Coming to America

Firstly, there's the language barrier. We all know Americans don't speak The Queen's English. They spell words in strange and wonderful ways, such as “color”, “aluminum”, and “learned”. To cope with a visit to the South I've been instructed on a few choice words, euphemisms, and aphorisms by my Southern colleagues.

For example:

• Fixin' (often a'fixin')
  Going to, about to (do something)
• Sam Hill
  Hell/heck, damn
• (He's/She's) Doin' like you
  Behaving well
• Y'all
  You all (people/group), everyone
• If'n
  If/and
• It's raining like a cow pee'n on a flat rock
  Torrential rain

As for currency, after living with Australia's colourful polypropylene polymer notes, or even the equally easy to recognise Euro notes, I find it difficult to use US currency because all of the notes look the same to me. It takes me an embarrassingly long time to dig up the right amount of money from my wallet, so often give in and end up getting a huge amount of coins in return.

The problem with the coins is two-fold. Firstly, they include, in order of size, a “dime” (10-cents), “nickel” (5-cents) and “quarter” (25-cents). Why the 5-cent coin is bigger than the 10-cent coin, I don't think I'll ever know.

Equally problematic is most decimalised currencies divide their equivalent of the dollar into 0.50, 0.20, 0.10, 0.05, and sometimes also 0.02 and 0.01 coins, so getting used to a 0.25 division instead of 0.50 and 0.20 divisions hurts my humble brain. I believe this comes down to culture.

In Europe, and certainly within the Commonwealth, decimal notation or percentages are normally used in preference to vulgar fractions for representing real numbers. This is probably because it's easier to calculate figures within the same base, making that whole mess with denominators redundant. For example, it's much easier to compare 0.6 to 0.625, rather than ⅗ to ⅝; likewise 2375 ÷ 2.375 is easier than 2375 ÷ 2-⅜.

In the USA fractions seem to thrive, particularly with measurements, possibly because the USA is one of the few countries still clinging to imperial measurements rather than converting to the metric system. Splitting inches into fractions makes more sense, since not many people know about mils (0.001 inches). Even the stock market uses fractions rather than decimal notation, breaking stock into sixteenths (historically eighths, because of the Spanish real).

Anyway, once I reach Atlanta, I'll find out if it was worth the effort to use the US-VISIT exit machines. I was told that without following through the exit procedure, my re-entry into the USA would be delayed by a few hours; however I didn't see anyone else using these self-service machines at the time. This may help explain why they've since cancelled the procedure.

The two Aztecs on the receipt are huge (storing about 3.7KiB of data, depending on error-correction levels), leaving me with an awkward feeling after the experience (and I'm not the only one). The whole US-VISIT procedure is so convoluted that the USA can feel pretty unwelcoming — First and last impressions linger the longest. Welcome, but we don't like you.

Airport security irritates me everywhere though, because I feel it's so artificial. For example, if I can't take a 30cℓ bottle of water (bought in the airport) on a flight to Paris because of security, but I could take whatever sized drink I wanted on a train to Paris, then it must be artificial. Trains are targets for terrorists too, but I suppose rail networks don't get pressure from international organisations like the ICAO.

I suppose I should get moving…