First Stop: Upstate NY

First Impression: It's damn cold here. It hasn't been above freezing since I've arrived and it's snowed twice in the past three days.

Second Impression: It's absolutely gorgeous. There are long stretches of fields and small lakes and rivers. If God blessed Texas, then the Angels blessed upstate New York. Right now, the whole area is covered in snow (it's snowing outside as I type this) and that certainly adds to the prettiness of the landscape.

I am pleasantly surprised that the area isn't as country as I feared it would be. There are plenty of businesses and shopping centers. I'm a city girl at heart, so I really like having things in town to do and local places to eat at and to visit.

Another surprise is the friendliness of the locals. There are two types of people here and I haven't figured out which is which yet. There are the people who have moved here from other places because of the military and there are the locals who have lived here all their lives. One group is friendly, the other is not. I'm hazarding a guess that the friendlies are the locals. The people in charge of the businesses and working at the restaurants and in the mall... those are the nice people. It's the people walking around doing the shopping that don't have the hospitality I'm used to.

Maybe it's a southern or a western thing, but where I'm from, when people hold open a door, you say thank you. When someone hands you something (your change from a purchase, something you dropped, a shopping bag) you say thank you. The people around here don't do that. They're very concerned with themselves and where they're going in life and don't take the opportunity to look around and see those around them. Life is what they do to it, not what they experience.