Everything is bigger

So, by now a few weeks have past and while here and there some routine is starting to develop itself – hating your alarm in the morning, dragging yourself out of bed and be a productive member of society for the next 9 or so hours – the feeling of ‘new’ has definitely not faded yet and subtle or not so subtle differences and observations are definitely a form of entertainment.

One not so subtle difference that everyone knows about but still amazes you when you first expericience it, is that everything in the US is bigger. EVERYTHING. Both people and stuff. While the number of ‘Blob-like’ people really isn’t that enormous as some people would think (you do see some rolling around the streets every now and then though), they do seem to happily come out to drive around Walmart in these trollys while shopping. I know I shouldn’t laugh about this but… still weird… You would think the little amount of exercise they could get from walking around in a store would be good for them.

When looking for something to wear on the upcoming St Patricks day (Jaana’s favourite holiday – such a girl), we discovered that Walmart has awesome funny t shirts. It quickly became apparent that we should not adhere to our normal sizes. So I guess I’m now a ‘small’ (which was nowhere to be found) while Jaana… well Jaana had to shop in the kids section. But she clearly didn’t mind and got some very funny stuff from the boys section after a short burst of outrage since the boys section was filled with funny/geeky/comic-y stuff while the girls section only offered pink and glitter. Stereotypes are definitely very much alive here.

But it doesn’t stop at people and clothes. Food itself is often one or two sizes larger here. An American steak is easily twice the size of the ones at home (I still don’t understand how we each managed to finish one).

Same for chicken, which by the way you can buy in packs of 10 kg. Because off course you can… Eggplants are humongous and I think onions are almost large enough to use as a football. Also, you haven’t seen a bucket of ice cream until you’ve seen an Américan bucket of ice cream. Sheds a new light on heartbroken women in movies and sitcoms: maybe if they’d eat less ice cream, they wouldn’t be dumped? Zucchini’s are a weird exception however: they’re tiny. The prices of fresh vegetables however are not. Clearly, trying to eat healthy is a costly choice here.

However, we took all of this as a warning.

All of this combined with, like jaana said before, the overwhelming amount of choice we get in the MUSC cafeteria (everything is there -nacho’s, burgers, sushi, pizza, subway- and even healthy options) made us try to adopt the habit of working out a bit more than before to counter the not so healthy food. The gym at home really helps.