In the United States, many Americans perpetuate a belief about the French. The belief is that French people are rude, particularly to Americans.

In discussions I’ve had about travelling in France over the years, I have often heard the same points repeated—that the person liked la province (the non-Paris part of France), but didn’t like Paris because the people were rude. And that while people were nicer in the countryside and the smaller southern cities, they were still often rude.

But during my own travels in France, I discovered that this American belief about the French was really a myth. While traveling in France with a good friend to celebrate my high school graduation, I was lucky enough to spend two weeks in Paris exploring, and then a few more weeks in the south of France moving between different small towns and cities. There is no doubt in my mind that the two of us stood out as American. We were eighteen-year-old “Yankees” with seven years of French lessons from non-native teachers, good grammar and vocabulary but woeful American accents when we spoke French. But even without hearing us speak, any French person could have seen we were American. My best friend wore one of those travellers’ wallets that go under your clothes, but he put too much stuff in it so it bulged visibly through his shirts. We didn’t know how to work the credit card machines in the big H&M in Paris—watching the Parisians in front of us check out only left us mystified—and we were completely lost as to what we were doing wrong in the grocery store checkout lane. As a result, I thought that the French people we met would receive us coldly.

But people were consistently nice to us, both in Paris and outside of it.

In Paris, when I needed to buy a new pair of sunglasses, we ducked into a shop to do so and my high school French teacher’s warnings about the proper etiquette for behavior in shops in France came back to me. Despite this, I expected a cold shoulder, so I was surprised when the employee helped us happily, asked what I was looking for, and made suggestions for glasses that might look good on me. Another day, in a small town in Provence when my friend wanted to visit an art gallery, the gallery owner was delighted to talk to us, wrote a list of other places we should visit in the town, and gave us his business card. When we were lost in Paris, passersby helped us.

To be sure, not every French person we met was unfailingly nice, but far more of them were than I had been led to expect while talking about France with friends and acquaintances.

I should acknowledge that I did witness French people acting more coldly to other Americans, but the root cause seemed relatively clear. To start with, the effort that the visitor put into using French made a significant difference in the way that visitor was received. My companion and I used French as much as possible, and although our French wasn’t the best, our effort seemed to make a difference with many people we encountered. In fact, I would argue that people were much more tolerant of our passable French than many Americans are of people with comparable English ability in America. While I know that not everyone has the option or opportunity to learn French, even foreigners we saw who only said bonjour and merci were received more openly than the many Americans we saw who didn’t use French at all.

My suggestion to non-French speakers and other American readers who think French people in general or Parisians in particular are rude is to think about how you respond to tourists who may not speak English while traveling in the United States. You would probably be frustrated or rude. So expecting the French to be perfectly nice to us when we haven’t made the effort to respect their culture in their country is an unfair double standard. And even if they are rude to us, my experiences gave me reason to think that this rudeness is a result of the lack of respect that many Americans show to them while traveling there. It’s evident while traveling in France that sometimes it’s not enough to say thank you or hello in French and that some people will still treat Americans less nicely than those from other countries. Maybe we do culturally deserve this because of American tourist behavioral norms; still the many individuals that are putting in the effort don’t. It’s a complicated issue that won’t be solved overnight, but each person that makes an effort makes a bit of a difference. Instead of complaining about French people’s rudeness, we should ask how we, as Americans, can respect French people in such a way as to deserve their goodwill.

This problem isn’t just about American tourist behavior in France, it’s about American and global tourist culture as a whole. While traveling abroad, it’s easy to get caught up in the experience of being in another country and not think about the people that live and work there, and I think this needs to change. The myth of French rudeness is just a microcosm of larger problems about tourist culture, centered on American tourist culture while visiting other countries. I think the heart of this issue is just taking greater care while traveling, considering how you’re affecting the people who live there, and working on mutual respect, because the more respectful we are while visiting, the more progress can be made in the way Americans are viewed around the world.