Essay: THE FOREIGNER DISCOVERS AMERICAN (AND VICE VERSA)

JAPANESE girls at Natural Bridge, Germans at the pool sides of a hundred Holiday Inns, an Italian family at Radio City Music Hall, British motorists at Old Faithful—these are the newest innocents abroad. Since 1961, when Congress, hoping to reduce the balance-of-payments drain, set up the U.S. Travel Service as the nation's first official tourist bureau, the number of foreign visitors to America has more than doubled. This year 1,200,000 of them (excluding border crossers from Canada and Mexico) are busily proving for themselves the truth of Lord Bryce's 19th century axiom: "America excites an admiration which must be felt upon the spot to be understood."

In A Hard Day's Night, the Beatles were asked "How did you find America?" "Turned left at Greenland," came the reply. Most of America's new visitors have considerably more complicated responses, though often not as sophisticated a grasp of geography. Accustomed to driving from one country to another in a day, European tourists are invariably overwhelmed by the vastness of the U.S. Not long ago a Frenchman who wanted to see Yellowstone took the first plane he could get to Wyoming. It landed at Cheyenne. He got out and grabbed a taxi to go to the park, only to find he was still 485 miles away. Nearly half of all incoming tourists land in New York, and Niagara is often the farthest point west they and their budgets reach.

The cost of getting to the U.S. is the main obstacle for foreigners, but even when the ocean has been hurdled, money remains a persistent problem—"the largest we have," says USTS Director John W. Black. Yet Sylviane Mathieu, a pretty blonde doctor from Limoges, found that she could get by on $10 a day for food and accommodations after having budgeted $15. Foreigners complain that there are no middle-priced hotels in many U.S. cities: only the expensive and the grubby. By contrast, the motel—"the word that blisters the night sky of the American suburbs in vermilion, green and harlequin Catherine wheels," as Kenneth Allsop wrote in Punch—is widely appreciated as a sybaritic haven of sterilized glasses, heaped towels, ice-cube machines and coffeemakers.

Dr. Oshima's Bisonburger

Tipping is a two-way cultural shock. Just as Americans resent the outstretched palms of European bellhops and waiters who have already received the compulsory tip added to hotel and restaurant tabs, foreigners in the U.S. cannot easily get the hang of the American freelance system. Another shock comes when a visitor tries, as he sometimes does, to haggle bazaar-style in Saks Fifth Avenue.