Sorry Is a Reflex In One Country and a Foreign Concept In the Other

🇨🇦 Canada vs 🇪🇬 Egypt: Public Behaviour Norms

By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

Canadians apologise to furniture. I have watched a grown man say sorry to a vending machine that ate his dollar coin, with total sincerity, no irony detectable anywhere in his face. Egyptians, meanwhile, operate in a public sphere so comfortable with proximity, volume, and negotiation that a Canadian dropped into a Cairo souk without warning will experience something close to sensory vertigo. Neither approach to public life is wrong. One is a masterclass in conflict avoidance. The other is a masterclass in conflict as a form of conversation.

I've queued in Toronto behind people so committed to orderly spacing they'd apologise for standing too close to a stranger four metres away, and I've haggled in Khan el-Khalili with a vendor who called me "sister" within thirty seconds and meant it as both a compliment and an opening negotiating position. Both encounters taught me more about a country's soul than any museum could.

Do's & Don'ts

🇨🇦 Canada

🇪🇬 Egypt

Canada: Politeness as Load-Bearing Infrastructure

Canadian public behaviour runs on an operating system of pre-emptive apology and studied non-confrontation so deeply embedded that visitors often mistake it for insincerity, when it's closer to the opposite — a genuine cultural commitment to smoothing every possible friction point before it becomes an actual problem. The stereotype about apologising constantly is not exaggerated; it's underreported. Canadians say sorry when they're bumped into, sorry when they ask a question, sorry when they need to interrupt, sorry sometimes simply to fill a silence that's grown a beat too long.

Queuing is near-sacred. Cutting a line in Canada isn't just rude, it's treated as a small moral violation, and the silent judgment that follows can be more socially devastating than an actual confrontation would be anywhere else. This extends to nearly every shared public space — buses, elevators, grocery checkouts — all governed by an unspoken agreement that order and patience are collective responsibilities everyone signed up for without a meeting.

Volume control is another unwritten law. Public spaces, particularly in cities like Toronto and Vancouver, favour a hushed conversational register that visitors from louder cultures find almost eerie. Speaking at a normal indoor volume outdoors, on transit, or in a restaurant will earn you glances, not because anyone will say anything, but because someone will notice, quietly, and possibly mention it to someone else later.

What foreigners consistently underestimate is how much genuine warmth sits underneath the reserve. Canadians are not cold; they're conflict-averse to a degree that reads as distance until you've actually built rapport, at which point the politeness gives way to real, if understated, generosity. It just takes longer to get there than in cultures where warmth is the opening move rather than the payoff.

Egypt: Proximity Is Warmth, Not Intrusion

Egyptian public life runs on almost the exact inverse logic — proximity, volume, and direct engagement aren't intrusions on your personal space, they're the baseline social currency through which relationships, transactions, and simple daily interactions actually happen. A conversation that sounds, to untrained Western ears, like the beginning of an argument is very often just two friends catching up with appropriate Egyptian enthusiasm, gestures included.

Haggling deserves its own category entirely, because it isn't a negotiating tactic bolted onto shopping, it's the shopping experience itself. Walking into a Cairo market and paying the first quoted price isn't just financially unwise, it's a missed social ritual — the back-and-forth, the mock offense, the tea offered mid-negotiation, the eventual handshake at a number both parties feel reasonably good about. Refusing to haggle at all can genuinely confuse a vendor more than haggling too aggressively would.

Personal space, in the Western sense of an invisible one-metre bubble, simply doesn't exist in the same way across much of Egyptian public life, particularly in crowded markets, transport hubs, or family gatherings. Standing close, touching an arm during conversation, and maintaining prolonged eye contact are all standard warmth signals, not violations, and Canadians in particular report a genuine adjustment period before this stops registering as an imposition.

Hospitality operates as a near-mandatory social script. Being offered tea, food, or a seat during any interaction that lasts more than a few minutes is close to automatic, and declining outright, rather than accepting a token amount, can read as a rejection of the relationship being offered, not just the beverage. Egyptians extend this warmth to strangers with a generosity that can genuinely disorient visitors used to hospitality being reserved for people they already know.

The Verdict

Canada wins on predictability — you will never be surprised by a Canadian's public conduct, for better and occasionally for worse. Egypt wins on warmth — the directness that initially overwhelms visitors reveals itself, given a few weeks, as one of the more genuinely welcoming public cultures going. If I had to choose which country's public behaviour norms I'd rather navigate on a bad day, it's Canada, purely because the rules are so clearly telegraphed nobody's ever guessing. But if I had to choose which country's public behaviour norms actually made me feel like I mattered to strangers, Egypt wins without a contest.

What Nobody Warned You About

Quora — "Why do Canadians apologise so much?" — paraphrased: "I once said sorry to my own dog for stepping on his tail. He wasn't even near my foot. It's a reflex at this point, not a choice."

Internations Cairo — paraphrased: "My first haggling attempt was a disaster, I paid full price out of fear of offending anyone. The vendor looked almost disappointed in me, like I'd skipped a step in a dance he was looking forward to."

r/Egypt — paraphrased: "Foreign friends always think we're fighting when we're just talking loudly about football. My grandmother and her sister have 'arguments' daily that are actually just how they show affection."

Conclusion

Canada has built a public culture around the collective agreement that friction is best avoided before it starts. Egypt has built one around the belief that direct, warm, occasionally loud engagement is the fastest route to genuine connection. Visitors who expect either country to behave like the other will spend their first month deeply confused and possibly a little offended on nobody's behalf but their own. Learn the local script, though, and both countries will reward you — one with quiet, dependable courtesy, the other with a bear hug from a stranger who's now decided you're basically family. Pick your discomfort. Both are worth it.