What's interesting is I moved from the DC suburbs (you could drive 10 minutes from the house in which I grew up, crest a hill, and look down into the lap of DC and the Washington Monument) to Chicago, which--Midwestern sensibilities are in a lot of ways very Southern, in that you get a sort of basic expectation of sharing and generosity. (Potlucks are wild. There is so much food.) And yet it's more restrained up here. But there's still that Southern feeling where the default interaction is at least polite rather than brusque, where people try (because it's a habit held over from when if you didn't at least try to get along, you'd freeze to death alone maybe?)