Units

Next week we expect once more temperatures in the upper 60s and lower 70s in Newport Beach. That’s quite nice for us and quite annoying for most Europeans; not because at least in Switzerland it’s much colder, but because they don’t even know how warm this is.

Let me quickly explain what I meant by my introducing sentence: since here in the U.S. temperatures are measured in degree Fahrenheit, the temperature ranges are often referred to by lower/mid/upper “ies” (40s, 50s, 60s and so on). This is a good way to tell approximate temperatures, if you know what those temperatures mean. Well, the conversion from degree Fahrenheit into Celsius is definitively complicated:

Deduct 32, then multiply by 5, then divide by 9

When I lived in South Africa, I already learned one of the “units”: the time. Of course one hour is still one hour, but if you have to write the time, it’s not 19:30 but 7:30 PM. Since in spoken German, we anyways use the short form, it’s not that difficult, except for the - not really logical - 12 PM, which is 12:00 (and 12 AM is 24:00 or 0:00). But at the latest when you go to a restaurant for lunch and they welcome you with “Good afternoon,” you know it’s PM (lat. post meridiem).

But compared to South Africa, the U.S. are a conversion hell for us Europeans. For example in the kitchen (ok, I’m not very often there you measure in quarts, cups, fluid ounces, table spoons, ounces, pounds, Fahrenheit and minutes - oh thanks! Even just for fluids we have fluid ounces, cups and quarts in the kitchen, at the gas station gallons and the water bill is in HCF (hundred cubic feet).

I’m really sorry for all those American school kids who have to learn all of this: 32 fl. oz = 1 cup, 4 cups = 1 quart, 4 quarts = 1 gallon, 748 gallons ~= 1 HCF

Don’t forget distances: there are inches, feet, yards and miles. But it gets worse when you need measures which are smaller than 1 inch: then you use binary fractions (1/16, 1/8, 3/16, 1/4, …). And if this wasn’t enough numbers yet: 12 inches = 1 foot, 3 foot = 1 yard, 1760 yards = 1 mile.

You are wondering why I haven’t even gotten to the conversion to metric units? Well it’s simply because I gave up - it’s even more complicated than converting one imperial unit into another.

Special Guest

The other day, when I was in the plane from Orange County to Fort Lauderdale, I was reading a magazine when the flight attendant made an announcement. Normally I just ignore them, but since my encounter with the special announcements at Kulula, I thought: perhaps it’s worth listening to it. And it was! Not that it was specially funny, but rather bizarre - at least for a not-so-patriotic Swiss:

Dear passengers we would like to welcome aboard this plane a special guest.

After this sentence, I thought: well, normally you don’t announce celebrities and other “special” passengers like that; but before I could continue thinking about it, the flight attendant continued:

[He] just said good bye to his family in Orange County and is now on his way to serve his country in Iraq. Please make this long flight for him as comfortable as possible.

What followed was a big applause - thankfully we were in a plane, otherwise it might have ended up in a standing ovation.

Change

Barak Obama has put the beginning of his legislation under this motto. In fact many things have changed since then - and there are already big arguments about whether this change is good or bad. Don’t worry, I won’t do any political analysis here, but I realized this is a good title to put on top of this blog post.

After the 18 mostly interesting blog posts about South Africa in the past year, I thought this is the way to write blogs. But this format only worked well for a fairly unknown country, and it doesn’t work for the United States. You can see how life here is in general in most Hollywood films and I think there is almost no international television news program that won’t tell you the latest (more or less important) news from the U.S.

Therefore I decided to change how I write posts for this blog. Instead of writing long texts I’ll try to tell rather short stories about life here. Things that are perhaps not so obvious to the outside spectator, but that make life here different and thus also interesting.

To finish the diary part of this blog, just a few words about the past three and a half months since my last post: after having found the apartment, I had to get a car. My dream was a Toyota Prius and I got a Prius - but a used one with 80,000 miles. The reason why I couldn’t get a new one, was my credit score, but more about that in a future post. Since then it was rather calm in my private life, but because things were quite busy and exciting at the office, I didn’t mind having some time to relax in the evening when I came home. Now I not only had about ten to eleven months of summer (which is still less than 500 days ;-), but also only two weeks of Christmas vacation and since then not a single day off - if you don’t count the very few public holidays and the two days I spent flying from Johannesburg to Los Angeles. But I won’t complain: I have a job and I’m happy with it - and I can live and work in beautiful Southern California!

Setup complete

Incredible, how fast time flies by; tomorrow it is already one month that I’m here in California.

The journey from Johannesburg to Los Angeles was long. It took me over 28 hours flying via Dakar and Atlanta, but I knew, this would be a once-in-a-lifetime travel. I had all my belongings from South Africa packed into two suitcases plus some hand luggage - a total of about 65 kg or 143 lb.

The first two weeks I spent in an Extended Stay America hotel in Lake Forest, about 5 minutes from work. I knew that I had to search an apartment as soon as possible, so I could start to settle down - something I unfortunately never did in South Africa.

Before that, I needed to get two more important things: an US mobile phone number (SIM card) and a bank account. The SIM card was easy to get, I just showed my passport at a local AT&T store and I got a prepaid SIM. Next step was the bank account, which I got at Bank of America (after a recommendation from a friend also living in California). Even thought one can’t get a credit card without at least a Social Security Number, I could easily open an account combination and start banking the American way (more about that perhaps in another post).

The search for an apartment was quicker than I thought. I had a look at several rental websites and rather quickly fell in love with an apartment at a Rental Living community in Newport Beach. I had set myself a limit of 1,600 $ rent, but I wanted an additional room as “workspace”, so my computer wouldn’t have to stay in my living or even bedroom. I found this in the Arrezo, which has a big living and dining room plus an upstairs loft, which would become my computer room. Since I would get a big discount on my first rent, I decided on the very first visit to move in and signed the contract on the next day. Since then I spent days and days in IKEA to find and buy the furniture I would need. You might ask: “why IKEA?” The reason for this is rather simple: I have my problems with the American furniture style; everything has to look old and big. The choice was supported by the fact that the next IKEA store is only a few exits away from my place.

Now I have the most important furniture: a working desk in the loft and a couch in the living room. I quickly adapted the American “everything a little bigger” by buying a nice 52″ LCD TV. There is already a large number of HDTV channels available, so the TV experience is really great!

OK, this is it for my first post on this new blog. Come back soon to see hopefully new articles about my life here in Southern California.