Friendliness

People here are very friendly, and it's quite normal to strike up an involved conversation, detailing various aspects of your family and career history, with complete strangers. As a typically repressed Englishman who has spent hours studiously avoiding making eye contact with fellow passengers on the Tube, this is both alarming and refreshing.

The best illustration of this I've come across so far is probably the story told to us by Walter, the business manager at the dealership where we bought our car. He moved to OKC from Miami, so clearly this is something which surprises other Americans as much as foreigners like me.

He first visited OKC some years before he moved here, in order to attend his sister's wedding. One evening he and his friends were in a '7-11' convenience store, when a man who they didn't know walked by, and said loudly and cheerily, 'Hi, how ya doin'?' They turned to each other in some surprise, thinking, 'Who is this guy? Do we know him?' They didn't - it was simply a standard Oklahoma greeting.