What a Good Hat

When I go to a nightclub in Vancouver, I go with a group of friends, and rarely end up talking to anyone outside my immediate circle.  When my friends and I went to Jackson’s in Carmarthen, we ended up sitting with a couple of random Englishmen we had never met, as well as having a dance with a hen party that showed up and with one of the bartenders (I’ve never seen a bartender in Canada come out and dance with the customers).  The whole evening was a lot more fun and exciting than my average evening at a Vancouver bar, simply because everyone in there was so open and there was such a sense of camaraderie with everyone else in the pub that I’d never felt before.   

   In a world where it is impossible to be sure of other people’s motives and where the charming gentleman next to you could really be a vicious psychopath with four buckets of severed arms in his shed, it seems that most modern North Americans choose to err on the side of caution, keeping informal interaction with strangers to a minimum and preserving a healthy paranoia about everyone who’s different from ‘us.’  While this might be a good self-preservation tactic in an uncertain environment, we miss a lot of human connection this way.  I am very happy to spend some time in a country where human interaction is more relaxed, and I will miss it when we go home.