A Foreign Country

This summer as never before, Americans are realizing that to most of the world's population the U.S. is "abroad," a strange land for tourists to goggle at, write home about, and exclaim over in their incomprehensible tongues. In 1964 more than 300,000 Frenchmen, Germans, English, Italians, Russians and Japanese -- not counting students, government officials, 5,000,000 Canadians and 260,000 Mexicans -- are expected to visit the U.S. This amounts to an in crease of 31,491 over the influx last year and about a 77% gain over 1960. "The U.S. vacation," says a London travel agent, "is the In thing this year."

There is still a formidable gap in the balance of travel: U.S. tourists spent $2 billion overseas last year, while foreign visitors will spend $375 million in the U.S. in 1964. But Americans are quickly getting the hang of catering to the tourist from abroad. So is the fledgling Government Tourist Agency, which spends $2,600,000 a year to plug the New World in ads and pamphlets, and has striven heroically to dispel the general impression that a trip to the U.S. is only for the rich. Even with generally unfavorable currency exchange rates, Europeans are astonished to find such travel bargains as the $99 bus ticket that will take a traveler as far as he wishes on any line for one month, an airplane ticket that will do the same on 15 local feeder lines for either $100 (15 days) or $200 (45).

Distances & Delights. Chief problem for Europeans is the language barrier. The Japanese don't expect to communicate in anything but English, but most Continentals can get along in at least one other language besides their own, and it comes as a shock to find the Americans so relentlessly monolingual. The cash value of tourism, though, is bound to engender more linguistic proficiency. In only a year's time, New York City's Newtom Commuting Corp., has built up a booming hired-car service around the idea of having polylingual chauffeurs, who pick up foreigners at the airport and stick with them for the duration of their stay in the city (Newtom can handle nine languages, so far). Manhattan's Gray Line sightseeing buses now offer spiels in Spanish, German, French and Japanese.

Another rude awakening for transatlantic visitors is America's sheer size. French travel agents have learned to make a point of telling their clients that the U.S. is 171 times bigger than France, but still they are repeatedly disappointed to learn that a morning is not enough to visit the Grand Canyon from Denver or that a horseback ride across Arizona would be no fun at all. The insular English are forever making appointments for lunch in Boston to be followed by dinner in Phoenix and then wondering what all the rush is about.

Pleasantest surprise is Americans' easygoing friendliness and hospitality amid all the busy-busy activity. "New Yorkers," wrote Shirley Conran in the London Observer, "have the unselfconscious joie de vivre of the French without being nearly so rude." Warned in advance that Manhattan cab drivers are a surly lot, a pair of visiting secretaries from London were converted within minutes of arrival by an airport hackie who insisted on treating them to a free tour of Manhattan, complete with running commentary. Industrialist Georges Monroy from Arques, France, stopped recently to stare in admiration at a farm in California and was overwhelmed when the farmer drove up and spent two hours showing him around. "This pleasant man," he marveled, "then took us to his house and offered us good Scotch!"

The Spot for Kissing. U.S. food is also likely to be a not unpleasant surprise--especially to French and Italian tourists, who come prepared to sicken or starve on a diet of greasy hamburgers and limp French fries. Not that they wax ecstatic. "It's a shock at first," runs the typical reaction, "but you can get used to it." The attractions they talk about most, however, are the superhighways and the coin-laundries, the toilet paper and the free soap, department stores, motels, and skyscraper hotels, and the simply operated, static-free telephones, over which human speech can actually be understood.

About 34% of the Europeans who have been discovering America this year have been English, 18% German, 6% Italian, 10% French. Notwithstanding Charles de Gaulle's supercilious view of the U.S., 19.5% more French this year than last, and 77.2% more than in the first half of 1961, have come to see for themselves. The venerable Paris publishing house of Hachette has just included a guide to New York in its famed Guides Bleus series, which notes, among other weightier matters, that:

> There are no pissoirs on the streets, in deference to U.S. sensibilities, and such facilities as there are are often deliberately camouflaged behind doors bearing cute euphemisms such as Romeos and Juliets.

> It would take a foreigner ten years to grasp the rules of baseball: "If a ball hit into the stands kills someone, the victim will be well pleased. There isn't a pleasanter death in America."

> The Empire State Building's observation roof is one of the best spots in the world for kissing.

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