An Englishman in New York

Okay, so I'm an Englishwoman, not man and I'm not actually in New York, it's about a 4 hour drive away, but an Englishwoman in Hanover just didn't have the same ring to it.

I wasn't going to tell people I was away on here until after I came back, in case any weird people know where I live, but decided that since I've got someone house sitting it really doesn't matter if everyone knows where I am.

I have been to the States before, but I was a lot younger, this feels like a new experience. My first impressions are that everything is so big. Milk and juice come in giant containers so I understand now why Americans have to have those massive fridges. They have massive houses too, even the small houses have huge plots of land because there's so much space. The cars are so big that in the UK we'd have major parking troubles, but here it's okay because the car parks are huge. The shops are odd too, there are loads of them, and they're very big, but so empty. Saturday morning shopping and you can just walk leisurely through a shop and buy something without queuing. It's not a phenomenon of Hanover either, we were watching the news and they were talking about a factory outlet or something in a nearby town and how busy it was and there were about 4 people in the shop, it looked dead. I'm not really sure how they support themselves if there's that few people shopping in them. So there's just a lot of space, and big things. When you eat out the portions are big and you get a lot more choice, I'm not sure this is a good thing for me. I find decisions hard enough at the best of times. There's so many different places to eat too, I don't see how they can need that many, again though, we went out on a Friday night and there were plenty of free tables in the place we went to, maybe they just have much lower overheads, so don't need to be packed to make a profit.

It's 5:50am at the moment, I'm not managing to get myself onto the right time yet, I've been up since 5, though I managed to sleep till 7 the last couple of days, last night I was shattered and went to bed at about 8:30 and now here I am unable to sleep. I also keep feeling not that great, possibly because of the quantity and type of food available.

We were debating about going to New York, which will be totally different than here, I guess my comments about everything being quiet would really be proved wrong by New York, but are not sure we actually want to, we will go to DC and also Gettysberg. I really want to go to Kitchen Kettle Village we might do that today since the weather doesn't look great. It's my birthday while I'm here, so we have to do some cool stuff on Friday. Maybe eat lots of food.