Why nobody smiles at you on the street

Arriving from the US, Brazil or the Philippines, the first thing many visitors read as coldness is the face people wear in public. On the metro, in a queue, in a lift, the default expression is neutral. Nobody smiles at a stranger, nobody asks how your day is going, and eye contact is brief.

The usual explanation is that a smile is treated as information rather than as punctuation. It is what you do when something is funny, when you are pleased, or when you know the person. A smile offered to a stranger for no reason reads as either mockery or as something rehearsed — the phrase for it, roughly, is 'smiling for no reason', and it is not a compliment.

This is why the same people who ignored you in the corridor become unrecognisably warm once you are introduced. The unpaid, service-industry smile is missing; hospitality is not. Being invited to sit down, being fed whether or not you are hungry, and being walked to the metro afterwards are the local equivalents of friendliness, and they arrive all at once rather than in small daily doses.

Foreign creators who live in Russia describe the same sequence often: three cold weeks, one introduction, and then a level of attention that feels like too much.

For how that shift looks from inside a flat — what happens when you visit a Russian family