We don't speak no Americano

So I capped off a long Thursday of teaching/tutoring with a conversation lesson with a 17-year old Czech girl. She was showing me her homework for the night: a reading from her textbook about the "Do's and Don'ts of Visiting America." Intrigued, I read it with her, and found it more than interesting to gain an outsider's perspective on my homeland, the land of the Trenta Latte. (still can't believe anyone needs 32 oz of coffee in one cup?! That one will probably go in the new edition of this textbook.)

For example:
1) Americans love to line up.
2) They place a very high value on confidence/self esteem
3) Expect to see flags atop every school, library, gov. building..etc, as Americans have a very high sense of nationalism and are taught from a very young age to say the Pledge of Allegiance and never to let the flag touch the ground

(so yay, these all sound good!)

Until the kicker:

4) Don't expect Americans to know much about your country, or even where it is.

Ouch. I don't even sense any witty irony from that statement; just plain, hard fact in their very serious and not-messing-around textbook. Alright, well this is why I'm here! I'm here to learn about the world, expand my sense of culture, truly understand the geographical differences between the itty bitty European countries, and maybe even learn some Czech while I'm at it...and maybe change this perception of Americans, just a little?

But I won't lie; when I got home, all good intentions of lesson planning went out the window as I did something I haven't done since I've been here, and perused "Texts from Last Night" and "Damn you Autocorrect" (a random website documenting the ridiculous texting typos/auto-corrections on the Iphone.) Laughing my head off in a subconscious need for a warm, fuzzy little bath of ridiculous, crazy (often rather crude) yet lovable American culture, before mentally returning to Czech-land, to learn more about the ways of the rest of the world... in a mission to reduce the population of "ignorant Americans" by at least one.