Australian Adventures: When You Wonder if American Manners Kinda Suck

One of the bad things about people being able to stream video from their phone anywhere they have a wireless signal is that they do so while seated next to you at the airport and they do it without using headphones.

The person doing this is American. After a week in Australia, I knew that the person with the audio on his phone up to epic volume levels was American long before I told him to turn it down. I'm tired and a bit cranky so I didn't ask. I didn't do the whole polite, "Can you please turn that down?" thing. I just said, "Please turn that down because the sound is bothering me."

He replied in his all-too-American accent, "Is that too loud for you?" Then someone else sitting around us piped in to answer the question. "Yes. Turn it down, dude, before I get a mother#^#(&$ headache."

Sigh. It's not that Australians are magically well behaved. They just seem to take rules here very seriously--the photo above is of the rules--as well as the "here's how we can make this experience better for you" guidelines--for the train. If I hop on the train in Los Angeles, it's a rule that you can't eat on the train, but I still see people surreptitiously munching on Twix bars. Perhaps they don't do that here because of the price:

I never buy chocolate bars but for real, that chocolate better taste like it's gold plated at that kind of price.

Anyway, I'm wondering how we can get a bit more civil in America. I'd like that. In the meantime, there's also a child running barefoot here in the waiting area at the gate, basically terrorizing and his mother is begging him to chill out. Thank God it's time to board.