I didn’t think the return ticket I bought was all that expensive, just short of £400 ($500?) I flew from Manchester to O’Hare, caught a connection to Gerald Ford International and later returned to O’Hare on the same ticket and then home after 3 weeks.
Pretty cheap I reckon.
I just checked some flight details and all it will cost you to fly from London or Manchester to New York is £201.
Hardly gonna break the bank is it?
Depends on how much money you make. $500 is quite a bit, by my poor student standards.
On Alabama: I’ve lived here my entire life but I’m actually Finnish. I’ve never seen anyone have a mint julep and the only grits I’ve had were in the school cafeteria (yuck). Of course, I live in the suburbs, so it’s pretty much like suburbs everywhere else - the only difference is an occasional rebel flag shirt and a slightly higher incidence of southern accents.
My next-door neighbor is from Tanzania. He once told me that when he first came to America he made every effort to avoid all contact with women for fear of being sued for sexual harassment.
He was also relieved to find out illegal narcotics aren’t really available on every single street corner.
He said he attributes a lot of misconceptions to watching airings of The Jerry Springer Show back in his home country.
I think there’s at least a grain of truth to the Americans-not-having-passports stereotype. Canadians and Australians seem to travel overseas quite a bit more than we do, despite being from countries that are just as large and isolated as the US, and with weaker currencies than the US dollar to boot.
Glad to see that I’ve got a few bleedin’ foreign types backing me up on the beer thing; I have to admit that when I spent a few months in the UK a couple of years ago, I kept craving a good American-style IPA. (Not that British beer isn’t wonderful; it’s just different.)
[hijack]
Azure Eternity:
I think they are way way out of style, and aren’t likely to come back.
I think most folks think in some vague unformed way that they know what a mint julep is, even though they’ve never had one, and picture it as a light frothy fancy mixed drink of the sort you’d get in Houlahan’s or Friday’s, like a Margarita or a Daiquiri or Long Island Iced Tea or Piña Colada or something – just so happens that they’ve never gone for that particular one.
Now, any bartender is welcome to correct me on this, but based on research I did in preparation for a party that was going to coincide with the Kentucky Derby, I believe a mint julep is (was) to bourbon what a dry martini is to gin – in other words, damn nearly straight spirits. You smash a few mint leaves on the outside of a frosted glass, toss a spoonful of sugar in the bottom, and then fill the sucker up with bourbon. That’s basically it. Maybe a splash of grenadine or equiv. at the most, but only in the sense that martinis have vermouth in them. In other words, somewhere between virtually none and none at all is fine.
Most serious bourbon drinkers prefer to sip it straight up out of a shot glass without sugar in it (that would definitely include me), and most people who like to drink sweet frothy mixed drinks with cute straws and parasols and whatnot aren’t generally drawn to 80+ proof dark strong-tasting distilled spirits unless they are significantly diluted and reflavored a lot more than a couple squished mint leaves and a bit of sugar are going to accomplish.
Of course the Manhattan, a drink of similar base and strength, is still around, so you never know.
Which would be great, if I lived in New York. Since I live about 12 hours drive from New York City, that cheap rate doesn’t do me a whole lot of good.
As others have said, I think Europeans don’t realize that most Americans only get two weeks of vacation a year, if they’re lucky. For many people most of one week is eaten up by visits with family over Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, leaving me about one week of free travel time. I’d love to travel abroad more, but time is a real issue.
Another illustration of size:
Dallas to Los Angeles, flying like a bat, barely stopping at all: 20 hours.
What exactly is meant by “no pedestrian facilities”? Nearly everyone I know in the US is fully equipped with two feet.
Well, many suburbs don’t have sidewalks, for example.
But many do.
The problem, when there is one, with going places in the suburbs is that homes are placed at a distance from the stores and services. When I was not employed outside the home, I used to routinely walk or ride my bicycle within the neighborhood, but it was out of the question to do so to get to the grocery store or the library, especially with 2 small children. Well, I could have walked or ridden the 3 - 5 miles on heavily-traveled main roads, but it didn’t seem like the most practical use of my time and energy.
some southern us residents seem to think that in minnesota (one of those “M” states) you have to be careful of polar bears wandering aimlessly into your back yard. others tend to think we all live in claim shantys like laura ingalls, with no indoor plumbing. while it is true there are natives around they don’t generally dress like the guys in f-troop unless they are having some special gathering.
bill bryson has a lot to answer for? oh no, i just started reading notes from a small island!!!
i meant to add, people here don’t walk as much, but mostly because it is harder to do so. my job is 20 miles away so my husband and i have to have 2 cars, there isn’t much public transport here. the grocery isn’t all that far, but there are no sidewalks and it is nearly impossible to cross the streets without a crosswalk. i think some of it is how the cities are laid out.
But…hang on a minute, I thought all Americans were rich who thought nothing of lighting their cigars with a $10 bill 
The quote I gave was just an example of how cheap it is to fly from the UK to the US. As you live in NC (Nth Carolina?) I can’t see the price being that much more.
I find it amazing that you only get 2 weeks vacation each year. I’m a mailman and I get 4 weeks plus about 8 other days, bank hols, Queens Birthday, Xmas and Boxing day etc and I also have the option of purchasing extra weeks any year by just taking a small, and I mean small, cut in my salary each week.
Not In Anger:
No all our cities don’t look the same! If you ever have an opportunity to travel the vast distances between U.S. cities, check out Las Vegas, San Francisco, or Seattle. I think you’ll find that there’s plenty of variety.
To all the non-Americans on this list, it really is a big country and as a result there is a lot of unique subsets of our culture. I’ve lived in the northeast, the southwest, and up and down the west coast, and I’ve seen many kinds of landforms and climates. We even have regional accents. So while it might make sense to think of the states as analogous to European countries, we all use the same currency and the state borders are unrestricted.
The size thing is not limited to foreigners. I’m from California, I live in Illinois. When it comes up, I always specify that I’m from Northern California, and still my Chicagoan friends say, “Oh! I was in San Diego last year visiting a friend, have you spent a lot of time there?”
Um. That’s about 600 miles from where I grew up. I’ve been to San Diego two or three times in my life. I’ve been to LA about twenty-five times, but that’s because I have family there, not because (as a Mexican cousin once assumed) it’s a 45 minute drive from the Bay Area. (And although we call the Bay Area Northern California, it’s still several hundred miles to the Oregon border.)
Illinois is a fairly good-sized hunk of land, but it doesn’t compare with the huge western states and
Argh. Take out the last word and replace it with a period.
Given that the US is one hell of a size how did the old cowboys get from one place to another without ending up in Dodge City instead of Tombstone.
I mean it’s not as if there were highways with markers on them is it?