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LONDON (AFP) - Foreign students visiting Britain are to be educated in the etiquette of queuing for buses, after local users complained about them not observing the conventions of standing in line.
Southern Vectis, which operates buses on the Isle of Wight, off England's south coast, said it was to contact local language schools following several complaints about the behaviour of young students over the summer months.
"On the Isle of Wight we get lots of foreign language students staying with families," said operations manager March Morgan Huws.
"In their cultures, they do not queue for buses where they live and there is a scrum every time a bus turns up, while in British culture there is a nice orderly queue.
"We have had quite a few complaints from residents who queue up in an orderly fashion then all those foreign students push past them.
"What we have said is that we will work with the language schools to provide some instructions on the etiquette of queuing. We won't be marching the students up and down showing them how to queue, we will just leave it up to the group leaders to pass on the information."
Orderly queuing -- as seen during the recent Northern Rock banking crisis -- is seen as a quintessentially British convention. One social anthropologist believes Britons are even capable of forming one-person queues at bus stops.
But while queue-barging normally leads to tutting, muttered complaints and shuffling to close the gap on anyone looking to barge ahead, most people are too polite to directly confront a transgressor.
Southern Vectis, which operates buses on the Isle of Wight, off England's south coast, said it was to contact local language schools following several complaints about the behaviour of young students over the summer months.
"On the Isle of Wight we get lots of foreign language students staying with families," said operations manager March Morgan Huws.
"In their cultures, they do not queue for buses where they live and there is a scrum every time a bus turns up, while in British culture there is a nice orderly queue.
"We have had quite a few complaints from residents who queue up in an orderly fashion then all those foreign students push past them.
"What we have said is that we will work with the language schools to provide some instructions on the etiquette of queuing. We won't be marching the students up and down showing them how to queue, we will just leave it up to the group leaders to pass on the information."
Orderly queuing -- as seen during the recent Northern Rock banking crisis -- is seen as a quintessentially British convention. One social anthropologist believes Britons are even capable of forming one-person queues at bus stops.
But while queue-barging normally leads to tutting, muttered complaints and shuffling to close the gap on anyone looking to barge ahead, most people are too polite to directly confront a transgressor.
What I find funny is that whenever I try and get on a bus, it ain't the foreigners who are the problem. It's all the old people who barge you out the way.
That said, the concept of a queue has always been fairly Anglo-Saxon - which is probably why I have never observed Frenchmen being able to understand the concept.
Comparing this to what i've heard about ski resorts in Europe (where apparently nobody lines up for the ski lifts properly), this is very amusing...
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