Loud American tourist is ‘shy, polite, and courteous’ at home

Press, 30 August 1985, Page 18

Loud American tourist is ‘shy, polite, and courteous’ at home

PAUL CORRIGAN

recently completed an

Air New Zealand-sponsored trip to the United States and Canada. It changed his ideas about American people.

A week or so before I set oat on my first visit to the United States and Canada a colleague said: "You’ll find that your ideas about Americans will be stood on their head.”

Much of what I thought about Americans and their country had come largely from the film and television studios of Los Angeles, from news and current affairs programmes, from reading, and from encountering them as sometimes loud and demanding tourists. I was in the United States and Canada for just over a week, in a group of journalists that watched and reported the rolling-out of the first of Air New Zealand's three Boeing 767 airliners at Everett, north of Seattle.

Two other journalists and myself then went on to Vancouver, British Columbia, where we stayed for two days. Air New Zealand will begin a service to Vancouver, via Honolulu, on November 3. We also went to Toronto, which we visited for two days. We stayed in leading hotels that seemed to reach into the stratosphere — I had never been to bed at 34 storeys. My room on the 28th floor of the Crowne Plaza, in Seattle, offered a panorama that I could only gaze at in silence. I can testify, too, as a rather downmarket gourmet, that we sat down to some sumptuous meals. So, although we were not able to meet many Americans or see much more than a fragment of their country, I saw and heard enough to turn some of my ideas around. I found Americans to be shy, polite, courteous, and helpful. At the Farmers’ Market, in West Hollywood, I stood on the footpath waiting for a break in the traffic so I could cross the street to a shopping mall. I couldn’t believe it when a man stopped his car — and he had a long convoy behind — and waved me across with a smile and a wave. This also happened on my return to the market.

Shop assistants from food bars to big department stores and hotel and restaurant workers were unfailingly courteous and helpful. Some of their New Zealand counterparts could learn a lot from them about how to give service without thinking they are demeaning themselves. I expected to encounter servility from these people, yet detected none.

I had never before been out of New Zealand but I knew that America was big and that almost everything was done on a big scale. With big money in such a country almost anything was possible. But I wasn’t prepared for Los z Angeles International Airport. It has four parallel runways, all being used at the same time. Convoys of airliners line up nose-

to-tail (or jet-pipe) waiting to take off. Aircraft queue up in the air as if they are on a great descending escalator.

Los Angeles International never sleeps. All day, all night, planes boom down those four runways into the air to shriek into reverse-thrust on landing. It is the third-busiest airport in the world, handling 35 million passengers a year. Airliners sporting the insignias of carriers never seen in New Zealand park at its terminals.

Airport-watching at Christchurch will never been the same again.

Boeing builds jumbos and 767 s in a cavernous, 62-acre structure that it says is the biggest in the world. I tried to imagine such a building, in which the 747 s and 767 s seemed so puny and humans even punier, standing out on the Canterbury Plains.

The huge freeways facilitate travel in such a way that many Americans think nothing, apparently, of hopping into their airconditioned cars, pick-ups, and motor-homes, and free-wheeling away up to 500-600 km a day. But some of my greatest pleasures were found at the diningtable: a 50mm-thick prime rib steak that dissolved in my mouth; the huge American sandwich, which is a meal on its own; a delicious oyster that filled the palm of my hand; an all-fruit breakfast in a hollowed-out pineapple served by Air New Zealand cabin crew; pancakes at breakfast awash in whipped cream; and perhaps best of all, a wedge of coconut and cream pie served by a waitress with a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth at a nondescript diner in Victoria, British Columbia.

The Americans and Canadians have this superb practice of supplying huge glasses of iced water at meals, and topping them up regularly. It counters the effects of drinking wine on an empty stomach.

The range of food offered in hotels, restaurants, diners, and supermarkets is bewilderingly extensive, the variety stunning. There seems to be something for every

taste. A fairly small supermarket near Bellingham, on the northern coast of Washington, offered dogs the choice of 17 finds of biscuits, in 251 b bags. The American drug store is more than just a chemist’s shop. You can buy anything from prescription drugs to' contraceptives, food, confectioneries, pipes, cigarettes, tobacco, books, and magazines — and even small radios and television sets.

I was also told before I went away that I would have great difficulty in finding a post office: “You won’t see them on the street corners like you do here.”

And this is where I most felt like an innocent in the Land of the Free, the Automobile, and the Dollar. We were in this huge hotel near Los Angeles International Airport and I wanted to send a postcard to my children. The shop on the hotel’s lobby floor sold postcards. Stamps? The young lady behind the counter kept her surprise in check and indicated a stamp*-vend-ing machine on the wall in the corner.

The chart on the machine told me that to get a 22c and 11c stamp I should feed in two quarters — 50c. So I duly fed in the quarters and the machine spat out a small cardboard envelope, which contained the stamps. I poked a hand into an aperture for the change. None. I felt around inside for it. I started to rummage in the machine and treat it a little roughly, which drew the attention of the assistant.

“Is there a prarblem, sir?” I explained that the thing had not given change. One eyebrow rose above the rim of her glasses and she patiently explained, as to a very young child: “It doesn’t give change, sir. That’s prarfit. The machine’s got to pay for itself. The customer pays." And the damned card arrived several days after I got home. The vending machine in the Crowne Plaza at Seattle required even bigger contributions to its upkeep from the customer. For 44c of stamps you had to ease its hunger pangs with four quarters — ?USI.

The entertainment factories of

Hollywood turn out so many police programmes that I expected to see a conspicuous police presence. In Seattle, Vancouver, and Toronto I saw fewer police than I have become accustomed to in Christchurch. for example. And when I went for early-morning runs in Seattle and Vancouver I felt a lot more secure than I do sometimes in the Garden City.

I also felt safer in the traffic of Los Angeles, Seattle, Vancouver, and Toronto than I do in Christchurch. Vehicles moved leisurely and with discipline on city streets and on the big multi-lane highways. Nobody seemed to have the urge to beat the lights or be the first away at an intersection. Pedestrians do not jay-walk, either. Even the top lawman of the United States is not allowed to get away with such a transgression. Late in July the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office issued an arrest warrant for the United States Attorney-General, Mr Edwin Meese. A search of court records had shown that Mr Meese had never paid a JUSIO fine for jaywalking on June 11, 1980. Not only that, Mr Meese was also being charged an extra 5U5120.50 in interest and penalties. A Federal Justice Department official said that “in the very near future that thing will be paid, and we’ll get on to the more weighty matters of government.”

Inevitably, Americans wanted to talk to this New Zealander about the Government’s ban on nuclearpowered and nuclear-equipped ships.

I believe that most of the Americans to whom I talked did not understand what it was all about. Either the American news media had not done their job properly in reporting it or else the people’s interest had been excited by something else — such as South Africa, which the American news media seem to have discovered only in the last few months.

Some thought that the Lange Government had become antiUnited States; others thought that the whole United States Navy had been banned from our ports. Others thought that it was a very sad rupture between friends. Younger, middle-class Americans rejoiced in the ban and were uneasy about some of the strong words about this country coming out of Washington. Many of these Americans saw New Zealand as some kind of peaceful, unpolluted, non-nuclear paradise, to which they would like to migrate.

Pleasure of the table

Machine pays for itself

Mixed views on ship’s ban