individual or national

is it American to be courteous to long staying guests or is it a personal characteristic?
personally, if i have a visitor staying with me or near me, i LOVE showing them around and getting them involved in my leisure acitivities. i feel like a lot of american's share this characteristic. many families i've stayed with want to make your stay "gezellig". some go as far as to step outside of their busy lives just to give you a taste of what they believe is fun living! perhaps this is more of an individual thing.
sanitary issue: notice how many, if not all of the street vendors here do NOT wear gloves? food preparation done with their bare hands! welcome to a foreign country where lawsuits against sanitation are obviously inexistant. also, what's up with having NO hand soap in the bathrooms? -- and how often do you see users of the toilet facilities actually WASH their hands? perhaps this is not so much cultural as it is individual laziness/carelessness.
AMERICAN PRIDE: are we a proud nation or what? sometimes i'd like to think we aren't but we really are... and perhaps that is why we often get labelled arrogant. the party-crowd of america always wants to show off their tolerance ability, "yeah, well i can bong a 5th of 5o'clock and still see the bottom of a 5th of jager!" we're too proud! and it is hard for us to admit we're wrong. we're always making excuses, or reasons...pointing fingers! perhaps this is also personal rather than national, though i must say, i see a lot more proud americans than i do proud Dutch (ruling out the Friesians, of course).