Post: Greetings from the States
As many of you know, as some of you don’t know but I really should have told, and as some of you would never have had any reason to know because you’re here as a result of searching Google for common terms such as “jesus”, “muppet animal” and “demon baby” (don’t ask me, I just work here) I’ve been in the United States for nearly a month.
I’m currently coming to the last few days of my little sojourn up and down the East coast of America and will have a fuller report once I get back home and have access to my lovely shiny iMac G5 (oh, how I miss you). I will also have what is known in the photography business as (and I quote from a professional photographer) “a shitfuckcrapload” of photos. For now, however, I shall just note some salient points:
- American food is, by and large, very tasty and very cheap. This is a very good thing.
- Security is often mind-numbingly excessive: I have instinctively begun to wince every time someone begins a sentence with “Well, ever since 9/11…”. The fact that I appear to have been singled out for a full search whenever I check into an airport (the kind that involves emptying your bags and patting you down, not the kind which involves rubber gloves and the removal of one’s trousers) has done nothing to soften my attitude towards said security.
- When one of your hosts has a PowerBook and a PowerMac G5 and says “Please treat this apartment like it was your own” it is very rewarding to do so. Especially when you’ve been suffering Mac-withdrawal symptoms from the past two weeks.
- When you go on the Freedom Trail in Boston, it probably is not wise to go up to someone in 18th-century garb and ask “Before the Iraq war, was this called the French trail?”. This is, thankfully, an insight I had before I went ahead and did this.
- While Budweiser, Miller Lite and all the other cheap American lagers are as bad as you might expect, the local beers (Sam Adams in Boston, Goose Island in Chicago, Yuengling in Philadelphia, Brooklyn Lager in New York and the wonderfully named Foggy Bottom in Washington) are generally rather wonderful.
That is all for the moment: expect some more writings from me as of Wednesday. I expect most of them will be at very strange times of day while I get over any jet lag I may or may not receive.
One final thought: I will have just slightly in excess of two weeks to get my design finished in time for the CSS Reboot. That’ll be exciting…
Glad you’re having fun! Seems like everyone’s on the up at the mo, wayhay!
“Everyone”? Whom else is life treating particularly well? As might be expected, I’ve been pretty much incommunicado for the last month.
Perhaps more one for the ol’ Gmail but I’m happier now than I’ve been in a long time, and it seems everyone else, if not especially happy, is at least no worse off than they have been
Life’s Good™