Yemen tends to be survival of the fittest, but if someone does cut in front of you, say in a line in customs, you just point out that you were here first. They usually act shocked as if you had just materialized out of thin air and beckon you forward. The person behind you, who was also there first, has to do the same routine, though.
I remember one time entering a boarding area in Dubai for a flight to London. You have to give your boarding pass to the clerk at the desk. Once done you move into the boarding area to wait for the doors to open so you can get on the plane. A big drilling hand (6’5", ~280lbs) was in front of me when a little arab fellow, dressed in robes and sandals, who obviously was in a hurry (I guess he figured the plane would take off before the line to the boarding counter cleared), stepped in front of him. The driller was flabbergasted! He tapped the guy on the shoulder and pointed to the end of the line. The fellow claimed this was his country and this is how they do things here…The incredulous look on the driller’s face was something I’ll remember for a long time.
We got off the plane in London and as we were walking towards customs the little arab guy was in front of us. The driller sees him and speeds up to pass the arab. As he does so he steps back and brings his foot back, stepping down hard on the poor guy’s sandaled foot. “This is how we do things in my country!”, was his parting shot as the guy jumps up and down holding his foot in pain. (the driller was from Canada, not the UK, but close enough)
That’s not entirely true. Wherever there’s an organized queue, like at the post office or the supermarket, then Israelis generally respect it (although that doesn’t stop us from trying to talk our way to the front - if your enough of a frier to give up your place in the line, then you deserve to be passed).
However, Israelis never line up spontaneously. If no-one’s in charge, then I’m in charge, and I say I go first.
A slight wrinkle to the India stories: it’s orderly and civilised if it needs to be.
I had the same experience as others in buying railway tickets - it’s fairly pushy. But we had to make an unexpected stop in Lucknow (train running 20 hours late en route to Varanassi, wife passed out in train toilet) and I had to get tickets for the next day.
The ticket office wasn’t at the station (of course not) and was a windowless room with perhaps 200 people in it. After a bit of form-filling and barging I reached the counter, ordered my tickets and was waiting for change when the lights went out. For half an hour. No one moved. There was no pushing. Perhaps there was a little quiet conversation, but not much of that even.
Pfft… You should have seen the car accident in Sana’a last week. Some guy drove right by us at warp nine and ran right into the back of a large truck, which luckily for us, we had just moved to the right to drive around. He was probably asleep at the wheel as it was 5:30am.
I dunno. I remember being in a McDonalds in J’salem and there was a total mess of people all around the counter. I stood at a random point and just waited. Imagine my surprise when the guy at the counter yelled (over three or four heads) “efshar la’azor?” I asked him if there wasn’t a line, and he shrugged and said no.
In Spain, there are many places where you are supposed to form a queue but there is nothing to actually… assist you with it. Those get confusing. For example, you go to the movies and you can’t tell whether there is a single line for all windows or separate ones for each window or most windows have individual lines but two of the lines have commingled… often, when someone actually asks “excuse me, is this one line or two?” the lines will actually, finally. get organized.
People trying to jump in line will usually get some kind of remark, which will normally not include mentions to their mother the first time. The second time is a different problem… usually, “what, your ma didn’t teach you no manners?” but it can escalate rapidly from there if the ass doesn’t cower and line up properly.
Old ladies are hell everywhere, they all think they have a God Given Right to get through anything and anybody. My grandma used to send me to a supermarket near her house because it was the cheapest in the area; the ladies working there would stand at the cashiers when it opened, to make sure that we all went in through the official entrance… this ended the second time one of them had her arm broken by an ancient female gnome about half her size and three times her age. Mind you: I’ve seen the same old crones in Britain and the US, and I’m not talking about Hispanics, eh! Blacks, whites, or zebra-lined, they think it’s their God Given Right to get before “these young people nowadays” who, evidently, “got no manners”…
My first experience was in Warsaw during the bad old Commie days. I dutifully got in line to pay for my item, but left the customary American “space” between me and the person in front of me. A local woman walked up, looked at me, and stepped into the space. Somewhat shocked, I quickly stepped back from her to establish my “space” again. Another person walked up and filled the gap. I then noticed that everyone was ‘nuts-to-butts’ all the way up the line. Lemme tell ya, the BO was thick enough to slice as it was, but I figured I’d ultimately end up back in Berlin if I kept doing what I was doing.
