Say 'Hi' in an international environment

It's very interesting to notice the group dynamics whenever you put people with a certain background in a certain environment. In any case it's something I like watching and thinking about. At the moment there are 55 people, mostly between 22 and 25 years old, together in Paris. (unfortunately only 12 females...) These people come from literally all over the world, and after being together for 11days, they spread out again all over the world, but not to the location they came from. 55 lifelines crossing each other and 11 days to make the most of that.
Yes, you've guessed, I'm one of those people (obviously, I'm one of the 12 females). And it is really nice to experience this. Somehow everything seems to smooth itself out nicely. There is an sense of common understanding amongst us that is special. To give an example: we never bothered with names. There are so many names and most of them are too exotic to remember from the start. The question we asked one another when we arrived was not 'What's your name?' or 'Where are you from?'. It was 'Where are you going?' :-) Just now after five days we're more or less starting to use names. Everybody's treating each other in such a respectful, understanding way. The cultural backgrounds and differences between us are so large we can't find any acceptance in the group starting from there. (to give an example, some people here had never heard the name Michael Jackson before) We're forced to fall back to more basic things we have in common and that make us feel accepted, like elementary politeness, being unprejudiced and a natural curiosity/interest for/in each other. That's the foundation we started on, and believe it or not, once you have that in place you can get a long way from there!