I had some English friends to stay the other day and was rather embarrassed as I felt one of them had been a little chilly to one of my good Hungarian friends.
When I saw this Hungarian friend again, I apologised for my English friend's somewhat icy manner toward her.
"Oh, I didn't think that she was being chilly", my friend said and then proceeded to tell me a story about a Spanish man who was found on a beach madly making love to a dead woman. When the police asked what the hell he was doing and told him how wrong it was to commit necrophilia, he exclaimed in surprise. "Dead?" he said, "I didn't know she was dead; I thought she was just English."
In the same way - well no, not exactly the same way, I suppose, but in a similar way - my Hungarian friend assumed my English friend was not being chilly, but merely very British.
So I suppose you could say I was saved by a stereotype.
Speaking of which, it turns out that, whereas some Australians claim to believe that the best place to hide £20 from a "Pom" is under the soap, some Hungarians have the same illusion regarding the citizens of France.
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