On Americanquirks Part 1

It's about 6 days before I leave Charlottesville and true to form, I'm not studying but instead, wasting my time before blogging. It's true, finals bring out the worst procrastinator in all of us (particularly us exchange students) and if I wasn't goofing off here, I'll be playing computer games or something. Hardly much better, really.

So it's currently -2 degrees Celsius outside, with "frozen rain" pouring upon us all (according to my Firefox weather add-in). Hmmm. Having not done spectacularly for the previous final today (the one time the instructor actually tested from the textbooks which he had not been referring to all day every day), I shall attempt to finish this entry relatively quickly in an attempt to be relatively productive.

Here's what I'm gonna miss (or not) about America and Charlottesville.

1. Everyone wearing Northface jackets.

2. How everybody uses 'sketchy' to define something that Brits would call 'dodgy' or us Singaporeans call 'farnee'.

3. The way everybody here pronounces "route" as ROO-OUT. It's a homonym for "root", dammit!

4. Liquid paper being known as "WiteOut".

5. Chinese food that comes with fortune cookies which attempt to teach Mandarin by using a different set of Hanyu Pinyin from the written Chinese.

6. Our version of 'torchlight' being known as a 'flashlight' in this country.

7. 'Tailgating' being a term for a party as opposed to a traffic offence.

8. Popped collars and anti-popped collars.

9. Aggressive anti-abortion, anti-Cheney, anti-non-radical-Christianity, anti-genocide-in-Sudan, anti-Kaine/anti-Kilgore (folks from Virginia would understand) groups campaigning on 'grounds' (read: campus - that should be a point in itself).

10. Chalk scribblings and drawings all over the university, to the point of random poetry written on boards.

Anybody else got interesting stuff to add?