It wasn't anything that you'd notice if you hadn't been there before, because what I was feeling wasn't so much the presence of strikingly positive energy but, rather, the absence of a mood of wary inwardness.
After Syria and Israel failed to resume proximity talks, the mood became wary.
The grandees of Hollywood are approaching this year's Oscars in a pretty subdued and wary mood, the most subdued since the days of 9/11 and the Iraq war.
But whereas last year mention of "the Asian market" to a Bordelais elicited a glow of content, this year the mood is more wary.
The mood was more wary at Public School 65 in Ozone Park, Queens, where parents have worried about contaminated groundwater under a neighboring building.
But such is the wary mood, it is unlikely Americans will stomach many US casualties - as they did with Iraq and Afghanistan.
These dreams are sometimes funny, sometimes frightening, often symbolic, and always engrossing, but one dream, from Ahmad Ali, a student, seems perfectly suited to the mood of the issue: wary but hopeful.
But there's a knowing, celebratory mood, a kind of wary hopefulness, among the president's African-American constituency here.
If he caught the mood right, he could lure wary voters towards greater optimism.
At the grimy Iddo Market in Lagos, a long line of rickety open stalls under a highway overpass, the mood over the weekend was wary.
