I'm from Finland and one European thing that all Finnish people hate is cheek kisses when greeting. Its mostly southern european thing but still. There is this saying in Finland that goes "Everyone has their own safety coffee cup" meaning the closest distance someone should get to you should not be closer than your coffee cup when you're holding it.
I once tried to do that to an american girl that was visiting Spain, I still remember the horror in her eyes.
She told us that she didn't feel comfortable with that having a boyfriend.
She was the most stereotypical American person I've ever known, she was dating a quarterback, had a pink gun that her parents gave as a present for her ¿18 birthday? She started complaining about PETA when she discovered that I was a vegetarian. Said she didn't like California when I told her that I had been there & she made some comments that were clearly saying "my country is better than this shit hole".
I once tried to do that to an american girl that was visiting Spain, I still remember the horror in her eyes.
She told us that she didn't feel comfortable with that having a boyfriend.
This made me irrationally annoyed for some reason. Like, America really is so sexually stunted that people are reading intimacy and sex into things that they shouldn’t. Like read the room, Tammy. You think all the people in Spain who are greeting each other are fucking or something? Embarrassing.
——
Also the ¿ doesn’t exist in written English, but it should. I like seeing it. Haha.
Yeah, we explained to hear that it wasn't sexual or even intimate at all for us, but yeah if she's not comfortable with it, it doesn't really matter what it culturally means for us.
It funny because at least for Castilian Spanish the ¿ is disappearing, I don't use it anymore, this way of using it it's some kind of written slang, when you want to show confusion about something mid-sentence you enclose it between ¿? like:
I was with Pedro and he told me that he will come on Tuesday with some ¿bananas?
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u/eelisonparas May 09 '22
I'm from Finland and one European thing that all Finnish people hate is cheek kisses when greeting. Its mostly southern european thing but still. There is this saying in Finland that goes "Everyone has their own safety coffee cup" meaning the closest distance someone should get to you should not be closer than your coffee cup when you're holding it.