Excellent point
It is often told tale that it is easier to disappear in a large city than it is to disappear in a smaller town
Another normal adaption to living in a small town, is not liking strangers, but having to work with tourists for a living. Working with people you don’t like is a hgh-stress situaiton, so people visiting those towns as tourists sometimes see a different face.
We found Paris very nice/polite/helpful, but then, we came from Australia…
Which is another interesting point: I’m convinced that Australians and Americans get on so well together because they don’t understand each other. Just one of those classic tales of cross-cultural misunderstanding.
The Hindu area of Bali (Indonesia) has a noticably different vibe than the Muslim areas.
I guess Singapore has a bit of a NYC thing going. FIRST. And don’t expect them to hold the elevator for you. Of course, Singapore thinks that mainland Chinese are pushy and self-serving — but they aren’t being rude to outsiders: it’s just the way they are.
I was making a Borat reference 
but I appreciate your first-hand experience.
Old joke: A tourist walks up to a local in Manhattan and says, “excuse me, but could you please tell me how to get to Central Park or should I go fuck myself?”
Which is actually the opposite of my NYC experience, believe it or not.
mmm
Mrs. Plant (v.2.0) born Long Island, lived in New Hampshire was also surprised by the friendliness of rural Southerners. She saw a guy filling his driveway with rock, and said “When you finish, you can come do mine!”
He did.
When her van was stuck (A New Englander driving in Southern snow, the mind boggles) the guy who stopped couldn’t pull her out, and went home to get his Father’s larger truck, and pulled her van free.
In her native New Hampshire, I stopped and smiled to let two women enter a grocery store in front of me. They fled.
That’s basically what I was like in Europe and people didn’t understand me until I was like “TABLE FOR 1, OKAY, GARKON?”
I find the negative comments about New Orleans to be incomprehensible. I’ve been there eight times and have never encountered friendlier people anywhere.
The one time I was there, I felt like the locals were friendly in the same sense and for the same reason that carnies are friendly.
How so?
Ah, Kazakh propaganda. Figures. 
I found that odd too. My ex told me people were so friendly there that she began to distrust their motives. She said everyone she passed on the street said hello to her.
I haven’t found New Yorkers to be rude. Last time I was there I easily engaged people on the street. But maybe I look like a New Yorker. One of the odd things that happened to me is that quite a few people asked me for directions. I had studied the map pretty carefully before going out, so I almost always knew how to tell them to get to the mostly tourist destinations they were asking about. They probably thought I was quite friendly for a New Yorker. I’m from Oregon.
I do think people in the intermountain west can be standoffish. I was raised there.
I found Seattle to be polite and helpful, but difficult to crack into socially.
I used to live there for college and worked as a bartender. It depends on when and where you go. If you go to a nice bar during the slow season, people will be extremely nice. However, Mardi Gras season is a madhouse and service people, especially bartenders, have to be extremely fast and brusk to do their job well. It is all about volume. Jazz Fest and large conventions are the same way. You only have about 15 - 30 seconds to take a drink order and have it delivered and paid for during really busy times. Anything more than that is cutting into your (very high) tip compensation.
I did some things that would be considered extremely rude including getting three of my coworkers to pick up a chair with an old lady sitting in it and carrying her down the steps to be picked up by anyone on St. Charles avenue because she was completely drunk and belligerent. I also used to have to forcibly bounce people for things like running behind the bar and trying to grab whole bottles of liquor. Most people don’t do that but that type of thing is surprisingly common in a party city that many drunk people assume is largely lawless. You can have lots of fun in New Orleans but there are some rules that you will get nailed for breaking and it wears on the service people. I have some sympathy though. I got accused of walking out without paying for my meal about 10 years ago in a French Quarter establishment. I paid and then went to the bathroom and tried to walk out when the bartender tried to stop me for not paying. Look next to the napkin dickhead like you should have done in the first place. I initially left a generous tip but took it back for being a prick.
OTOH, if you go to a nice place on a Sunday morning for brunch, it is one of the friendliest places in the world.
As a long-time resident of Indonesia, I strenuously object to the idea that non-Muslims are nicer than Muslims in that country. Sure, there are cultural differences between Java and Bali (not to mention the gazillion other places in Indonesia). But instances where anyone has been anything but super-nice to me, in the 17+ years I’ve been in the country, are vanishing rare. Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus – everyone has been kind and welcoming.
Now, if you are talking about Muslim residents of Bali (you don’t mean Tenganan, right - they aren’t especially friendly, but they also aren’t Muslim), that’s a somewhat different situation. Unfortunately there ARE religious tensions in Indonesia, and Balinese Muslims, as a minority group, may not be the happiest folks on island. I still find it hard to believe the “vibe” is less friendly, but I will concede that I don’t have a lot of personal experience talking to folks in Balinese Muslim communities.
Did you ever get out of the French Quarter, into the neighborhoods?
The Chuuk Atoll in Micronesia has a reputation for unfriendly people. My very brief stopover there didn’t dissuade me of that notion.
People from southern parts of Spain tend to find Old-Castillians “dry” and Basque/Navarrese/Aragonese downright scary*. Both get solved, or at least tempered, by feeding the outsider.
- Sense of humor tends to dead-and-buriedpan. May speak a non-romance second language full of /k/ and /x/ sounds. We speak too loudly and too quickly. May put people’s spines to the test (hint: “the customer is always right” is not the correct answer).
From the wide range of responses so far about places literally all over the world, I suspect that our measurements are at fault. That is, asking individuals this question is the demonstrably wrong way to approach the question. That said, I don’t really know what the correct approach is.
I live right next to N.O.
I am not surprised by the negative comments, nor by the positive ones.
I think, at least in some cases including N.O., it has much to do with how the visitor is perceived by the local. In some places, lets pick on the American South, people are sensitive to perceived stereotypes. If you think the visitor is afraid of you/looks down on you/has a negative opinion of you, your attitude to that person is going to be hurt. I find that here in the N.O. area. When someone from up North visits, it can take time for the locals to warm up to them. Once they do, people here are quite friendly and fun-loving. But if they make any mistakes…
Understanding that there are tons of places I’ve never been, making it hard to give any kind of definitive answer, there’s no doubt that Boston has the least friendly population of any city I have visited(and I’ve been there a number of times and a number of different parts). The inhabitants aren’t hostile, exactly, so perhaps “not nice” isn’t quite accurate, but I find them tribal and largely uninterested in folks from elsewhere. (I also went to college in New England, and found the kids from Boston to be less open and harder to get to know than students from other places.)
I don’t know if “rude” is the right term, but Seattle’s reputation is at least big enough to warrant its own Wikipedia page:
Boston people can be bad. I am from the Philly area, and I suspect we are worse. Still, people in and from Missouri all seem to have a chip on their shoulder about something they cannot explain.