Money
for Nothing
I'm having a quick overnighter in West Wales on business. So,
I'm sitting in the corner of a pub thinking about what and where to eat when a
bunch of tourists come in and attempt to speak to the barmaid in Welsh.
In northern and Scottish accents.
Like most of us in Wales, she doesn't speak Welsh so they may as
well have been speaking Martian.
I feel sorry for the tourists, who seem to feel
cheated and leave for another pub. Good luck to them. Wales isn't abroad. Yet.
Cultural stereotyping?
I’m not sure if this amounts to cultural stereotyping
and if so, does it matter if it’s good-humoured? I’m sure that many of us have
been on the other side of the fence, albeit accidentally.
Did you expect to see more Frenchmen in berets when
you first went to France?
In London, did you expect to see more Australians
with wine corks hanging off their hats (said to keep the flies off, in case
you’re interested).
And what about more Hawaiians eating pineapple and
ham pizzas? (For the record, I never saw a pineapple or a pizza when I was in
Hawaii)
So, you can’t criticise people for turning up at the
Severn Bridge, armed with a passport and a phrase book because you’ve probably
done the same yourself at some point in time, in some other way, accidentally.
(Intentional stereotyping which causes offence to others is another matter
altogether, of course.)
The Second Severn Crossing or the Golden Gate
Bridge?
And whilst we are on the topic of the Severn Bridge
– the gateway to Wales – why, oh why did we miss the opportunity to brand the
new bridge that opened in 1996?
You might make allowances for the lack of
imagination in naming the original 1966 bridge the “Severn Bridge”, but surely
someone could have come up with something better than the “Second Severn
Crossing” as a brand for its successor? San Francisco called a bridge that
isn’t too dissimilar and is actually a sort of orangey brown “The Golden Gate
Bridge”. Their bridge appears on t-shirts, ours only features on Google Maps.
Money for Nothing
Back on the theme of national stereotyping, I wonder
what less-known national stereotypes would be. There are lots of countries I
just wouldn’t have a clue of stereotyping. I was in Sweden recently and I
didn’t really know what to expect. Well, for a start, society is very digital – even some of the
menus are on iPads.
You don’t see cash much in Sweden as result of its digital drive. A hotel receptionist told me that his son – 17 years old – had never really used cash. It’s all cards and phones – even on buses and in taxis. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for a beggar we passed in central Stockholm. Without a Chip & Pin machine his takings were likely to be miserably low.
On 4th June 2016 the Guardian Newspaper commented that according to central bank the Riksbank, cash transactions made up barely 2% of the value of all payments made in Sweden in 2015. In shops, cash is now used for barely 20% of transactions, half the number of five years ago, and way below the global average of 75%. And circulation of Swedish krona has fallen from around 106bn in 2009 to 80bn in 2015.
I’m not sure if I want to go cashless just yet. I like to take money out and know how much I’m spending. In the meantime, perhaps the Swedish national stereotype might be person clutching a mobile in one hand and a credit card in the other, sitting in the back seat of a Volvo taxi - which he pays for by card - on the way to visit the Abba Museum.
Yes, there is an Abba Museum. No, we didn’t go.
