I'm still not Switzerland

Another big difference between Americans and Swiss jumped out at me today as I was riding the train back from a Twins game. (Yes, the Twin Cities do actually have a crude form of public transportation that's useful for getting to downtown Minneapolis, but that's about it.) (And the Twins are absolutely horrible this year, thank you for asking.) As we were all crammed into the train, standing-room only, I noticed that several spontaneous conversations among strangers were taking place around me. On one side, a conversation arose about why a veteran, who was attending to his mother in a wheelchair, wanted to return to duty in Iraq. On the other side, two strangers were talking about places they'd visited in Europe.

This does not happen on Swiss trains or buses. In fact, as I mentioned in a post a couple of years ago, there are even designated quiet cars where you are not to speak to anyone, talk on your cell phone, listen to music (even with headphones), or breathe through your nose at a level above 5 decibels. In regular train cars or on buses, the Swiss will happily greet people they know, but they do not strike up random conversations with strangers.

And there was another way I knew I wasn't in Europe: people were actually orderly and considerate when boarding the train. In Europe, including Switzerland, when the train doors open, it's the law of the jungle. Europeans act as though their lives depend on boarding the train ahead of everyone else. Train-boarding behavior in Switzerland strikes me as very weird, because in general, the Swiss are much more polite than Americans. Just not when it comes to getting on a train.