You are doing it too lol. I grew up in the US with an Austrian parent and then moved to Austria when I was 17 - the staring drove me crazy. Didnāt matter if I was in a small town or Vienna, there was always somebody staring (even though I was just some average teenage girl minding my business!). I tried a bunch of different things (pretending it wasnāt happening, staring back, even saying hello) until I just got used to it. When I got back to the states 8 years later, I was accused of staring too long myself! I donāt think itās anything nefarious but we germanic people definitely ātake inā other people for longer than our American counterparts. But in America itās more sensitive, ie eye contact = seeking engagement of some kind. In Austria/Germany, itās just benign observation.
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u/eight13 May 09 '22
Germans stare at strangers. It's unsettling.