Yesterday I was at a restaurant with my friends. This Asian guy came in and sat near us. I noticed him speaking Korean on the phone. I consume a lot of Korean content, so this got me really excited. On a whim, I decided to go up to him and chat. I introduced myself, and he invited me to sit with him if I wanted to, even though he was a bit awkward, lol. He ordered some stuff for me. I found out he’s here in Switzerland for work, and we had a good talk. I ended up hanging out with him around the city. We exchanged contact info and are seeing each other again today after he gets off work. It was my first time doing something like this, and I honestly didn’t know meeting people could be so spontaneous and organic.
There are a lot of cultures where seating in public is ad hoc, you just sit wherever, you generally don’t claim a table or area to yourself. In those situations greetings and socialization are pretty normal.
I remember going out to eat fast food with a girl and her kid a decade ago and some homeless guy asked if he could sit with us. I said sure, and he was a nice maybe 50 year old guy. He had clearly been around kids and enjoyed the normalcy of just hanging out with the three of us for 30min. The kid didn’t mind, but the girl I was dating thought it really weird.