I’m in Germany, which feels pretty unfriendly to me (and I’m from Connecticut), but there’s still a back current of something. I don’t know if it’s best described as a sense of community, solidarity, or shared humanity, but I work at a bakery (culturally comparable to a diner, imo, and I worked in the US at a few diners) and the clientele as a rule sees me as a person in a way that they didn’t always in the US.

It’s also the first place I’ve worked in a city that didn’t have an oppositional relationship with the local homeless population, because my boss treats them like people, and doesn’t allow anyone to do any differently.

Yeah, I have a European acquaintance who I've heard talk at length about how America is warm and friendly relative to Europe, and it's a notion I've heard backed up by online accounts as well.

I ws defining most of Europe as "America light" here. People in Central America, the Middle East, and Africa all have a particular human way of interacting with each other that is absent in America and sort of muted in a lot of Western Europe. Then at a certain point my perspective flipped and I realized their way was normal, and it's us that have something unusual about us.

The world is a big place with a lot of variation, and I'm not trying to romanticize any particular place. Just saying that a lot of looking out for each other and being kind has been forgotten about in a lot of America.

Absolutely. Cold culture vs warm culture. It's not just an American thing, but the "only america is this bad!" thought process on here is rampant. It's getting exhausting.