The Little Yellow Journal of Another Trip To America

Another winter has been spent being bewildered in the States! This year I encountered (beside all the usual bigotry, gun worship and emotionally manipulative advertising) the fattest chihuahua I had ever seen, mailboxes that looked like they were alive, and a different take on the self-service vending machine. I ate an obscene amount of tacos too, for all meals of the day. You can’t do that in Britain!

And then I flew home, and wondered what just happened. Here’s how it looked through my eyes:

After the fold are all the old direct links, for posterity’s sake. Continue reading “The Little Yellow Journal of Another Trip To America”

FOOD; cooking and eating in and out of Austin

When one goes on holiday, they are prone to being asked what they got up to when they get back. It’s a fair enough question, but I like to go on holiday to relax, so doing nothing doesn’t make for interesting conversation. I realised, though, what we did do while away was a fair amount of cooking and eating- both in and out of home, and even in and out of Austin, and with that came some interesting visual stuff out of me.

Continue reading “FOOD; cooking and eating in and out of Austin”

Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong

Lilly and I have made it back to Austin TX, to visit her folks for a Holiday holiday, and enjoying the easy life right now! America is a special place. This isn’t my first visit, so despite only being here a couple of days, I am beginning to spot some of the terrifying things about the States that only an outsider would notice. I was pretty unimpressed to see pharmacies sell cigarettes here (sure they sell a load of other tat too, but selling cigarettes just seems counterproductive), but I also discovered something worse when out for a little walk to the nearby grocery store:

These two signs are either side of an intersection, which is what made me notice the issue at hand- as much as I tried to get them into the same shot, it didn’t work as there was a big old tree between them, but hopefully it conveys the desired point-

Petrol is CHEAPER thank milk here!

I like to think I’m not some green hippy eco-warrior, but I do consider myself reasonably environmentally aware, so this just seems really really wrong. I don’t get how a substance produced from finite resources, and which causes pollution and war, can be cheaper than a liquid produced from cows. And there are a lot of cows in Texas too!

To think Americans complain about the price of petrol too- for any readers out there who aren’t so good at maths, at current exchange rates, that works out to about 39 pence a litre. The last time I filled the vespa up it was about £1.15 a litre, so that’s about a third of what we pay in the UK.

Maybe Berocca Obama should do some european-style taxation on petrol- he could use the income to bail Arnie and the rest of the country out, and it might make the environment a bit happier too.

America makes me hate cars, it really does.

 
You are currently reading
Page 1