![\"\"](\"http:\/\/trickartt.com\/notes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/nurong-570x290.jpg\" "\\"nurong\\"")
<\/p>\nLilly 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:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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-<\/p>\n
Petrol is CHEAPER thank milk here!<\/p>\n
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! <\/p>\n
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 \u00a31.15 a litre, so that’s about a third of what we pay in the UK.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
America makes me hate cars, it really does.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[49,47,50,45,46,48],"class_list":["post-621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rubbish","tag-america","tag-austin","tag-gas","tag-milk","tag-petrol","tag-texas"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pC5Eo-a1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trickartt.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trickartt.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trickartt.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trickartt.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trickartt.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.trickartt.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":651,"href":"https:\/\/www.trickartt.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621\/revisions\/651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trickartt.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trickartt.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trickartt.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}