New experiences

Every day I'm doing or eating something for the very first time. Yesterday I had my first peanut butter jelly sandwhich (good stuff!) and my first marshmallow. Today I ate sweet potatoe fries for the very first time.

Yesterday morning I attended my first little league teeball game (which is like baseball only instead of throwing the ball to the dude with the bat the kids hit the ball off a post). I went to see how Shannon's (Sarah's sister) son Alex is playing. It was interesting - although the game seemed to matter much more to the parents and coaches than the 5-year old players. Some of them didn't seem to understand what they're doing. A lot of it is about wearing the baseball outfits, eating the special powerbar, everybody getting together.

This morning we were helping Ross (Sarah's brother-in-law) at a 5 km race. He is a chiropractic was one of the sponsors at the event. He was giving free pre- and post-race massage and assessment, we were getting people into his stand. It was fun and a good insight what this kind of events look like here. The number of runners was over 3000. What I think might be characteristic to the US culture is the mascots - haven't seen people in the mascot outfits walking around in other countries. I wonder how the culture developed in that way and why some people thought it might be a good idea to dress up as a giant hamburger. Kids like it, I was told.

One of the things I find annoying is that in restaurants and shops you really don't know how much something costs - because they always display the price pre tax! How irritating is this! You have to add sales tax (same as VAT) to everything yourself. The sales tax is flat for all the products, only some things are tax free - like unprocessed food. The logic behind it is that so poor people will prefer healthier products instead of processed food (which makes them fat and is often not good for them). As I was told it doesn't help much as processed food is still cheaper even with tax.

Another thing I find peculiar is the level of water in the toilet (the pot). The water level is really high, like 1/4 is filled - how weird! At first I thought it was only in a few first places we visited, but it seems to be almost everywhere. I haven't figured out why this is useful.

One more thing I haven't seen in other countries is the number of signs on high pole posts. I mean here advertising signs like McDonalds and so on - almost every restaurant, shop, carwash, gas station and what not has its sign really high up. Sometimes when driving the number of signs you see is overwhelming, it's like a parade or something.

So far all is good, having a lot of fun!