Why not tell off someone ignorant to make them go away? It wasn't hard.

But okay, maybe this guy was non-confrontational like Aang was, where he didn't want to be mean to people. Aang would've tried to make friends with the people here and maybe found some other way of maneuvering them around to be more polite, by doing the social equivalent of Airbending, whirling things around before people realized they were being whirled. In any case, Zuko had defended the guy and now he was standing there, with a stranger, suddenly realizing that now he had to talk to him afterward.

Zuko wasn't really good at talking to people, hence why he'd so often gone silent in all his travels. That was why he suddenly went from confidently snobbish and regal to painfully awkward in about one second flat. He leaned against a nearby wall and crossed his arms just to have something to do with them.

Pick a subject, Zuko. Any subject.

Any subject.

"You have dragons where you're from?"

There! A conversational topic! His world had dragons, too.