Are there any places where the population isn't nice?

Which part are you disagreeing with?

Boston ranked one of the rudest cities in the U.S.

Yes, Boston, You are Racist

From the first link:

Doesn’t seem too exceptional to me, and I personally don’t find NYC or Philly outrageously rude. Just not effusively nice. I’ve lived in the Boston area and seemed like a typical, major city.

Bolinas, CA. You can’t find it*, and if you do, they don’t want you there.

*All the signs pointing to it from Route 1 have been destroyed, presumably by the locals residents, and the state has agreed not to put up any more.

My other suggestion is Quebec City for non-Francophones. My only evidence for this is my father’s experiences there when my parents visited back in the 80’s.

And SLC showed up on the Friendliest list as well, so the methodology of the surveys is a bit suspect. :slight_smile:

There’s been a lot of healing between French and English Canadians in the last few decades. Quebec City is definitely not someplace to avoid for rudeness or hostility now.

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When I was living in RI, I had some business in Oklahoma and would go there frequently. The first time I went there and interacted with the locals it was definitely off-putting. They were so nice I keep wondering what the wanted from me! :slight_smile: Coming from New England, it definitely took some getting used to.

I having trouble describing any city that is listed as nicer than SLC as being rude…

:smiley:

When my wife and I traveled to Boston, it didn’t take long to decide that our first trip would be our last. Saw this comic recently and had to share it with her for a knowing laugh.

Non-Bostonians.

In all of my travels, Paris is the most obvious answer. At the worst, in most other places, the people are simply too busy to be nice or helpful. Parisians actively spend conscious effort just to dick with you.

I spent quite a bit of time in Paris in the 90s, and I never had an especially bad encounter with anyone. The stereotype just never presented itself. I can speak a tiny, tiny bit of French, and that very poorly, so I even had that going against me.

Based upon the one week I spent there, I found Parisians to be rude, although that was a long time ago when being an American wasn’t very popular anywhere in Europe.

I never found New Yorkers to be “rude” as much as they are always in a hurry and if you ask them something they’re GOING TO EXPLAIN IT ONCE AND ONLY ONCE SO LISTEN UP AND IF YOU DON’T GET IT THAT’S TOO DAMN BAD.

Count me as also wondering why SLC is counted as “not-nice”. From the two times I’ve been there I’d count it as the nicest city I’ve been to. Even the panhandlers were “nice” in that they just straight up asked you for change instead of this long drawn out sob story patter that wastes your time and insults your credulity. Although I can sympathize with those who don’t like uncomfortable extra-friendliness, as a lot of the official LDS places there seem to be like that.

The least friendly large city I’ve been to is New Orleans, and it isn’t so much that people avoid you or are rude, it’s that they seem to exude a vibe of wanting to be anywhere else than interacting with you which, like my experiences in the mountain west, seems strange for a tourist economy. As opposed to London and DC where the service personnel were effective and exuded a modicum of enthusiasm.

I’d say that overall, for my personal definition of “nice”, England has the nicest people. They take pride in their work but don’t indulge in wasteful small talk unless they think you’re up for it. But if you do start a conversation with a non-shopkeep person-to-person it turns out that a lot of them are outgoing. So I like them because they know when to talk and when not to :slight_smile: On the other hand, I was only there for a week and saw a couple instances of outright rudeness: more along the lines of what you’d expect from the aforementioned Philly and NYC (in which I have not seen outright rudeness.) (One was a customer ahead of me in the queue at a Gatwick airport shop and he complained in an incomprehensible accent and the clerk took offense, so he evidently was using coarse language to describe the prices, and the other was when two people argued over who had a table in Hyde Park. Not huge issues but normally you don’t see that over the course of one week anywhere else.)

The only downsides I’ve seen with Philly and NYC is their stereotypical “not-afraid-to-voice-their-opinions-about-others-business” even though it didn’t venture into outright rudeness. For instance, when I made a detour to Philly for the express purpose of walking along the Wissahickon, multiple people wondered out loud if I wasn’t cold in my shorts and t-shirt, which I was in the beginning but warmed up soon. I’d rather be a couple degrees too cold than too warm if I am exercising. One person I can understand but multiple people “helping” me by telling me I looked too cold got old after awhile!

I went there less than five years ago, and I’m never going back. If that was better, I’m glad I never went before.

This has not been my experience. Maybe it is a factor of how you define “nice”. My experience in small towns has been that “outsiders” are not tolerated, and if you once get to be partway “inside” then everyone knows your business and feels obligated to comment on it. Neither of which fits my definition of “nice”.

I have spent days walking around Paris by myself and have never experienced any rudeness either. Then again, I don’t speak more than a few words of French. They could have been badmouthing me the whole time and I would never know. My strategy was to just walk up to friendlier looking younger people and start talking in English. If they replied back in French, I would just look confused because I was and we were deadlocked. They would start speaking in English to this hopeless rube because they figured out quickly that was the only way to get anything done and have me go away. It works like a charm. You just don’t want to be caught in the grey area of pretending to know French if you aren’t truly fluent. Many of them seem to be sympathetic to the full-blown, monolingual, American retard if you are polite about it though.

Armenia.

'Tis a dreary, unwelcoming, inhospitable people. Quite the opposite of their neighbours the Georgians, who are a hoot and a half.

I’ve been to two that come to mind: La Plata, Colombia, and Dali, China. But if I had been there on a different day, encountering different people, I might have had a whole different impression. As a whole, Colombia and China were lovely countries, delightful people.

In earlier times, Iran and Syria were two of my favorite countries in the world, for the generosity and hospitality and good nature of the people.

Ive never liked Thailand very much, with the people not very endearing. I’m in no hurry to get back to Turkey, either. In recent travels, Id say Cambodia the best, Djibouti the worst.

Something that I was told a long time ago.
A person moves to a new area. He asks a local person how are the neighbors here? The local asks him as to how were the neighbors where he came from?
The person says that the people in the area where he came from are jerks.

The local says “Same thing here”

I spent about 10 days in Uzbeskistan mostly in Khiva, Bukhara, and Samarkand (and a little bit of Tashkent) and, besides us finding ourselves in the police station within 10 minutes of stepping out of the airport (for reasons not involving us being accused of anything) and I found the people wonderful and generous. Within the first day in Khiva, I was invited into some family’s house to take pictures (I was a photographer wandering around the outside of the famous city walls taking pictures and got flagged down by some kid), and they let me take pictures of the whole family and even gave me some freshly made flatbreads to take home, after showing off their tandoor-type clay oven. They didn’t ask me for any money or anything, just gave me an address to send photos to.

Going around the market in Samarkand, it was similar. I was photographing and marveling at all the spice vendors and their colorful mixtures, and they’d give me bags of dried spices for free. And in Bukhara, I got probably the drunkest in my life eating kabobs, smoking Pine cigarettes, and downing cheap Uzbek vodka ($1 a bottle) with a group of Uzbeks I met and communicated with in some sort of pigeon Slavic language (I speak Polish and I have a smattering idea of Russian, but not quite enough to really hold a conversation in it, but apparently it was enough that night.) I woke up the next morning with the most wicked hangover, but everything intact, nothing stolen. Just a good night at the outdoor kebab place with strangers doing something in retrospect that was probably pretty damned stupid but, hey, I was a twentysomething.

Very friendly people.