Well, where I live people always holds the door for you.. and I live in Sweden.

But, it can be that it is in the northern part and not in Stockholm.

=)

Seriously? Generally bad for people? That’s the funniest excuse I’ve ever heard… I guess the phony niceness is debatable, but being from a country where that’s a given, I can tell you when WE do it– it’s far from phony. We like each other. We care about each other. We are considerate of each other. So we hold doors for each other, and if that means taking two steps faster to appreciate the consideration, we do it out of gratitude– and that isn’t phony.

Nor is it generally bad for people. Too too funny.

13. This is because we really do got less emotions, it’s not that we don’t dare showing them, I think. Because we dare pushing babystrollers alone on the street, and that’s a bigger thing.

19. Door-holding as a compulsory thing is phony niceness and something that is generally bad for people. If someone hold it for me, I have to walk fast, maybe faster than I originally wanted. And what if I wasn’t even going through it, or wanted to stop to start typing a text message. “People expect OTHER people to hold doors FOR them.”

20. Smoke: more than California, way less than France and Yugoslavia.

21. A law that has been created because some bureaucrat assumed that they could save some lives per year, not because they wanted to create more compulsory niceness.

29. FAMILY is no big deal.

I thought about the Swedish male look too. I think this is more of a northern/developed country thing in general. As in the US, and in difference to, say, South America, we are pretty unisex and mix our genders casually. We partly do it because we can AFFORD doing it: there’s still a huge difference because our genders, physically, for example, males are much taller than women. That’s why we don’t have to put on airs, we’re still men – we dare appearing shy because we are still men, and we will prove to be manly in many other situations, after the females has made some more effort to approach us.

But, in South America there is smaller natural differences between the genders. And that might be one of the reasons why South American men feel that they have to put on more airs, and therefore create the latin macho thing…which really isn’t so macho after all.