Small talk rules are completely different here — did anyone else freeze up?

Completely relate. I'm from a nation of professional weather-chatters, and here my friendly bus-stop comment gets a polite nod and nothing more. But invite me in for coffee and suddenly it's two hours of real conversation. The warmth is just kept for the inner circle.

Yes! It's not coldness, it's a different threshold. Strangers stay strangers here, but the moment you cross into 'acquaintance' the loyalty is deep. Took me a year to stop reading the reserve as rejection.

Where I'm from, smiling at strangers actually looks suspicious — like you want something. So watching people relearn that 'friendly' isn't universal is funny to me. Neither way is wrong, they're just different scripts.

I missed the easy chit-chat so much in my first months that I'd go to the same café daily just to build up to real conversation slowly. It worked — familiarity is the key that unlocks people here, not spontaneity.

The silence in lifts nearly killed me at first. Back home you'd comment on something, anything. Here you stare at the numbers. I've made peace with it, mostly.

My trick was joining a hobby group. Shared activity gives you a reason to talk that isn't 'random stranger', and the small talk grows naturally out of the thing you're both doing.

OP here — 'different threshold, not coldness' is exactly the reframe I needed. I'd started taking it personally. Café regular strategy it is.

One thing that surprised me: neighbours who won't small-talk in the corridor will absolutely show up with soup when you're ill. The care is there, it just doesn't come wrapped in chit-chat.