Black women ‘humiliated’ after getting kicked off Napa Valley Wine Train For Laughing TOO Loud!

[eridani]

53. DH and I flew to Amsterdam on a Dutch airline in 1996

My internal anomaly alert registered surprise at the number of conversations that were going on. I finally figured out that what I was paying attention to was my sense that if that many people were talking, it should have been a lot noisier. Even the panhandlers there have very soft and deferential voices, combined with a normal physical distance that seems to an American far too close. Talk about mixed messages--the distance saying "I am right in your face" and the voice saying "I'm being very deferential."

An engineer friend worked in Spain for a year, and went out to a tavern his first week there. He thought their team had just won a soccer match, or that maybe the prime minister had been assassinated. The bartender assured him that the noise level was 100% typical. A friend who went to Greece on vacation said it was two weeks before she figured out that nobody was mad at her.

So yes, there might be differing underlying assumptions about how loud public conversation should be.