Saying Hello to someone When I lived in Germany, I would go to the huge supermarket which is called "Real" to buy a lot of foods for whole week every Saturday. Sometimes it was going to be more than 100 Euro at a time. When I paid at the register, I said Hello to a cashier and when leaving there, we said "Bye, Have a nice day"(Tschuess, Schoenen Tag noch) with smiling to each other. I think this custom is wonderful! The relationship between customers and shopkeepers is equal like friends. And there are nice communications in a daily life. In Japan, it's quite different. We don't have the custom like this. We don't say Hello and Bye to shopkeepers. But they always say to us "May I help you? Is everything Ok?"which is too much polite! It looks like the position of customers is a lot higher than shopkeepers. We don't try to communicate with someone. Is it that because we are shy or island nation? I'm not sure. Anyway, saying Hello to someone with smiling is a really good way to have a good relationship (or get along) with local people in the foreign country.