Entry tags:

america, americans, personal

Americans - the corn people
A few things strike me about America:

• Americans are friendly, which I really like. I'd heard this, but it particularly struck me after Europe. (I'd also heard that Australians are friendly, but didn't appreciate that till Europe.) An interesting thing to watch is how easily people make eye contact with you. Americans (in Boston anyway) do it more easily than Europeans
  
• Americans are more patient than I expected. The pedestrian crossings in Boston - "crosswalks" - are different to what I'm used to, not to mention that the most basic part of my brain still believe that cars drive on the left, so I've got it wrong a few times. Now, I might have expected them to lean out the window and shout abuse, possibly wave a gun. But no - I've even had an SUV stop and wave this poor confused foreigner across the road, when there was no crossing of any kind. (i had a similar thing in Iceland, actually.)
• The light switches go the opposite way to what I'm used to (i.e. up is on, in America). It's just seems odd that I never knew.
• Is there anything you can't put corn syrup in? At the supermarket, I looked for wholemeal bread - "whole wheat" which I admit is more logical, and couldn't find one that didn't have corn syrup! I prefer my bread without sugar of any kind. But another time I found "Yoga bread" which has sunflower seeds and cranberries in it; and it's easier to find unadulterated peanut butter than it is in Australia (the only acceptable additive is salt, in my view).
  

All of this is based on a very limited experience of Europe (a few places in the Netherlands, London, and Iceland) and America (Boston, and one day in Denver... Ontario isn't America, but it fits the pattern for everything except the corn syrup).