I guess this is about relationships, though these are just mildly annoying friends.
I live in another European country so have some habits that the locals don't share. Is that the problem, though, or is it just that some people are naturally negative?
Yesterday someone was saying how she hated going shopping because of the crowds, the queues, the noise. I said that I do some of my shopping online, and soon found five people staring at me in amazement that I would do such a thing, even though it's clearly a service offered here. It was like I just said I had it flown in from Harrods. No, she wouldn't want to solve her problem that way!
On the defensive, I said that I have no car, and it was a good way to get heavy goods and drinks - I don't want to carry ten litres of milk home with me. Now the general hilarity was about my wanting to buy ten litres of milk. I get low-fat long-life milk, but we do get through quite a lot a week. The subject switched to how it is really bad to drink milk "as a drink" (we were all sipping lattes!), how it is full of fat and protein and how humans are the only animals to drink milk outside childhood, and the rest of the evening I got quips about my excessive milk consumption.
I didn't dare say that I use a lot of milk on my cereal, as people are scathing about cereal here: "bird food", full of sugar (I'm a health food freak who mixes her own sugarless muesli), no wonder the British are all fat etc. (This is an equally overweight country.)
After that it took a large glass of red wine for me to relax into the conversation rather than feeling I was being picked on. I can be a bit oversensitive about these things, but it is pretty annoying, isn't it? Does anyone else get this? Is it really just because I'm the weirdo foreigner, or is it just that some people are total miserable naysayers? What else can you do instead of getting defensive like I do?