Comment by jgilias

I'm really late to the party, but here goes anyway.

Some context is due. The article is almost twenty years old. The experiences described there are from a time period when Latvia had gained independence from the Soviet Union only some ten years prior. So, pretty much all the people working in the hospitality industry would be someone whose formative years and/or young adulthood was spent during the nineties.

That was a pretty brutal decade. Rearranging from planned to market economy is hard. Economic crises abound, rampant organized crime, generally high levels of aggression. I come from a small town and I was a kid then, but even then I know of four murders that happened then in my home town. A guy was beaten to death in a nightclub, another guy was thrown from a bridge, my favorite sales clerk at a local store got incarcerated for axe-murdering his wife and her lover, and a body was found in the bushes behind my music school. Ah right, there was also the case of a neighbor massacring a family on a potato field. A friend who lived in Riga during that time told me how his dad always had a peace of metal pipe behind the door. Just in case. In a later interview the guy who was chief of police then revealed how he slept with body armor on at all times.

So, people who were teenagers or young adults then learned to not smile for the same reasons the prison population is not really a cheerful bunch. It's outright dangerous. There's a book and a recently made movie about coming of age as a metalhead in a mid-sized Latvian town during the nineties called Jelgava 94 (Doom 94). It really conveys the look and feel of those times quite well.

It's very different now. Sure, people don't smile as much as Americans (no one except Thais does), and are not as chatty as the Brits. But a lot of people have worked or traveled abroad, have seen and gotten accustomed to different cultures. According to my experience pretty much everyone below the age of 25 speak fluent English. And hug. They hug a lot. And yeah, the crime levels are nowhere near to how it was in the nineties.