America, f*ck yeah

Hi, it's me from yesterday, because we're leaving for Canada in the evening and I have to write this beforehand. But anyway.

It's 4th of July, hooray. And today I'm gonna talk about the differences in Finnish and American things.

The biggest thing that surprised me was how much there is communication. I mean like, once I needed to buy yeast, but I couldn't find it in our shop so Maria called another shop to ask if they had. Like, she called a shop. What. I've also noticed that there is a lot more self service things here. Like there are several self checkouts at stores, you can loan library books by yourself (although I think you can do that in Finland too?) and you can just do basically anything by yourself if you want to. It's kinda weird, there is a lot more service and self service simultaneously and that seems like a really weird idea.

Another difference is the traffic. I think I've talked about it before, but I don't like traffic here. There's at leas two lanes on basically every road, so many cars, and no one uses signals. You can make a right turn even if the light is red, and when you turn you go to whatever lane you want to (assuming you go from one lane to several). It's just really crazy. I don't drive that much, and I only drive the same routes, so I'm ok but man, if I had to drive somewhere I've never driven before...

It is hot as balls here. Seriously, all the flipping time. Now I'm glad that the basement is cool. Just the other day, it wasn't even sunny and it was +30°. I've been eating a lot of ice cream. I actually have some Ben&Jerry's in the freezer right now and I'm gonna go get it once I'm done with this.

What else, uhh. There is a surprisingly small amount of difference in my daily life compared to that in Finland, except I don't go to school, I take care of kids, but still. And I don't really leave the house anyway, so I don't really know what's going on out there, haha.....

I could get serious for a moment and talk about important things, like the school system or the health care system or the fucked up gun policies or maybe same sex marriage (which if I have understood correctly is actually making progress so that's good), but I don't really have time or energy to do that right now. Point is, some things may be kinda better here, but fuck all if I'm not glad to be coming home in two months. That's all I guess. Bye.

Pie out.

P.S. Next week's post will be brought to you from an airport, holy shit.