Same sky: Eating grapes in Japan

Over at the Nerd's Eye View blog, Pam's got an interesting post up about etiquette for travellers - and a very funny story about some Japanese visitors to her company in Austria, who were quite confused when all the employees started greeting each other with the word "Mahlzeit". Literally it means "meal time", and they commonly used it where I lived in southern Germany too, especially as a greeting in the middle of the day. The Japanese visitors in Pam's story heard this as "Mozart", which they thought was quite appropriate since they were in Salzburg, but more than a little strange!

Pam's current contest is about cultural misunderstandings, and I've had my fair share of them. My stomach will never forget the problem of counting in Slovakia, for example, where they hold up different fingers to me when counting, and I kept winding up with three hot dogs when I thought I'd ordered two.

Perhaps one of the funniest cultural clashes I remember was a really simple situation - probably because these are the times when you least expect some cultural clanger to happen. When I was living in Japan, the parents of one of my good friends invited me around to their house for dinner. It was a great meal of traditional Japanese foods, and then we all settled back to watch the video the parents had taken on their recent cruise in Europe. While we watched, there was a plate of grapes to nibble on for dessert.

After an hour or so of footage of the cruise ship, short trips ashore and more footage of the ship, my friend's mother switched the light back on and started to clean up. When she got to the plate of grapes in front of me - now nearly empty - she paused. She looked at me, looked around on top of the table, and even looked under the table. I had no idea what she was doing.

Eventually, she asked me where the grape skins were. The grape skins? I'd eaten them, of course, although I had noticed they were a bit tougher and chewier than the grapes back home. She explained that I should have peeled the grapes before eating them. Now that was something I'd never thought of. Luckily, we all laughed about it, but I was always wary of Japanese grapes after that.