Dear Reader,
Welcome to our monthly column in which we try to be faithful to our objective - decoding cultures.
We plan to bring news with intercultural overtones to you, adding our personal interpretation in the hope that this contributes to better mutual understanding.
Sincerely, Karin & Richard
We read in the news…
Give the Turks a fair deal!
Fox News, never the most sympathetic of information sources for freethinkers, reported on December 19 that "the European Union opened its borders to more than ten million Serbs, Montenegrins and Macedonians on Saturday after nearly 20 years of demanding visas, a major boost for closer ties with the 27-nation bloc."
Email to the editors
Our piece in the last newsletter about British ignorance of Belgium and the Belgians produced a number of responses. Here's what one of our readers - a Belgian national and appropriately anonymous here - had to say:
Europe - and isn't it our unique achievement in the end? - is a very funny civilisation (Norman Stone, Professor of Modern History, Oxford University)
Let's start the New Year with a joke which, incidentally, tells us something about the differences between cultures. Like all such jokes it draws on stereotypes, but at least it's intelligent:
