I've been there this summer.
There's a sign asking you to tell your nationality while passing the person.
It's just for tourist demographics and completely voluntary.
Poser racists think all Asian people are Chinese, all Hispanic people are Mexican, and all Black people are African. Professional racists can identify your home region by the minute traits that they loath about you.
"The slight trill in their accent and the width of the bridge of their nose tells me that they are from the Cassidian Provence of Blahgistan just north of the Arno Mountain range... bloody Cassidians taking our jobs!"
It's like a regional version of "better a heathen than a heretic"
As an American, in Tennessee, I don't understand it. It's not like the Brits have to deal with fucking Kentuckians, the cousin banging weirdos. Why do they hate on their neighbors so much? I mean, I have to live next door to yankee posers who fuck their sisters and made meth the state bird. And you don't see me hating on the neighbors like that!
It's more sibling rivalry than hate. It's far more terrifying. It gets even more so when something actually threatens either one. Anyone who's seen the result of picking on the youngest of 3 brothers knows exactly what I mean.
"I can see that the hair has split ends so we can narrow it down to 45 degrees of the equator, that hair clip that has 3 black stripes in the middle so that means we can narrow it down to Southeast Pennsylvania. Actually that scar looks like it was made from the fence surrounding the Walmart on Driver Road..."
Passports are checked by some government authority, they don't give you access to the data, so the professional racist is there for statistics used by whomever.
Iceland's in the Schengen area so there's a lot of flights coming where they don't even ask for your passport. That's how it was done when I was there in 2019 or so, anyway.
the fuck is with these comments? yall never leave the united states? this isn't about race. you can absolutely make a ton of informed observations based on so many social cues, styles, speech, and so on. and as others pointed out, the guests tell you too lol.
Honestly it's fucking weird you guys think this is racist. makes me wonder if you even understand what racism is
Exactly this.. I've been called out before for saying that someone (who was french) "looked french", with the implication that it was racist of me to imply that people from different countries typically have subtly different features.
Of course, you can't always tell where someone is from based on how they look, act, or speak, but pretending that there aren't certain phenotypes that are more common some places than others is just ignoring what we can observe. It's not always easy to pinpoint exactly what it is, but people generally have an idea of what a "typical southern/western/eastern/northern european", looks like (or any other area of the world for that matter), and often that intuition will be correct. This is not racism, it's simply the fact that after seeing a bunch of people from some country or region, you build a pattern for what phenotypes are typical in that region. Racism is when you decide to assign more worth to some phenotype or ethnicity than another, which is a whole different thing.
Basically, recognising that people are in fact different is not racism. Determining someones worth or quality of character based on differences in phenotype is.
"Looking french" is an amazing example of this. French people can have skin tone ranging from the palest of white to the darkest brown, yet when you see them they are unmistakably French.
Being Danish and intimately acquainted with my neighbours, I actually think you can tell Norwegians from Swedes fairly easy by looking at them. Not based on science, but... nevertheless.
Norwegian here: Yes. There are definitely some people that look very stereotypically Danish or Swedish, to the point where I feel like I know where they're from before they say anything. Once they start talking, any doubts are of course out the window.
I've self diagnosed with face blindness, so I'm not certainly not the greatest expert on this subject, but I think that might be an eyelid combined with an odd camera angle.