Man, talking to strangers in random places just feels socially uncalibrated to me, like I'm being retarded. The first time I across that idea was in the form of "cold approach", the idea of trying to score a date from a woman you see while out and about.

I wonder if anyone who did this had to start from a baseline of feeling this is straight up weird (I'm pretty sure it is weird in my culture).

This is very different

Most random encounters have a pretext, from smoking a cigarette to talking to the shopkeeper, or being in a queue for a long time.

Talking to a woman ( esp given that many of them are harassed from what I understand from my female friends ) without any reason to is much harder