Greeting people can be just SO awkward
For all my friends, family and readers who have been the victims or the unwitting aggressors (I think I have been both) of the awkward foreign-kiss-kiss-on-the-cheek-thing with new friends from other places, the link below is for you. Even if you have just wondered at times if you are doing it right or horribly wrong, read on about how to non-awkwardly greet people from different countries. I offer this for a few reasons:
It can be SO awkward when you get it wrong. I cannot tell you how many times someone has gone in for that extra one as I was centering to pull away and, well, you-know-what happens.
It is so distinctly un-american to greet each other like this. We are just inherently not touchy-feely people.
Speaking here as an American, I suggest that we need our own style of kiss. All right, it can be “theirs.” We don’t really have to think of our own. It has never stopped us before. Just take it! We can just co-opt their style, call it something else and say it’s “American.” After all we take everybody’s everything else, change the name, make it SO MUCH BETTER (in our eyes) and then proclaim ourselves the very best at it, right?! That’s just what we do. You needn’t look any further than the realm of sports to find the most blatant examples of this: Baseball (World Series against ourselves?), Football and Basketball–games no one else in the world plays or cares about. Let’s do it with the embrace! What should be our unique, best-in-the-world American style of embrace?
Before I go trying to change the landscape of the embrace as we know it, let’s try to get down what other countries do first, all right? So, read on… How To Non-Awkwardly Greet People From Different Countries.