Toilets are shaped weirdly

As I've yet to start massive travels and am still just enjoying all the smaller differences about American life, I guess I'll hafta talk about that for a bit!

The first major difference I've found is that bathrooms are different here. Taps are usually a knob or dial that you twist to adjust temperature and tilt to adjust flow. It's just little tiny things like that that are making me think "I am so not at home." Also, toilets are shaped pretty dang differently. Not majorly differently, it's just that they have a wider, flatter bowl and have a lot more water in them. Australian toilets are deep and have about three inches of water in the bottom. American toilets are more like an actual bowl and have about seven or eight inches in, and it fills to the point that you have to watch out for splashback. This is a real honest problem.

Fast food is amazing. Not good amazing, just plentiful amazing. And in some cases, horrifically bad amazing. A few major chains that I've had completely confuse me as to why they haven't made it to Australia; Taco Bell is my biggest confusion. It's not great or anything but it's exactly what you want out of fast food mexican and drunks want fast food mexican. There is a type of cheese that is used on a lot of things, which is a fake nacho cheese. It's pretty much a yellow goo which I think is half powdered Doritos and half wood glue that really gets into so much stuff it's amazing.

On the food front still, it's only a burger here if it actually has ground beef, a steak or chicken in it. I've gotten used to the fact that biscuits are a more buttery slightly thicker english muffin, I've come to terms with the fact that jelly isn't a wobbly mass of sugar with an Aeroplane on the box and I still can't get my head around when someone says "sandwich" and hands me a bun or a burger. Mindboggling, I tell you. And I'm already homesick for margerine. Everybody uses mayonnaise instead.

Biscuits are actually pretty good, and I think I'm going to find a way to get them in Australia, along with grits. I'm not entirely sure what a biscuit is; it tastes sort of like a buttery english muffin, only it's heavier and the outside of it isn't powdery and toastable, it's more like a bun. They're quite odd but go very very well with bacon, egg and cheese. Or with sausage and gravy. Or with most things. Grits are fantastic, they're a form of cornmeal porridge that you usually have savoury, instead of sweet. It's common to have it with tomato sauce, bacon, salt and pepper, cheese, butter or even horseradish or worcestershire sauce. They're supposedly an aquired taste but heck, I liked it pretty much straight away.

I went to a Karaoke bar. That was a mistake. They had Down Under by Men At Work in the songlist and I didn't get to choose my first song. I'm a sort of a gimmick, you see.

Conversations with most people here usually go quite well until I say a word like "tomato" or "awesome" or "strawberry" or something that I apparently pronounce so hilariously, at which point all communication stops and it becomes a game of trying to teach whoever I'm talking to how to say those words in an Australian accent. A lot of people tend to put on a really prim and proper British accent when trying to sound like me. It's weird and odd, all at once.

It's probably just that I haven't really been to that many major cities yet either, but everything feels more spread out. In Australia, there's districts of activity and long expanses of just suburban areas and not much more. Here, it seems like there's something to do around every corner, but that could just be my stinky foreigner eyes staring at everything strangely and thinking it's all new and exciting.

I'm going to go out to a coffee shop in a little while and have something fiendishly complex and delicious, then go... well, I don't even know where, but I'm sure it'll be somewhere.


Oh, by the way, the baseball game? Maddie and I walked through the gates and straight away got asked if we wanted to take part in a on-field game, so in between the third and fourth (or fourth and fifth) innings we went down to the batting cages, got dressed up like giant buns and raced another team to create a burger out of ourselves. It was fun!