Thug Life

So what's it like here?  Beautiful.  Quiet.  Slow.  Nice.  All of which are kind of weird to me.  It's summer so it should be super crowded and smell a little rotten and be really noisy and fast-paced and a bit rude, in a happy urban way.  The Virginia dialect is more like molasses than the mustard I'm accustomed to.  It did take about five times longer than I'm used to checking out of the grocery store, but they greeted me multiple times in the store, made sure I found what I was looking for, and offered to carry the two little bags to the car for me.  The library put Bruce Wayne to work as a volunteer right away--no background check or suspicion or training or trial period.  The gas station that inspected my car charged sixteen dollars, for which I can't think of any service and not even too many meals I could have gotten back in Metro NY.  But it's all really disorienting.  I have to have a fan running at all times, not to circulate air, but to cut the alarming silence.  Weehawken was never silent.  Never.  Although here I guess there are tree frogs and stuff which can be pretty noisy, but the quiet is really really really quiet.  Really.  Quiet.  Last night I made a last visit to the bathroom before sleep and although I could hear the tree frogs through the window, there was a deafening silence in the room.  It made my ears feel like when a plane is landing and I need to swallow to clear my ears.  And the politeness makes me suspicious.  Are these people really nice? or do they want something from me? People wave when I drive down the road, even though they don't know me.  People say hello, have a nice day, but not like they have to, but because they seem to actually mean it.  It will take some getting used to.