Personal Proxemic Zone Violation Experience

I had an encounter the other day that related to both the topic of this blog, and the video we had to respond to in class on personal space. I was eating lunch at Case dining hall with a couple of my friends, when some of other people's friends showed up. They sat down right beside me, even though there were empty seats all around the table. This made me a little uncomfortable, mainly because I didn't know the people. Then, when a person sitting next to me left, I moved closer to the people who I had come to eat with initially. This decision to move was almost instantaneous, and it wasn't until I had already done it that I realized that this was similar to the situations that were shown in the video that we looked at online this week.
This experience continues to help show that in our society we are raised to leave as much space in between people who we do not know and ourselves. This is very different from other societies where people are more comfortable being close to one another.
One of the topics that the video "touched" on was the fact that we are also an apologetic society: we apologize every time that we run into someone to eliminate any conflict. When people from other countries come to our country, one of the things that they notice the most is the fact that we apologize so much for running into people, or even cutting someone off. This differs from the societies in other countries that are less apologetic. In these nations, if someone runs into another person or cuts someone off, they just continue about their business.
I feel that this is because in our society we like to leave as much space in between ourselves and others. When others violate our personal space, we become uncomfortable and sometimes hostile. We apologize, first, because we know how we feel when others violate or space so we try to eliminate that tension, and two, because we are raised to do so.