Going Dutch in Beijing: How to Behave Properly When Far Away From Home

I can never get the greeting right. Is it once on each cheek or is it three times? And should I plant the actual smooch on the cheek or is it the disingenuous air kiss? Luckily, it’s always friends and family, so I’m okay with getting it wrong, business deals and lives are not in the balance.

Mark McCrum’s Going Dutch in Beijing: How to Behave Properly When Far Away from Home is a thorough collection of behavior tips for travelers around the world. The book tells you where the “ok” sign and the thumbs up will work as positive reinforcement and where you’ll end up inadvertently making an insult. It tells you where you should arrive on time, where arrival time is a mere suggestion, and when it’s appropriate to go home. It tells you where a nice bottle of wine is just the thing to bring to dinner and where you should have chosen flowers instead - and what color those flowers should be, even. The book cracks some business mysteries too, like why that client always says yes when he means no or what all those extra people are doing in your meeting.

There’s no way McCrum could have addressed every possible situation - you’d have to have an international dictionary of etiquette - but he does a good job of addressing some of the top level scenarios. There are some anecdotes and more detailed explanations mixed in to each section. The book tries to follow a narrative format, starting with hello, ending with goodbye, with conversation, business, holidays, dating, and lots of other useful divisions in between. I found the format a bit forced, but even so, I read the book cover to cover over a weekend.

I wouldn’t take this book on my round the world trip, but it’s a good pre-trip read, if only to sensitize a traveler to the potential land mines of your behavior while you’re abroad, be it for business or pleasure. I thought the sections on business were especially enlightening - for the life of me, I can’t imagine a scenario in which it would be acceptable to nod off during a meeting but, hey, whaddaya know?

For a short while I worked at Sony in Salzburg, Austria. Austrians greet each other with “Mahlzeit!” at meal times. Roughly translated it means “Bon Appetit!” When walking from our building to the cafeteria, you’d hear “Mahlzeit!” dozens of times, with the appropriate response being “Mahlzeit!” right back. One of the project managers told me that they’d recently had a group of visitors from Sony, Japan. After the third day, one of the Japanese guests got up the nerve to ask about the greeting. “Why do you all greet each other with “Mozart” at lunch time? Is it because you’re in Salzburg?”