Quote:
Originally Posted by niwell
Rude and Polite seem like odd metrics to me. As pointed out above, at least some of the "rude" identifiers seem like things that would be commonplace in a big city with lots of forced human interaction. You just don't have the time to acknowledge it all.
But brash (rude?) places can be extremely friendly. Been in bars in East Coast cities and have had people tell me their life story within 15 minutes of meeting. Meanwhile those that are seen as polite can be extremely cold. Yeah they'll say please and thank you, but it ends there. Canada is notorious for this, though some places are better than others. The West Coast in general has always felt cold to me - smaller towns notwithstanding. While I enjoyed my visit a lot I found Portland to be fairly standoffish.
|
The overlap between niceness, politeness, and friendliness is interesting. It invites a kind of zero-sum logic, where polite people have to be colder or secretly assholes, but that doesn't bear out. These are layers of familiarity. Like a cake, the nice custard in the middle might soak up into the polite cake above, or saturate the friendly cake below, or not. It can be too much--saccharine and soggy; it can be dry and tasteless. Sometimes the custard is so scant, it's hard to parse politeness and genuine friendliness. Sometimes the cake is a rude but nice pie.
I get a lot of Germans (and others here) telling me how nice Canadians are. My take was always that they just hadn't met enough Canadians. But on my recent trip back, I'll be damned: Canadians are really nice. Even an old friend living in Australia confirmed on her recent trip home--Canadians, while not as in-your-face friendly as Australians, are nicer.
Maybe this is something best seen in contrast to the frosty, repressed, and arrogant Germans, but Canadians seemed open, patient, helpful, well-adjusted, and generally enamoured with each other. Even when dealing with some bonkers flight delays, everyone took things in stride and stayed nice.
Germans are slow to anger, but when problems pile up they go from zero to Gestapo in an instant. A four-hour flight delay would have seen someone crack, kicking the air like a frustrated child, screaming about unverschämtheit--everyone else would look on with icey eyes, maybe snap at each other. The English are fragile and prone to bad-apple behaviour--someone starts with the passive-aggressive whining at the first sign of a problem and gets everyone else grumpy. Americans are self-absorbed and prone to panic, but once they understand they aren't alone in a situation they become gracious, chummy, and prove themselves to be fundamentally very nice.
This is just one scenario, but within it, Canadians and Germans are polite, Americans and English, rude. But Germans and English are the assholes; Canadians and Americans are nice.
But are Canadians actually your friends, buddy? I've found Canadians harder to make friends with. Germans are comfortable with being friendly acquaintances in a way that I don't know that Canadians easily handle. Germans will invite you over for dinner; maybe you'll meet up again, maybe you won't. If you don't talk for a year, that's fine, you can still catch up and hang out again. Canadians hold back from this kind of association like, "shit, will I have to invite this person to my wedding?" If you haven't talked to someone for a year they may as well be dead to you. God forbid you run into them anywhere but a bar.
Prev
(the northern nice part).
Linear Mode
