Who Are Those Loud Americans? Oh Wait, Thats Us

Since I have done quite a bit of traveling with my family I have pretty much always known that there are a lot of other countries who have citizens that are not necessarily the biggest fans of Americans.  We tend to have a stereotype of being stupid, loud, and obnoxious.  Even knowing these stereotypes, I have never really considered myself to be an overly loud person.  I laugh when something is funny, raise my voice when I get excited, and will yell my friends name to get their attention if they are far away.  Until I went to Austria I thought that these were relatively normal things to do.

These actions which I consider to be so normal were distinctly abnormal in Austria.  My first experience of this was when I was out with maybe three other students walking down Mariahilfer Strasse.  It was sometime in the early afternoon so we were not disturbing anyways sleep and yet while we were walking, an older woman turned around and told us to calm down and speak softer.  Until she said this I had not even thought that we were being very loud.  We were not yelling or screaming, instead we were just talking, laughing, and enjoying ourselves.  Immediately I felt ashamed because I do not like disrespecting other peoples' cultures.  Everyone else just laughed it off and said that it was fine because we were American tourists so what else could these people expect from us?  It was at that point that I realized that if I was going to hang out in any sort of group of students I needed to get used to getting glares and set downs since most of the other students did not seem to care to try and adapt their social behavior.

It was never more obvious that the group had chosen to embrace the American stereotype than when we were at restaurants, on the U-Bahn, or going out to the bars.  We were loud, we were obnoxious, and I am sure that all the Austrians thought we were rude.  Sometimes I would try to quiet people down but after awhile this seemed a fruitless endeavor so, unless it was a truly ridiculous display of Americanness, I simply decided to embrace my wonderful, although loud, classmates since they were just trying to embrace Vienna and enjoy everything that it had to offer.