I thought October would be the off-season for tourists to Florence, but no such luck. If there are so many people here in early October, I can hardly imagine how crowded it gets in the summer. “They’re turning my city into Disneyland,” a glum Florentine fellow told me in a shop off the Via Corso the other day. I see what he means — and I’m part of the problem.

It is striking to me to see how many Chinese tourists are here. According to The Economist, European travel by Chinese citizens is booming:

Nearly one in ten international tourists worldwide is now Chinese, with 97.3m outward-bound journeys from the country last year, of which around half were for leisure. Chinese tourists spend most in total ($129 billion in 2013, followed by Americans at $86 billion) and per tax-free transaction ($1,130 compared with $494 by Russians). More than 80% say that shopping is vital to their plans, compared with 56% of Middle Eastern tourists and 48% of Russians. They are expected to buy more luxury goods next year while abroad than tourists from all other countries combined.

The dizzying pace of growth is expected to continue. Only around 5% of China’s population now own passports, and most of those who travel go to Hong Kong or Macau. But increased affluence, a trend towards longer holidays, fewer visa conditions and growing numbers of repeat travellers mean that every year more will take foreign trips, and more will venture farther. By 2020 the number of foreign trips made from China will double, predicts Aaron Fischer of CLSA, an investment firm, and spending by Chinese tourists abroad will triple. The world should brace itself, says Wolfgang Arlt of the China Outbound Tourism Research Institute, to receive 100m aspiring Chinese keen for “their turn to see the Mona Lisa” and shop in big-brand stores, and 50m more experienced travellers keen to move beyond the tick-box attractions.

Well, good for them, I guess. Why shouldn’t they enjoy the pleasures of other places? And good for us, too, because from what I see and hear, they are displacing Americans as the classic example of the rude foreigner. The other day we were in a restaurant and saw two Chinese women in their 50s come in and ask for a table. As soon as they were seated, they began ordering the waiter around. I was close enough to hear that they spoke very limited English, and were extremely impatient with the waiter (who also spoke English, but they didn’t seem to want to give him a chance). One of the women flagged him down after they had been seated for maybe 45 seconds, and began trying to communicate with him. Eventually she pulled out her iPhone and began poking it. The waiter was saying something to her, but she wouldn’t listen; she only poked more emphatically, and seemed to be getting very anxious.

Later, the waiter explained to us that this happens all the time with Chinese tourists. They research the restaurant online long before they arrive, turn up, then turn on their iPhones and tell the waiter what they want to eat. Often, he said, the dish isn’t on the menu, because the menu will have changed since they first consulted it online. But they won’t take no for an answer. The waiter told us he was trying to explain to the women that the kitchen doesn’t offer those dishes anymore, but they just got madder and madder that they couldn’t get exactly what they wanted, right now.

A couple of nights ago Casella and I were sharing a table with a very nice Chinese couple (he was Chinese-American), in from Shanghai. They were talking about life in China; the American was burned out with it. They both said that life there is extremely competitive. They talked about what a big deal is the “little emperors” phenomenon: spoiled only-children emerging from the one-child policy, who are raised to believe they are entitled to have their heart’s desire. I don’t know how much of that is behind the behavior I’ve seen in their countrymen (the jerky Chinese women in the restaurant were well into middle age), and how much of it is simply the inability of people from one culture to understand that they ought not to behave in another culture the way they do at home — which is exactly how the first American tourists from the middle classes got such a bad reputation.

The Chinese will learn in time how to behave, just as Americans did. (Casella spoke to an Italian taxi driver who told him the worst tourists are the Chinese, the Russians, and the Arabs, because they are all extremely demanding and treat the locals like crap.) You can still see an Ugly American from time to time (hey, my countrymen, take off your baseball caps, especially when you go into a restaurant — and American girls, stop smacking your gum; you look like idiots), but not nearly as often as you used to do. We’ve gotten more sophisticated about traveling over the decades, and so will the Chinese. Still, when you see up close how rude these foreigners can be, and how much resentment they earn from themselves among the locals, it will really make you stop, observe, and think before you act in a certain way while visiting another culture.

And really, shouldn’t we all be doing that anyway? I have learned in my years of traveling that above all, travelers should pay attention to the people around them. I remember walking into a fast food place in the Netherlands years ago and listening to a couple of American tourists talking so loud everybody in the place could hear them. It was shocking to see them carry on like this. They simply did not see the other people around them, by which I mean they didn’t see them as real people. The tourists’ voices were about right for an American fast food joint, but very wrong for a Dutch one. It seemed that they believed they could behave exactly as they did back at home.

Of course you don’t want to be the sort of person who is so afraid of making a social mistake that you never risk anything. I have found that even if I’m trying to be observant and sensitive, if I clearly commit a faux pas or cause offense, it almost always makes things right if you apologize straightaway, and smile sincerely about it. My guess is that foreigners have to see so much rudeness and arrogance from tourists in their countries that they really appreciate it when a traveler admits error and asks for understanding.

What have you seen on this front? How have you handled it as a native, when foreign tourists are exceptionally rude? How have you handled it when you realize that you have been exceptionally rude in a foreign country without meaning to?

UPDATE: VikingLS notes this story from The Atlantic about a pamphlet the Chinese government printed to help its people not be such obnoxious jerks when abroad. Excerpt:

The 64-page guidebook also features helpful illustrations like this one. The caption reads: “Don’t spit phlegm or gum, throw litter, urinate or defecate wherever you feel like it. Don’t cough, sneeze or pick your nose or teeth in front of others.”