Cultural experience

Tonight Will and I went to see the new Harry Potter movie (It is definitely one of the better ones. This and the third one are the only ones that add anything to the books at all. The acting is a bit flat, but the cinematography, directing, visuals, and editing were all good, and it managed to capture some of the little things that make the HP universe interesting. But I digress), and as is natural after a two and a half hour movie, everyone in the audience needed the restroom afterwards. I was waiting my turn for the urinal and people kept moving in front of me, cutting in line. Then I realized that by Korean standards I wasn't in line at all. In the West we tend to give a rather large berth to people using the restroom, but here they lined up five behind each person in about five feet of space, so that everyone is practically touching the person in front of them, including the person pissing. Koreans' personal space bubble is smaller than Westerners as it is, but in this case Westerners want even more space than they usually do when using a urinal, whereas Koreans seem to be willing to accept even less space than usual when everyone is trying to fit into a tiny restroom. I've heard stories about people from different cultures subconsciously trying to move to the distance at which their culture thinks people should stand apart, but since those distances vary from culture to culture they end up chasing each other across the room trying to get the spacing right. Tonight was an even bigger lesson in cultural sensitivity to space, since I was able to recognize that my uneasiness was purely cultural.