> Let's give an example: I am French, criticizing is a kind of national sport. If I come to some Chinese guy's house, and see a contemporay painting hung in the living room, I might say "Oh! So you like this kind of painting? I really don't understand it. Is it expensive? What! That much for a bunch of strokes?"
Going into someone's home and insulting their taste is generally frowned upon in most places.
To add on this line: I was once having a Dimsum dinner with a friend's friend. The guy was French. He held the discussion for 15 mn about his trip to this island in Indonesia, and the sole purpose of the vacation report was to say how bad it was, from the shitty weather to the horrible hotel to the masochistic food.
I have spent 10 years in China, and sometime my own cultural atavisms do surprise me. Another example is the kiss-on-cheeks things, which I'm quite not used to anymore.
I think a lot of Canadian's are the same way, but maybe a bit more polite and in a light way.
I watch This Hour has 22 Minutes, and I have never witness such great satire based purely on criticism and exaggerations of reality.
Pascal: "vérité en deçà des Pyrénées, erreur au-delà"
Something required here is avoided there, and the reverse. In France it is ok and even polite to tell a girl (say, a coworker) "you are beautiful today", but I think this would not be considered very tasteful in other places.
In China, it is ok to give to others the gifts you have been given, and it is even expected (therefore the best gift to give and those gifts that can be given back, like closed bottles). There is a small business in buying back gifts. In Europe I don't think you can do this.
> In France it is ok and even polite to tell a girl (say, a coworker) "you are beautiful today", but I think this would not be considered very tasteful in other places.
It's worse in some places, in that it can vary by the individual, and people sometimes feel fully justified in getting offended on behalf of someone who took no offense at all. Most Americans, for example, would think taking offense on behalf of someone else is pretty stupid, but it happens and you occasionally have to deal with it.
There is no magic way to avoid causing offense. Get on with it and defend yourself if you have to. You could get fired for no reason. You could get cancer for no reason. It's random cultural nonsense that you can't fix.
I think you're missing his point. In a lot of parts of the world, including mine, this would be rather offensive behavior. The problem comes when you automatically generalize what happens to be offensive in your part of the world to the world at large. It seems conceivable that in a foreign culture, such as the parent poster's France, this type of criticism might be considered a path to a sincere and personal relationship because it shows that you're willing to interact with your host on a personal level. And it might not even be offensive if the criticism is normal and expected. The host might even join in mocking his own "foolish" purchase.
The larger issue is that there's no conceivable way to know all of the ways you could offend someone else without spending a significant portion of your life immersed in their culture. I lived in a major city in Spain for a couple of years, and there's a seriously pluralistic culture there with large immigrant populations from a number of continents. My observation was that they tended to sidestep the unintentional-offense problem by limiting inter-cultural contacts. Their interactions tended to focus around well-defined interfaces like buying something from a store. It's a sad state of affairs but I'm not aware of an effective solution.
Going into someone's home and insulting their taste is generally frowned upon in most places.