I am a yankee, grew up in Jersey and until recently had not been more than a hundred miles from home. This summer my brother and I took out first trip across the country. We traveled to New Orleans using back roads and ate at local type places.

My observation about the whole trip was this: People down south are just so nice! Friendly, outgoing, open to stangers, open to small talk, polite, etc. Much more so than the people in New Jersey and the other states around my home in Atlantic City.

This is a serious question and observation. Why are the people down south so open and friendly as a whole? (Just a few exceptions).

Another troll topic revived! Pitting regions against each other. Saying "this is a serious question" doesn't make it not a troll -- it's still begging for sniping and antagonistic generalizations about northerners and southerners.

This is an OLD OLD OLD topic. If you really REALLY think you need to read what people think about it, go back and look for one of those old trolls but PLEASE don't pull it up to the top again. Just read it and GO AWAY!!!

I grew up in Texas and lived for many years in Michigan. You do not realize how great the people are in the south until you live in the north. I am not saying the people in Michigan were bad, they were not. Most were very nice once they knew you. The real difference comes in how strangers treat people they do not know. Just the way you were treated in stores and restaurants was not anywhere near the niceness that you are treated with in the south. It never has been the same and it never will be. You can notice some erosion now that more people native to the north are living in the south, but if you get a true native it does not compare.

That and the weather is why you never read of anyone that retires and moves north.

I heard somewhere that people from warmer climates tend to be warmer people--which is why people in the South are so nice. That's an old saying, though.

This cold weather makes us cranky!!!!!

I haven't found that to be the case at all. You can find nice people and jerks all over. You find what you are looking for sometimes.

I'm formerly from Gadsden, AL and can honestly say that Southerners are nicer on the surface, but that's about it. Northerners are not less friendly than Southerners, they're just less superficial about their friendliness. I know an awful lot of Southerners who have personal traits that would make a Northerner cringe.

Just two personal observations from experience:
1. Southerners tend to by nicer face-to-face, but are as ready to stab you in the back as the worst New Yorker.
2. There's a theory that the closer people live together, the less civil they are. That's why people who live on farms seem so nice -- they never see anyone, so it's easy to be nice when they do. One the flip side, peope who are crammed together (other than the Japanes) tend to lack civility toward one another.