I recently went to Turkey. Which was alright. But I’ll get to that later. First I wanted to share this brilliantly stereotypical scene that I witnessed at Barcelona airport. I had had to fly from Bilbao to Barcelona, then to Istanbul, and I had a two hour wait between flights at Barcelona. I didn’t realise that the gate I was leaving from was past a separate, internal security control, and that once you’ve passed through it your only eating options are McDonalds or a cafe which only serves cakey things. This is to explain why I ended up sitting in McDonalds for two hours.
Oh, and also, this particular part of the airport had all the gates that are used exclusively by American airlines. So, to recap; McDonalds. Two hours to wait. Lots and lots of Americans. Now, before you start thinking that I’m some sort of be-dreaded, hacky-sack-playing, unwashed, anti-American communist, I really don’t have a problem with Americans or America in general. I like to think that my view of America is slightly less manichean than that. It’s just that it sometimes seems that there is a particular breed of especially loud American who is singularly unsuited to international travel. I sat at a table next to four of them, which is where this almost offensively clichéd little drama took place.
One of them, who could have been a caricature of an American (overweight, thick Georgia accent, Hawaiian shirt – yes really – and a baseball cap, almost certainly named Bud) arrived at the table with a tray full of burgers, in high dudgeon;
Bud: The service here is so rude. I was like, ‘can I get a McGriddle’, and she just looked at me. She didn’t say ‘no hablo inglés’ or anything. Just looked at me.
Bud’s Wife: Are you serious?
Bud, shell-shocked: She didn’t even know what a McGriddle was.
Other American Man: What? That’s unbelievable. Everyone knows what a McGriddle is!
Other American Woman: Everyone. Everyone knows that.
Bud: She didn’t know. She just didn’t have a clue.
Bud’s Wife, aghast: And this isn’t even an American coffee that I have here.
Bud: I’m not even going to ask for some Splenda. She probably won’t know what it is either.
Other American Man: They probably don’t even have it here.
Bud’s Wife, getting up and leaving the table at full waddle: That’s it, I’m going to go and complain to the manager.
And she did. Honestly, if this has been a little play staged purely for the entertainment of passengers in transit, I would not have been at all surprised. I just hope for their own happiness that the first thing they did when they got home was tear into a McGriddle and an American coffee with lashings of Splenda.
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