Nosebleeds - And other cross cultural misunderstandings
 

They mean something different in American comics.

Do you think anyone in Japan reads X-Men and thinks 'Wow, Professor X is a perve and seems to be aroused in really innapropriarte situations!'?

Also does anyone know where the whole nosebleeding = lust thing came from?

And I guess also other funny langauage/cultural oddities can go here too. Like if you remove the accent from Ano in Spanish it means anus which apparently is a mistake that George Bush made.

The idea behind Japanese nosebleeds is that a guy (generally a virgin) sees something arousing and all the blood rushes to his head, bursting the small, fragile blood vessels in his nose. This is actually somewhat possible, in the same way it's possible to get a nosebleed from intense stress like we tend to use it, but it's not exactly any more realistic.

I have to say that the idea the French are rude is a bit of a misnomer. Rather, they're very blunt, don't dance around the issue, and don't volunteer excess information. In fact, they look at us and think we're jabbery because of all the excess information we give along with the actual direct answer. For example, where we'd be like, "Is there a bus station nearby?" and the person we asked would be like, "Yeah, just go two blocks down that way and wait until the quarter hour," the same question in France would yield a "Yes," and they'd figure you were going to figure it out on your own from there. The appropriate question would be "Could you please direct me to the nearest bus station?" for them, or something similar.

I'd argue that. My house caught a light about... a year ago, and while I was the one trying to calm people down, my nose went on like a faucet. And I don't mean like one of those airport faucets, where there's a few drops here and there, I mean like an actual, "blood is flowing out of my nose someone get me a towel" faucet.

So their rudeness is our laziness? I like it.

Well, they also tip poorly, but that's another part of the culture. Actually, leaving a big tip for a server of the opposite sex is an insult of sorts to your significant other if you're in a relationship. It's a form of flirting, from what I understand.

I don't know about the rest of you, but generally when I see something arousing, the blood rushes to a different part of my body, and tends to LEAVE my head.

From what I hear, for Japanese men that area isn't as big and fills with blood quickly. All the rest of the blood has to go somewhere.[/penis joke]

The French have always been nice to us, tipping appropriately but not generously. We have many problems with the Chinese, because they don't bring a group translator- or if they do, they encourage them not to refer problems/questions for the hotel through them. They also never eat or drink, so we don't get tips.

Technically a tilde, not an accent mark, but yeah.

Speaking of presidential gaffes, one of my classmates who studied abroad in Germany once described a discussion he went to, on the "Du bist Deutschland" ("You are Germany") campaign that ran a while back. He felt out of place, because being born in Iowa, he was most definitely not Germany.

The smartass in me immediately responded, "Aber bist du ein Berliner*?" at which point he directed me toward this.

*I don't know if that's grammatically correct; I only know a couple of words here and there, really.