What's the oddest thing you've heard or been asked about the uk in your resident country?

[redexpat]

I've heard more than once in denmark that the UK is a catholic country

And today i was stopped in the supermarket and asked to settle an argument about the origins of halloween.

Does anyone else feel like a sort of cultural ambassador?

i find the Americans' fascination with 'yoorpeans' really fascinating. Also their conscious labelling of things that are ' imported".

Are Yoorpeans cool or not?

(I was at work thing with H abroad, drinking and having a laugh when the American guy turned to his wife and said " see i TOLD you the Yoorpeans were ..." cant remember the exact work but it was along the lines of rebellious and funny)

My dentist here in the Netherlands is always astounded everytime I see him that my teeth are not rotten and that I do not in fact have any fillings (unlike Dutch dh) because "English people all have terrible teeth".

One of DH's friends who is an arse thinks everyone from the UK is an alcoholic, gets rat-arsed every weekend and doesn't own a coat.

Whereas when back visiting the UK, I always get asked if I live in Amsterdam and if I smoke weed (erm, used to smell more weed on British streets than here).

"oh ur from England?is that in new York?"

I once got asked 'do you eat sandwiches for dinner everyday in England' ? asked by a Chinese colleague in Vancouver. She couldn't think of any 'british' food so thought we all lived on sandwiches and cups of tea

quite sweet really

Also heard that English people are all supposed to have terrible teeth.

I'm from Manchester and usually get "where you from...oh Manchester, London" and then get asked if I recommend a hotel in London.

I have been to London three times in my entire life.

I am constantly asked by the French if we still eat boiled meat en Angleterre and how disgusting the food is in the UK. Which drives me mad being a chef, well I was a chef until we moved here now I just churn out meals for ungrateful toddlers and dream of a time when I had a job. And it is very frustrating because I think we are doing food, on some levels way better then the "road kill" and frites you get served at most restaurants in France.

Oh French people .

I used to get "your food is disgusting - meat with fruit...]
Like duck a l'orange, hein?

Where I live and where I'm from (Portugal), they think the UK is very organised, transport works well and only our politicians are corrupt or dirty.
I then tell them about the leaves on the tracks and the wrong type of snow, along with the cash for questions scandal.
(and the things the UK is better at as well :) )

I lived in London for 15 years, until recently, btw.

I am horrified to say that when I was a teenager, I once asked an Irish girl whether they had the same tv programmes as we did...

That's not too bad coffee they probably do have some and not others. I'm in Australia and we have lots of BBC programmes.

According to the member of staff who sold us our tickets for Edinburgh castle last year, an American man once asked him how long it took to dismantle the castle and reconstruct it again each year for the tourists.

I know that Americans don't get as much holiday as we do in Europe and don't therefore have the same opportunities to travel, and having spent time in places like Vegas and Orlando, one's sense of what's real and what's not get's a little 'skewed'.

But come on!!!

Each of my 3 kids in turn has been on the same nursery outing to a nearby farm. Each time, I've gone too. Each time, the farmer doing the tour tells us how most of his school tours are from the nearby city, and '90% of the children have never seen grass before.'

Never seen grass before? Either he is having a laugh, or the kids are, frankly.

He says it so convincingly, and everyone else on the tours just nods and tuts, oh cities, aren't they dreadful.

On hearing I was from England an American (another Bostonian) man's opening question was: Do you guys eat a lot of butter? Um.....

Dh and me in a restaurant in NYC, he spoke to the waitress and she nearly fell over. she couldn't believe there was black people in UK.

on holiday in the states early 90's. visited gp for chest infection and after listening for a few seconds doctor proceeded to ask me if the British had heard about Aids, and as he wasn't sure if we as a nation had, that condoms were a necessity.

minky wins!

In the US in the late 80's we (group of Greek high schoolers) were asked if we had just bought our clothes and shoes especially for this trip having left our togas and sandals at home. They were also pleasantly surprised to see that women were allowed to step out of the Akropolis. The questioners were uni students participating in a debating competition!

An American student staying with us when we lived in Spain refused for ages to believe that 'lorry' was a real word until we showed it to her in the dictionary - she thought it was some weird family slang. (She was equally tickled by 'woolly jumper' and 'bollocks' as a swear word.)

seagull - that's reminiscent of an American tourist who was overheard asking why the Queen had had Windsor Castle built so close to Heathrow...

Well quite. Why did the Queen build it so close to Heathrow? The traffic noise from the M4 alone would put me off

It lowers the property value. And must scare the corgies too.

An American once blanched with shock when I was talking about black British people (I think i was talking about Idris Elba and other black Brit actors who got better parts in the US) and said, 'You can't say that, it's racist, you should say African-Americans!'

I pointed out that I wasn't actually talking about African-Americans but black Britons, but he was absolutely certain that he was right, and that the polite way to refer to any black person, whether they were from Brixton, Jamaica or Nigeria, was African-American.

(Am on this thread under false pretences, as am not a Brit, but the bizarre ideas some people have about Irish people lacking fridges/the Internet/cities and inhabiting a perpetual whirl of fighting, drinking, and discoursing with leprechauns gives me a right to contribute, right?)

firbol of course! Actually you've reminded me of a conversation in the usa when id spent some time in india. Everytime i said indians it was corrected to native americans. No, the collective noun for people from india really IS Indian.

I spent a few minutes explaining Guy Fawkes and fireworks night to one of the mums at the school gate yesterday - I am in Canada. By the end of it I think she thought I was insane (Catholics/ parliament/burning/sparklers)