So we half-heartedly moved to the only remaining room in the hotel, two floors higher, with a dead television set and a view of the other highway. I called the hotel from the airport but was met with resistance that only cluelessness can bring. The woman understood that I was upset but didn't grok that I was upset about being overcharged. She thought I was upset that I'd been moved to another room, and said that they'd have been happy to move us back into our original room except that they'd rented it to someone else. It took another phone call from home, but I finally reached a manager, and after telling the story again, succeeded in getting a refund for the amount we were overcharged.
People are polite here.
Then I moved to the sticks and shortly found myself apologizing for driving the way I did. Drivers stop in the middle of the street so pedestrians can cross at the post office. So anyway, today the woman on the treadmill next to mine pulled her headphones off as I was leaving to apologize for breathing so heavily as she exercised. As if she'd offended me. And now I guess that, for a lot of people, stressors like traffic, lack of parking, and other characteristics of city life invoke some pretty unpleasant states.