{"id":57,"date":"2007-03-19T19:45:41","date_gmt":"2007-03-19T17:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gijsk.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/first-time-in-the-us\/"},"modified":"2007-03-19T19:45:41","modified_gmt":"2007-03-19T17:45:41","slug":"first-time-in-the-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gijsk.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/first-time-in-the-us\/","title":{"rendered":"First time in the US"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Because bulleted lists rock:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The Hilton is not for me. I&#8217;m struggling with the luxury nature of most things. For instance, this morning I wanted to have breakfast. Which of the four eating places inside the hotel should I use? Breakfast is not included in the night&#8217;s stay, so how does paying for that work? Is it a buffet or do I just get stuff from the waiters? It&#8217;s all solvable, and fortunately everyone there is paid to help even though I&#8217;m ignorant, but it&#8217;s annoying at times.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Public transport&#8221; is not part of the standard Southern California vocabulary. Getting around without a car and without spending a ridiculous amount of money on cabs is hard.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;How are you, sir?&#8221; is the standard substitute for &#8220;How may I help you?&#8221;. This is confusing.<\/li>\n<li>Obesity is a real problem. After having breakfast, the &#8216;why&#8217; for that is readily apparent as the continental breakfast I took was considered &#8220;a base&#8221; by the waiter, who told me at least 2 or 3 times I could get more stuff if I wanted to. I did not finish this &#8220;base&#8221; alone, though that admittedly might have something to do with my jet-lagginess and generally confused stomach.<\/li>\n<li>Chinese restaurants in the Netherlands should start being real Chinese restaurants, instead of serving all this stuff we call &#8220;Chinese&#8221; which is actually Indonesian\/Malay (Babi Pangang, Nasi Goreng, Bami, etc.)<\/li>\n<li> Some stereotypes are not stereotypes, they&#8217;re simply true.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That will do for now. I&#8217;m off to see the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.queenmary.com\" title=\"Queen Mary Website\">Queen Mary<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>One more thing &#8211; it amazes me, as it has for some time now, that as one travels to different places across the globe, every place has its own &#8220;colour scheme&#8221;. The easiest examples close to my home are the fact that brick houses make up most of the (nothern\/middle) Netherlands, and once you cross the border to Belgium and France, the omnipresent red brickwork is replaced with grey\/white plasterwork, the colours and fonts used on roadsigns change, the wildlife\/trees are different&#8230; For some reason this and the different plants\/nature\/cars around mean the atmosphere changes. Perhaps this is what other people think &#8220;feeling on holiday&#8221; is all about, I&#8217;m not sure. I just find myself thinking, at times &#8220;gosh, this place is ugly&#8221; and then remembering I should really be thinking &#8220;gosh, this place is <em>different<\/em>&#8220;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Because bulleted lists rock: The Hilton is not for me. I&#8217;m struggling with the luxury nature of most things. For instance, this morning I wanted to have breakfast. Which of the four eating places inside the hotel should I use? &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gijsk.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/first-time-in-the-us\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fluff","category-personal","category-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gijsk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gijsk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gijsk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gijsk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gijsk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gijsk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gijsk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gijsk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gijsk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}