The wrong side of the road…
We knew they drove on the other side of the
road, this much we expected. Left turns are the big ones, right turns the quick
flicks. But, have you ever thought about reversing from the front left seat,
changing lanes and merging the other way and reverse parallel parking… ahh!
Roundabouts
Round-a-bouts in our part of the world look
like this….
They are a new installation and one gets
the impression that they are a bit of a novelty. City Hall, having a bit of fun. Firstly, they
are usually installed in places where they don’t fit. That means you have to
squeeze and inch around them. Secondly you don’t give way to the left, you
treat it as a first come first serve basis. I’m of the impression that they are
basically in place because of the prettiness…
Four way stop signs.
An intersections with four stop signs..tell
me friend what would you do. Apparently, it’s simple.
1.
Come to a stop
2.
Observe who came to the
intersection first
3.
Allow the person who arrived at
the intersection first to go first
4.
If you’re busy watching the
road and forgot to remember who arrived first, just let the person to the right
go first…:S
Paper
We needed something printed in our first
week here. Since the power incompatibility had rendered our printer obsolete we
had to head down to our local Kinkos.
We plugged in our USB, inserted our credit
card and waited, the machine started purring and then kept right on purring for
15 minutes. I even had time to get to Starbucks next door and order a coffee.
When I came back the machine had spat out
one of our printouts.
The attendant eventually came over and
looked at our machine. He tsked, he shook his head and then uttered
“ You can’t print in A4.” Mr Ginige and I
looked at him blankly.
“ You have to print to letter size, make
sure you hit the “fit to paper size.”
Whaaaaat?
A4 doesn’t exist here, normal size is
letter size. That means envelopes and Letter size, folders are letter size and
binders are letter size, all our hapless A4 pieces of paper now stick out the
ends.
In the same vein as this we went to Office
Depot (pronounced dee-poh) yesterday to purchase some folders. Nuwan had
earlier bought a 3 ring binder and being annoyed at having to punch 3 holes
with our two-hole punch he advised me to get a two-ring binder. We scoured the
entire wall of binders, getting more and more puzzled. Not a two-ring binder in
sight! They are all three rings. So we walked out of office deepoh with a three-ring binder and three-ring hole punch
Coins/Money
All American notes are green….nuff said.
Power
American plugs are different, that’s to be
expected. However American power is different, while most of the world runs on
50 hertz system, America (and a handful of other countries) runs on 60 hertz
electricity. Which means that most of our appliances don’t work! Suffice it to
say, I’m totally devastated about having to trowel through the catalogues and
pick out a new food processor, blender and stand mixer. Gosh darn it!
Measurement
We haven’t quite got out head around the
measurement, pounds, ounces, gallons, yards, feet, miles….I’ll leave it at that.
Bread
The bread here generally has the taste and
consistency of cake. This has left me
reading the fine print every time I got to the supermarket scouring the
ingredients label for sugar. It usually has a lot!
Not to mention that anything here that has
low fat is pumped full of artificial sugar…the stuff that stays on your
tongue.
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