Aloha !

I think it really is sort of protocol to sit down in the seating area, yes. There's no one who stands up in arena's here in Holland when they're sitting in the ring, unless they want to applaud for a rousing rendition of a specific song or the encore is that spectacular that everyone stands up for it.

Here in Holland, and I think in the rest of Europe, it's sort of known that if you have seats, you sit down, and do not block the view of the people behind you. Even if you're at a rock show. However, we don't have seats in front of the stage, which is probably why the protocol works like that in Europe after all. Us Europeans never understood why there's seats in the middle of a venue. They tried it once with Bruce Springsteen in Ahoy Rotterdam (a venue that holds 8.000 people) and many, many people complained about it.

Salaam Aleikum,
Sebastiaan