Confusing Normality

I have not written for a while as it is so easy to slip into things, you start to forget what things used to be like. Sometimes, when you come across something that makes you stop and think, you have difficulty deciding whether it is different here or back there. In my case it is even more difficult as I often compare things here to Australia and/or England. Needless to say, I get very confused.

Money however is something that I still have to be so very careful with. I still have to check the denomination of the bills and the coins! People who have traveled abroad will recall when paying for something you tend to offer a hand of coins to the person and say can you take the right ones which they do carefully whilst loudly explaining what each coin is. I still find myself doing that sometimes I must admit.
One thing I doubt I will ever get used to is bikers not wearing crash helmets. For every biker I see wearing a helmet, I see 5 or 6 without.

Mind you, they have very special bandannas here. They obviously use some very special kind of fabric with all the properties of a crash helmet because lots of bikers use them….. I even saw a father and daughter on a bike recently. She (aged about 10) had a helmet on, he, did not, it was strapped to the back of the bike. Go figure.

Whilst on safety on the roads. In Aussie it is illegal not to wear seat belts, front or back. Here, you do not have to wear a belt in the back. Personally, I will not drive unless the person in the back has a belt on, because in the event of a crash they become a ballistic missile aimed straight at your head. I have had to explain that to people and insist (politely of course) that they put on their belt. Guess having to wear a belt impinges upon a persons civil liberties, yeah right.
I am also still struggling with the date. I have written day month year for so long I don’t want to think about it. Here of course they write month day year. Can’t get that at all.

The other thing I am having difficulty with is weight & measures. I was brought up on pounds and ounces, with a person’s weight in stones and pounds. When I started teaching in the mid seventies we converted to kilograms and grams and I have gotten used to that. Here a person’s weight is in pounds. Mind you, I have come to realize that I weighed just under 12 stones (when I was 18), in Aussie I was 75 kilos and here I am 163 pounds. Given that 12 stones = 168 pounds, I weigh slightly less now than I did all those years ago. In fact I have actually lost a little weight since moving from Aus (75 kilos is approximately 165 1/2 pounds). Having said that, I am very careful on what I eat and check my weight every day as I have come to realize that a very common body shape here is a pear on legs. I noticed the prevalence of this in Aussie but here…..

Height has always been a problem. I think in feet and inches which is strange, as I think distance in meters and kilometers. The trouble is, here they talk about height in inches so I end up trying to convert. Mind you I have gone from trying to convert metric into feet and inches to converting inches into feet and inches. I guess some things are harder to change.

Similarly with distance, I think in kilometers and meters. Here of course it is miles and feet (forget yards). Consequently I smirk when I see signs on the road indicating a junction is 1500 feet away.

The other thing I struggle with is temperature. I converted from Fahrenheit to Celsius when I was very young. The UK uses Celsius as does Aussie. Here it is in Fahrenheit and I have real problems in trying to work it out. It just does not come naturally to me.

My daughter has also found another strange thing. She is currently at college studying to be a nurse. On that note, nurses here have a far higher standing than in either Aussie or the UK. They also seem to be trained to a higher level and have much more responsibility. Anyway, she has found that other students have a real difficulty in converting decimals to fractions and the other way round. Two fifths is 0.4 right, or five tenths is 0.5 (i.e. a half). That is the sort of thing that should come naturally. It does to my daughter and I having been taught such things from an early age. Not here it seems. Her fellow students go through all sorts of convolutions to perform the conversions. They have to be able to do this as medication can be either imperial or metric and it is the nurses who deal with the dosage.

The other thing she found strange was the perception of how people think about and use metric. She was in a lecture where the metric system was being explained. The lecturer happily announced that people commonly use Decimeters as one Decimeter was ten meters. She happily announced that she had lived in a decimal; system all her life and had never heard of that term and no it is not used. The lecturer was amazed as it seems he had been giving the same lecture for years and no one had ever pointed that out. Mind you, her probably never had a student who grew up in decimal countries before. She corrected him on several other strange terms such as Deca and Heca, pointing out they are not commonly used.

I will endeavour to keep this going as I find more strange little anomalies. The sort of thing that is not earth shattering but tends to screw with the mind