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.