Whose Decency and Whose Good Manners?

Saw this (see signs below) at the local grocery store here in Dubai. I wonder what happened to prompt this... wish I had been there just so I could know whether I'm being "decent" or "well mannered" on any given day.

But seriously, one of the challenges of living in a multi-cultural place like Dubai is that instructions like this are not clear enough. What is decent to one person is not decent to another. Good manners in one culture is not necessarily good manners in another. In some cultures it's great manners to belch loudly after the meal to show how much you've enjoyed it. But not in my culture of origin.

Just recently I was laughing with some Indian colleagues of mine. Seems that in Indian culture it shows concern for a person if they look tired or sick to say something like, "you look sick"... or "you look really worn out". A feisty response to a comment like that in my culture might be, "you don't look so good yourself"!