A suburban nightmare/major tourist destination/home of the rich and famous/golf course infested region located on Virginia's Lower Peninsula, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. Tourists come by the millions each year to come witness the "restored area," which is a panoply of 17th and 18th century homes and businesses staffed by people wearing authentic colonial-era dress and trying to scratch themselves without anybody noticing.
Central Williamsburg is dominated by this restored area, along with the College of William and Mary, the oldest college in the country (yes, older than Harvard), which has ridiculously high standards for admission and whose students own enough Abercrombie and Fitch merchandise as a sum total to produce an entire edition of their famous catalog. It's a beautiful place, very aesthetically pleasing, with lots of trees and buildings in excellent shape, and, oddly enough (considering the tourist infestation), a slightly hip place, owing to the large student population.
The city itself is a planning disaster, with streets that lead to nowhere and extremely haphazard intersections, most notably the locally famous "Confusion Corner," where Jamestown Road, Richmond Road, and Boundary Street make their confluence. It is arranged like so:
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Which does not look so bad, to the uninitiated, but the truth of the matter is, meeting four major roads in that fashion at a point where pedestrians are constantly teeming (most, being tourists, without any regard for marked walkways) and there is absolutely no signage declaring who is to yield to whom -- no stop signs, no yield signs. No such signage is permitted in the historic area. It damages Atmosphere, seeing a "YIELD" sign in an area that is supposed to be a "step back to the 18th century."
Williamsburg also features Busch Gardens, a major amusement park run by a beer company, and a local police force that is rather overzealous when it comes to dealing with local kids committing mostly benign acts of mischief like talking about venereal disease in extremely loud voices in the presence of tour groups.