Traveling is supposed to be a way in which individuals can experience and interact with cultures, ideas, and nations that are not their own. Traveling allows you to see things and interact with peoples that before you could only see on TV or read about in a book.

Traveling is not a time for being overly self-conscious about stereotypes or misconceptions that the people of the country you are traveling to might hold about you and your country of origin. The best you can do in this regard is to be aware of them. Do not try to curb your attitudes, opinions, or personality in such a way that will affect your enjoyment of the trip.

If there is one thing that all of my travel abroad briefing courses have drilled into my head it is that, when we are traveling in a foreign country, we are cultural ambassadors for our nation. I can not agree more with this, but not for the reasons carefully handpicked and force-fed us by our trip coordinators.

When Americans, or anyone else from any other country, travel in a foreign country there is a cultural exchange occurring. The visitor is experiencing the culture of the country they are now in and the residents are experiencing the culture that they have brought with them from their home country.

Our coordinators always tell us "not to enforce American stereotypes when abroad." I.e. being loud, arrogant, disrespectful, etc. They tell us to respect the culture and the people of the country that we will be visiting. They tell us that we are guests in their country like we need to be reminded. In my experience with traveling abroad and to different locations across America, Americans are actually pretty respectful tourists. To Disney World, Iceland, and China I have seen a few instances where Americans were any more disruptive or disrespectful than individuals from other nations.

From what I have seen, massive tour groups from countries like Japan, China, and South Korea are much more disruptive and disrespectful. Both in Disney World and Iceland I have seen individuals from these massive tour groups pushing other tourists out of the way, loitering around monuments and attractions for much too long, and all around being very loud and obnoxious.
In China, Chinese tour groups would literally swarm Americans or any non-Chinese individuals they could find in order to take pictures with them. An African-American girl in our group had her hair pulled many times just walking through public places.

Even in my hometown of Wells, Maine I have experienced awful examples of disrespectful tourists.

Every summer, the town is overrun by French Canadians from Quebec. One summer I worked in my town's Hannaford supermarket and had to deal with these people every day. Besides just being extremely rude and haughty, many would only speak French to me and then get mad when I couldn't understand them.

However, given all of these examples listed above it is always us who are stereotyped as being rude when abroad. There also seems to be this notion in American society that we should be kind and civil to foreign tourists, even if they are themselves rude and uncivil to us. This makes absolutely no sense to me.

In my experience, Americans are some of the most kind, accepting, and open people when traveling or studying abroad. They want to learn about the culture, they want to interact with the local people and have conversations, they want to learn about the history of the land and see the places important to this, and they most definitely do not want to actively disrupt any of this.