It's the weirdest feeling being here in the states, to be honest. It's somehow familiar because it's so much like on all the movies and on the TV; the people talk and act the same... and the stereotypes seem to all be true. Big cars, big meals, lots of black people, industrial size packs of food/toilet paper, flags outside houses, the lists go on and on.

Just looking around my parents' place makes me laugh because of all the products I find which look so stereotypically American. From the super-huge packs of cereal (5lb/2.2kg! We have 3 of them.). To the massive rolls of paper towel. They're standard sizing here in the States, but in Australia they're the super-size variety. When my mum came home last week she bought us some huge paper towels because that's the size she was used to in the states, but they looked huge to us.

The thing that really makes me crack up, though, is looking at the paper towel that we have in the cupboard. It looks EXACTLY like the guy on the Burly paper towels in that episode of the Simpsons where Marge gets a crush on the guy in the picture. Big bulging manly muscles, manly-looking flannel shirt, reasonably hunky-looking guy on a background of tall trees, suggesting he's a woodcutter of some sort. Everything suggests testosterone and virility. :) The paper towels even sound manly. They're called Brawny paper towels. I'm not making this stuff up.

And guess what, toilet paper doesn't come in just standard sized sheets. Why have just one size when you can have four? Regular, Big, Giant and Mega. Our thirty pack of Giant toilet paper is apparently equivalent to seventy-five regular rolls.

As you can tell I've spent a bit of time around the apartment for the last day or so. I was still pretty whacked yesterday after the flights on Tuesday so I spent most of the day sleeping, exploring the 65 channels of TV and I went out walking around the university campus that we live on.

It's the start of summer here and everything is just so very very green. The grass is green, the trees are lush and green, especially after the colourful non-green leaves of autumn that we have around the house back at home in Sydney that I'm used to. When I was out walking yesterday afternoon I was almost blinded by the brightness of some purple flowers in the sun. It was incredible. All that sun and vibrant colours were actually exhausting to a poor little jet-lagged vegetable like myself yesterday so I wasn't out for too long.

Look at the green and brightness:


It's pretty interesting, though. Being in a slightly cooler region of the world than Sydney means we can find all sorts of berries and animals in the local forests. My dad brought home some wild strawberries yesterday and said he saw a deer. And today we drove past a flock of wild geese which had at least a dozen fluffy down-covered goslings within it. They're so cute. :) Shy, too, but I'll take photos next time from a distance.