From the Editor’s Desk: Friendly (Premium)

A few months ago, I wrote about the “hello people,” the strangers, passersby, and acquaintances that form an interactive part of the backdrop of our lives. Since then, my wife and I spent about three weeks in Mexico City, and we had some interesting interactions there that brought something into focus that will be obvious to many but is still, I think, important to explicitly acknowledge.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a good name for this. But it is possible for “hello people,” the people we say hello to out in the world, to transition into friends or at least something closer to friends. This type of relationship can be a weird purgatory, of sorts, since most of these people, even those you see daily or at least regularly, will not make this transition. And that’s fine, and perhaps even necessary. But it’s always fascinating when they do.

As I wrote of our neighborhood in Mexico City, we feel at home there now and there is a growing collection of people whom we are friendly with and vice versa. We can walk a few blocks up the street and say wave and say hello to a dozen or more people, shop owners, restaurant owners and staff, whatever, as we go. Many are polite and wonderful in that uniquely Mexican way—“You are always welcome here,” we’ve been told a few times, “this is your home”—but some are getting closer.

There’s the restaurant co-owner we chat with a lot as he’s incredibly nice and friendly and speaks perfect English, which I define after many years of international travel as not just fluency but understanding humor. The last time we saw him, he asked how we were doing, and I replied, “pretty bueno” in a purposeful mashup of our two languages. He laughed and I said I was “trying to work it into the local lingo,” and that if everything went well, he could expect to hear it more and more around the neighborhood. He thought this was a wonderful idea.

And there is our favorite sushi restaurant, the best we’ve ever experienced, just a 7-minute walk from our apartment (and, go figure, across the street from the restaurant co-owned by the person described above). Having something that good so close to our place is incredible, of course. But getting to know the people there has been even better. The owner is amazing, a traveler with deep connections to Japan, but we’re particularly close with the man and woman behind the sushi bar, both of whom are artists, and incredibly friendly. One speaks perfect English and the other speaks no English, and yet there is a curious connection between me and the latter, tied, I’m told, to how appreciative I am of him and his work.

We’ve had some “fun with language” moments there, too—the English speaker now jokingly encourages me to speak as much Spanish as possible—and we’ll be back in town for the Spanish speaker’s birthday in October, so we’re plotting what we can do for him. But we go there a lot, speak with them a lot, and also speak with others near us at the sushi bar when it makes sense. I helped a couple next to me decide what to get after they learned we were there so often on that last trip, for example, and we chatted a lot about our respective homes and experiences. And we recommended the restaurant across the street to a woman from Seattle during a previous trip and then saw her over there twice later that week.

We were chatting with these two sushi artists when the woman, the English speaker, said something unexpected. She said that after we had finished our previous visit and had left to walk home, a couple at the end corner of the bar, people I vaguely remember only because they were clearly American but had kept completely to themselves, had asked about us. As in, “What’s the deal with those two people?” I didn’t understand what that meant: it’s not like we were loud or acting stupidly or whatever. But that wasn’t the issue. They wanted to know why two Americans, two English speakers, knew the people at the restaurant so well and vice versa. On the one hand, we were similar to them—Americans, basically—but on the other we all seemed awfully familiar with each other.

I was still pretty confused about this, but then the woman told us her reply: “They’re friendly,” she told them, “and they come in here all the time. So we’ve gotten to know each other.”

It sounds so normal when you say it like that. And it is curious to me that these people, who had kept to themselves and not spoken to anyone, had asked about this. That they were too shy to speak to us, fellow Americans, while we were there. And in thinking about this, it sort of dawned on me that their appearance at the sushi bar, as opposed to just sitting at a table by themselves, was itself a bit incongruous. That the point of a bar, any bar, is really the communal experience. You don’t have to speak to others. But you kind of do. And it’s pretty much always better when you do.

And the reason is obvious enough: you meet people. You interact with people. You may find yourself having a good time with those people. And then you may see them again. A bar is not the only place this happens, obviously, but it’s a wonderfully social example of such a place. But this can happen anywhere. At work. At events. At the gym. Whatever. But you also have to put yourself out there. And when you do, in that moment of vulnerability, you have the chance to cross over.

We have many, many stories about the terrific encounters we’ve had at bars.

We were with friends at the Trapp Door, our favorite local restaurant, sitting at the corner of the bar, and as the four of us ate, drank, and talked, I could see a guy at the other corner, watching us like he wanted to join in. And then the person he was sitting with left, and he bounded over, and said something like, “I have so many questions about what you were talking about,” and we ended up spending two hours with the guy, who happened to be married to the principal of our daughter’s school. Among other things, he had a fascinating behind-the-scenes story about what had really happened during a recent drama there.

We never saw that guy again, but I think I had previously mentioned meeting a couple at a sushi bar in Pennsylvania right after we had moved there. They were very helpful in recommending local places to eat—I store such things as “Want to go” pins in Google Maps so I can easily find them later—and so we went to the front desk and paid for their meals when we left, without them knowing, as a thank you. Hoping they would see us again, they kept a gift for us in their car, and we did run into each other during a later visit to the same restaurant. And we’ve been friends ever since. In fact, they’re our closest friends in Pennsylvania.

We don’t go out in the world looking for friends. But I guess we do go out in the world open to being friendly and to interacting with others. And I think that’s important, even though it can be scary. There’s the other George from the gym I speak to regularly (of “I can’t complain” fame). The nurse who was so excited for me when I lost weight that I’d gotten to know a bit over several visits. A guy we met on last year’s cruise to Alaska who lives in Washington D.C. that we had dinner with there this week and will see again on a future trip. Friends from France who read my blog almost 20 years ago and invited us to dinner, kicking off a relationship that continues to this day. All these chance encounters. People who sometimes graduate from being “hello people” to being … something else. Not all of them. But some of them.

It’s possible to get these interactions wrong, of course.

My biggest pet peeve is with those who misunderstand the transactional nature of most interactions with restaurant staff and then over-tip as a result. And this is something I’m careful about as we find new restaurants and bars in Mexico City, in particular: understanding when friendliness and appreciation are purely about your financial contribution and are thus not just friendly. Granted, this is hard in Mexico, given how friendly literally everyone is. But the examples I noted above are, to me, solid. These are good people who clearly care about us as people too.

When we were still in Boston, we went to a local seafood restaurant regularly, racked up pretty big bills, and got to know the bartender there really well. We loved the guy, and still do, but this was clearly always going to be a transactional relationship. He would mention the free drinks we had gotten as he handed us each expensive bill, and that was that. (Typical Thurrott humor: sure, we paid $165 for lunch, but at least we got a free drink.”) Unfortunately, two of our friends also became friendly with the same person but completely misunderstood the relationship. They were in the same situation, spending even more money than us, but in their case, literally bragging about getting a few glasses of wine for free while stupidly tipping far more than was necessary. And this is one of those things you can’t really explain to the parties involved: you’re not saving money, and you’re not as close as you think you are. They’ve seen this guy out in the world exactly as many times as we have, zero. That’s not a friend. A great guy, yes. But not a friend.

I do give these people credit for trying, and for being open to something more. After all, you can’t make mistakes if you don’t try, just as you can’t evolve and better yourself without trying. And on that note, while being friendly to others doesn’t always work out, it is always worth doing. Good things can happen.