The etiquette of street walking

This morning I decided that I do not own a large enough Russian-English dictionary, so I marched myself into town to get one. On my way home I found myself in a situation that I really dislike: a long straight pavement and 50 metres ahead of me a person walking towards me. Immediately I start to panic.

Now I never know what to do when I walk past people on the street. I never know whether to look at the person or to not to look at the person. Its the agony of two people walking in opposite directions about to pass each other. I see the person and I know that they know that I've seen them. And it is never seems right/possible to make eye-contact for those painful 20 metres before the cross. I develop a nervous head twitch where I pretend to have noticed something very interesting on the side of the road, but I have to keep looking back at the other person to see if they are looking at me. Or I pretend that I am thinking about something intently so develop the "glazed over" expression of "I'm looking right through you and don't know you're there." I look at my watch/phone/anything to hand, just to have something to look at that is not this other person. I always worry that the music on my Ipod is too loud and that the peron will hear me listening to Wham and think that I am a very tragic individual. I also worry about my walk- am I walking too bouncily? Is the other person thinking that I am walking too bouncily?

And the other person never seems to be as uncomfortable with this situation as I am.

I can ignore the person and walk past them like they don't exist. Smile at them and run the risk of them not smiling back or worse just staring at me like i'm mad and that smiling at people in the street should carry a minimal sentence of 6 months at a suitable institute to rehabiliate you back into normal society. Or I start to smile at them, but get scared and it instead looks like I'm smiling manicly at a piece of litter on the ground.

And then once the pass has happened I breathe a sigh of relief and then look up.. only to see another person and have the whole trauma happen again.

There is of course the other option of just crossing street. But then I have to entertain the idea that the other person knows that I have crossed the street just to avoid the pass.

I think the government should adopt one way pavements- it would save me a lot of anxiety.