Every city has a personality. I'm not talking about the look of the city - its skyline or cleanliness. I'm talking about the feeling you get when you walk through the city and encounter its people. New York has the reputation of rudeness, though as one born there I prefer to think of it as assertiveness. Pittsburgh has a small-town feel within a city structure, as though the people in it didn't realize that their own towns had been engulfed into a city. In Buffalo, everyone just seems very cold, with an almost manic drive to get indoors. These are my perceptions, of course. Yours may differ.

But Washington, DC is different. When I arrived here over three years ago, I didn't know what it was. At first, I attributed it to the number of tourists, and I was sure that it was tourism that defined the city's attitude. But now I know differently. Washingtonians, after only a short time living in the area, become passive-aggressive. Now that I know it, and see it, I find it distracting. It annoys the hell out of the tourists.

The biggest example is the Metro, DC's subway system. There are certain guidelines that Washingtonians follow when riding the Metro. The biggest involves escalators.

Metro escalators are really quite a sight. If you haven't seen them, be sure to take Metro if you come to visit. They are long. The Rosslyn station's escalator takes nearly two minutes to ride from bottom to top. Wheaton's takes two minutes and forty seconds, and is the longest escalator in the Western Hemisphere (the only one longer in the world is somewhere in Moscow, I'm told). Others are nearly as long.

Tourists become intrigued by the Metro escalators. They stand the whole way up and the whole way down, and they take pictures of each other and pictures of the escalators themselves, and they marvel at the length. Washingtonians walk. It's not that they're in a hurry to be anywhere - an extra minute isn't going to kill them. It's that standing on the same escalator day after day for over two minutes at a time gets boring.

And so an unwritten guideline came about. If you're going to stand, stand to the right. If you're going to walk, walk on the left. This is all very typical when you think of it. It's how roads and bike trails work. Pass on the left. Easy. In fact, in the newest Metro stations, there are actually signs that say, "Please stand to the right." Not hard. Even if you're a tourist you should be able to figure it out.

Sadly, most don't. It amazes me how a group of tourists could be riding the Metro all day long and not notice that there is always a line of people standing to the right and a line of people walking up the left side of the escalators.

This is where the passive-aggressiveness of Washingtonians comes in. Picture it. A huge escalator with a line of people on the right. A clueless family blocking the left. A Washingtonian walking up the left encounters the clueless family.

Now, if this were New York, that old assertiveness would kick in. He'd say, "excuse me," or "please stand to the right," or, OK, "move it." The tourists would get scared of the big, bad, mean New Yorker and get out of the way. In DC, however, this is not the case. The Washingtonian will stand there and glare at the tourist. She will then mumble under her breath about people getting in her way. If someone should come up behind her, she may just turn to him and say, "Can you believe these people who can't figure out passing on the left?" When this happens, one of two responses is evoked from the tourists. The first is mild embarrassment, followed by a sheepish moving to the right and a mumbled "I'm sorry." The second is a grand statement about how they don't understand why people are in such a hurry. In any case, they end up with a low opinion of Washingtonians.

This attitude is mirrored in the way people drive, the way they walk on the street, and even the way they carry themselves when shopping. It's as if they are so afraid of being labeled as "rude" that they overcompensate and end up being rude anyway. The fact is there is nothing wrong with being assertive. If you want something and you don't ask for it, then you have no right to be mad when you don't get it. The line between assertiveness and rudeness is not so fine that it needs to be tiptoed around. Yes, we will all encounter stupid people, and yes, those of us in tourism cities are bound to run into more than our fair share of them. So speak up! Many of them aren't stupid; they're just ignorant of local customs. Making them feel bad will do nothing but make them feel bad. A kind word or polite request to follow the custom might give a better impression of you, and might just make a person feel grateful for the education.