Nice-Ness

The first thing you notice when you arrive in Berlin (after the dog poop nobody cleans up) is how unfriendly people are. The amount of unfriendliness you encounter in everyday life is quite amazing -one might think people consider it an art form and invest appropriate amount of time and energy in cultivating it. This ranges from simple unpleasantries like not saying "excuse me" for all kinds of transgressions of physical and social bounds over explicit physical expressions like showing people the finger to actual yelling and cursing.

Just today, the poor UPS man in our street got yelled at and threatened with a lawsuit for blocking the road for less than 5 minutes. Come on, people, the poor man is just doing his job. But I digress.

So then I decided that I will perform one act of kindness or friendliness a day (being nice to family members doesn't count, even though I was tempted to count my attendance at my grandmother's bday dinner as 2 hours of kindness). At least one, I suppose, although all these unfriendly people really aren't making it easy...

The first day, I bought a plastic bag for the guy at the supermarket who only had a credit card and forgotten to pay for it.

Yesterday, I picked up a cucumber that a kid had dropped in the supermarket (apparently a prim site for performing kindness) and had an actual conversation with a woman in the forest, instead of just grunting in response to her comments.

Today, I warned about 6 women of an exhibitionist that was roaming around a lake (see post above).

It's really not all that difficult being nice every once in a while, although I don't expect this to catch on any time soon...