Social Context

I am standing in front of the hotel check-in counter with my then young son Aidan. I am waiting patiently for one of the two clerks to look up from their paperwork and process us. A man walks up behind my right shoulder and talks over it at the clerks. They look up and one of them gets him his room. The other goes back to ignoring me.
I am in line at Starbucks waiting for the cashier to finish processing the previous transaction. A near middle age man walks up, stands between me and the cashier, and starts to order. I tell him I was waiting and in excellent English he apologies and steps back.
We are exiting the arena. There are hundreds of people trying to get down the flight of stairs and into the arena lobby. A woman decides to stop in the middle of the stairs and put a jacket on her two year old, slowing everyone down as they try to avoid them.
The intersection is congested. A car is blocked by traffic from making a right turn holding up cars behind it. A driver honks, but doesn’t just honk, leans on the horn relentlessly as school children and parents walk by.
I am driving and waiting on a long red; testing my patience The light turns green and I get ready to punch it when I notice an e-bike speeding in front of my car. And then another.
I go into the Jack Jones clothing store because somehow I ended up at work without any underwear. A young clerk greets me and follows me as I walk into the store. There is nothing flirtatious or about it, she’s just doing her job. As she stands right behind me, and I mean right behind me, as I look at the underwear selection.

I could go on and on. I was going to right that most of these kinds of events, which occur daily, don’t bother me at all. But if they didn’t bother me, well then why I did I bother to write this. I am certainly noting the events.

I’ve had more than one expat friend who grew extremely frustrated with what they called this “rude” behavior. But while I’ve certainly been annoyed at cars making rolling right turns into pedestrian lanes and so on, I’ve not considered it rude. I try to flow with it.
The reason I’m writing about it today because it just dawned that it’s about social context. One that puts those closest to you first and foremost, one that locally optimizes in order not to be left out, and one that doesn’t have the same sense of physical boundaries that we have in the west.