Originally Posted by stut
I would say a qualified 'yes'.
The more I travel, the more I come to the opinion that people are fundamentally the same, and that the differences, while forming the interesting, fun part of travel, are largely superficial and habit-based. I see more diversity among my friends and neighbours than I do when travelling (admittedly, I live in South London), so when 'doing like the Romans', I always wonder what that means.
If it means learning a little language, learning the most important customs, and taking advantage of all the little things (esp food and drink) that make the place interesting, then absolutely. But if it means forcing yourself into acting in a way that fits with an ill-conceived stereotype of that country's people... Then absolutely not.
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I find stut's comments match my own thoughts.
When I am traveling for pleasure, I am more likely to take some time to learn a little bit of the language and customs, both because I have more time to do so, and because I will have more time to use them. For work, if I learned the local language of everywhere I went in the past three years, I would have needed to learn 18 languages and 9 alphabets (not counting Japanese Kanji) some of which I would have used for as little as three days. This doesn't even count numerous African languages which are used as well as the colonial languages of English and French. I just don't have that kind of facility with languages, so I rely on the kindness of strangers.