As someone who has lived most of his life in a very crowded and urban environment, one of the most surprising situations in the first days of moving to Liechtenstein to me was being greeted my random people on the street. For that I should elaborate on my background: growing up partially in Russia and Germany I was subject to very different cultures with different habits from a small age on. But despite what you might think the cultural differences are not the topic I want to focus on here. The feeling of life was not that much different because the big factor that shaped my environment was the density and population of the cities. You might say that Russians are colder, and Germans are more polite, but such association are diminished by the bigger influences that shape the everyday life of the people. I spent most of my life in Munich, Germany a city with 1.8M inhabitants and one aspect of that was definitely the anonymity of the “big city life”. Whether it be getting to school or texting someone about help at university you mostly deal with people you´ve either never seen or heard of before. This is something that made a big difference when comparing the cultures of a metropole region vs the rural area of Liechtenstein. When on my way to get groceries in a nearby town I felt a bit clueless when a middle-aged women walked by me and said the typical “hoi”. Do I respond, even if I don´t know this stranger at all or I do I stay quite pretending I didn`t notice? I answered her call, but a weird feeling of unfamiliarity crossed my mind. Meanwhile the friend accompanying me felt unbothered. On our way home he explained to me how for him coming from the small town of Passau this is as normal as jogging.
When going around your business in the city it´s very often your intention not to notice your surroundings. The rushed; stressful and noisy environment is usually not something you want to interact with. Like taking the full bus, pressed against the others like a sardine you try to seek the space, the “private zone” and not interact with anybody who could threaten that. This is even a topic corporations profit off by offering you handy solutions like noise cancelling headphones to blend out the noise. So, it is natural you develop your way of “zoning out” when going around daily life. In the municipality of Liechtenstein, I feel like something like that is not really needed. Due to the sheer size of the towns people know each other naturally so of course they developed that habit. But even if you come here as foreigner the community still transports that feeling of togetherness to you.
You also don’t have that pressured environment that turns in you introverted in a way anymore that you were so used to all your life. This is definitely something I still have to get used to but when being here for just a month there is still plenty of time to adjust to the new environment. Of course the greeting is just one example of the different dynamic that fills this place but nevertheless a small detail that can paint the bigger picture of how life in Liechtenstein feels like.