The white house with a wrap-around porch, where a graying, smiling old man sits sipping sweet tea while the wind chimes sing on the light autumn breeze which swirls the golden-orange leaves: symbol of the changing seasons.
The quintessential picture of Southern life?
Nick Scirico, a freshman in meteorology, said he thinks so.
“People are a lot more friendly here, that is the biggest difference I have seen so far,” Scirico said — an Albany, New York, resident for 16 years.
He said amiability among strangers is a sign of it.
“When you walk into the supermarket here, random people come up to you and just start talking,” he said. “I’m not used to that because people at home usually keep to themselves.”
Scirico said he came to North Carolina for the schools — both the major he wanted and tuition and financial aid were a good fit.
One difference Scirico said he is not fond of is smoking.
“People do not smoke as much [in New York] as they do here,” he said.
Scirico continued to say Albany has a nonsmoking law which prevents smoking in all public buildings such as restaurants or amusement parks.
But, whether or not he got used to the smoking and the Southern accents, Scirico said he is here to stay.
“I like New York, but there are a lot more jobs down here, plus, I do not winter there anymore because it is too cold,” he said.
Nicole Nartowicz, a sophomore in business management, is originally from New Jersey.
Nartowicz lived in New Jersey until age seven and said she does not remember much about life in the North.
But, she still has an opinion about life in the South versus life in the North.
“I think it would be more exciting to live in the North and there would be more different types of culture,” she said.
Karen Stapleton, an English lecturer said she was “born and raised” in the Bronx of New York for the first 33 years of her life.
Stapleton said two things surprised her when she first came to the South.
“In one way, I was struck by the greater congeniality of people,” Stapleton said. “There’s a marked difference in the civility of people, particularly in public.”
The other difference was the pace of life.
“Life down here is not as frantic and hurried,” Stapleton said. “People’s sense of time is different and slower.”
And while Stapleton said these things are stereotypes, some of her experiences validate them. Others, she said, do not.
“There’s a sensibility that Southern people are less intelligent, I don’t know why, maybe it’s the drawl,” Stapleton said. “My experiences disprove this stereotype.”
Stapleton said she misses certain aspects of her life in New York.
“Largely, I miss my family. I miss the endless possibility that seemed to exist in New York and Manhattan and the cosmopolitanism of Manhattan. But, I’ve also found because we have three universities in the area, there certainly is a sense of culture, internationalism, and possibility,” she said.