Africa is hopeless. No lines for anything, even airplanes. Everything is a mob scene. But you sort of get used to it.
That’s the thing - there wasn’t a line, so no-one bothered to stand in one. If the McD staff had clearly stated they wanted people to queue up, then people probably would have. In this case, they probably felt they would work more effectively without a line.
OTOH, this is Jerusalem we’re talking about. I’m a Haifa boy, and I feel intimidated by the way things work there.
For people who grew up standing in lines, Russians are horrible at queuing. If folks perceived that their business was more important than yours, they would push up front. Sometimes if they felt that their business was trifling they would jump in to get it done quickly.
McDonald’s in Moscow was a zoo. I did learn that when standing in the mob, you see they cashier scream ‘Svbodnaya kassa’ or ‘available cashier’ you point at her and scream out your order. Even if you are in the middle of the mob, they would take your order.
Th US Embassy was a nightware as well. Of course then I learned the reason for that. At 4:15 (closing time 4:30) they started shutting the place down and they are done. Not even my screams of “I pay your salary you bitch” seemed to help.
Moscow is as bad as Warsaw; perhaps the Russians taught the Poles all they know about lines. I don’t remember problems at the embassy, but I was always TDY there out of the Frankfurt ESC.
Seoulites are pretty good when it comes to lines…although you do have quite a few ahjoomas (term used for middle-aged women who have mastered the art of brazeness when it comes to cutting in line and stealing seats on the subway) to keep you on your toes.
Random anecdote: I remember when I was in Rome, a bunch of us were in line at the zoo and this Italian couple stepped in front of us without even pretending to be sneaky about it. We tapped them on the shoulder and motioned indignantly to the line behind us, but they just smiled cheerfully at us and budged not. As if WE were being the weird ones.
I’m from Lebanon, and now I’m living in London. The first thing I noticed when I got here was that people queue up everywhere, and it drove me nuts. What the hell is wrong with these people? The simplest tasks involve several queues, in neat and tidy straight lines where everyone minds their own business and keeps their mouth shut. Whatever happened to good ol’ fashioned pushing and shoving? And NO haggling. Never. How queer! It was funny that the first to identify with my predicament was an Israeli friend.
And the anti-queue (the Middle Eastern version of a queue, where big, tall Westerners stand sheepishly on the side until the little old lady at the cashier feels sorry enough for them to ask the crowd to let them through ) is not as chaotic as the new-comer would seem to think. There’s some sort of order, dictated by the crowd’s perception of your sense of urgency and your relative size. Hence the lack of fights over cutting lines. I just find it trippy when a foreigner gets all emotional about a guy half his size pushing him out of the way. What? Just push him back you big dufos! Besides, in most places where an anti-queue is necessary, some entity less than efficient is involved, such as the bus company or a bureaucracy or lazy shop-keepers, and it becomes important to make the clerk/owner/whatever feel the heat (literally) to get them moving. There’s a great sense of camaraderie involved in that you know. We’re all doing our bit to force the system into efficiency.
Eh bien… they may actually have been from, uh, someplace else… including simply out of town. Being on vacation is considered by many people as a good occasion to leave the manners at home, I’m afraid.
Athens, the changing of the guard. I’m there with my college class. A lot of tall, generally blonde people as well as three busfuls of Orientals are already there when we arrive, 10’ before it starts (that’s incredibly punctual for Spaniards on vacation). At 5’ to, several guards get between the palace and us and start signaling that we should all fall back to the edge of the sidewalk, saying “palakaló” (please in Greek).
In Spanish, “pá la calor” is “for the heat”. Athens. July 7th. It’s like 120F, and these guys are saying “for the heat”, so while the other people line up in an orderly fashion, even arranging themselves by height, we roam around making puns. More Spaniards as well as some 20 Italians arrived before the changing actually started. The poor guards were starting to look like they would love being able to stop the palakalós and start the naming of our mothers, but of course they weren’t allowed to. So when the changing actually begins, with a squad of guards coming down the street, us rowdy Itaniards finally line up. Directly below the edge of the sidewalk.
The people from my class were kind of polite, even… we made sure the Orientals could focus their cameras… But the rest of the Itaniards? HAH! You’ve been dumb nuff to obey the authorities, you pay for it, man!
Itaniards: group formed by Italians and Spaniards. Known to communicate in Itañolo (alternative spellings Itagnolo and Itañol).
Yee haw.