thank you' in India. 'Sorry' would hardly ever be heard. And if you give someone a present, the custom is not to thank the giver, but to put it immediately away.
All this ties in interestingly with what I said in the book about 'please' and 'thank you' not being at so much of a premium in much of Africa as they are here in the UK (The Magic Words, p.50); also about presents not being opened in front of the giver in the Far East, particularly Japan, where there is always a danger of the receiver 'losing face' through disappointment (You Really Shouldn't Have, p.65).
Does anyone out there have similar experiences with 'please', 'thank you' and 'sorry', not to mention differences in ways of receiving gifts around the world...

les bises

In the book (p. 11) I put the French down for two air-kisses to the cheek as their style of greeting, but now it seems from a new survey that this might not be the whole picture. In Paris and central France I'm right: but up in the north, from Normandy across to the Belgian border, les bises habitually consists of four pecks on the cheek; while in the south-east, apparently, they go for trois.

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2980475.ece

la pause-cafe

Well, here's something I haven't got in the book. The importance of 'la pause-cafe', or coffee break, in France. And our poor correspondent didn't realise for two years what she was doing wrong. When you're the outsider isn't it often like that? People just let you muddle on until you realise that it's not your shocking personal hygeine or terrible jokes that's to blame for the fact that nobody talks to you.
I'm glad to see that she ties in with my advice about toasts and business cards, though.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2007/oct/27/work1