Weird America

So I'm feeling a little homesick and have very little of anything familiar around to ease it, so I will populate my pity party by talking about some of the weird stuff in America that I wasn't expecting.

The food is probably the big one, though I had heard strange things before coming. Everything is more sweet than back home, even bread and milk seems to be. Also, everything exists in America.
If you want some crazy-ass combination of liquorice-beetroot-pretzels you just need to scour Walmart or at most hit up google and you can probably drive to buy it. And it's probably a dollar because the food and alcohol here is super cheap.

'Meat' flavour. Hmm...

Only a little ridiculous because I haven't been scouring Walmart

Not ridiculous. Just Maddy with a giant pretzel which is delicious.

I found it odd that this was 'naturally and artificially flavoured' but that's probably just me not understanding food labeling standards

 The patriotism is the second. There's not much more to say than that. Flags everywhere, everyone has a home team that they support aggressively because that team is the best, thank you very much.You can buy patriotic paraphernalia  just about everywhere and no one will mock you for wearing/carrying it around. They won't even mock you in a supportive way, they just support it.

'Merica!

 Everything is bigger also, I don't have any good photos for this but their roads are bigger to fit their massive cars which carry the (sometimes) bigger people. Everything takes up more space.

Convenience is the last big one. Drive-thru pharmacies are common. You can get a drive-thru marriage (though I haven't personally seen that one). Pre-grated cheese is also prevalent.

A few miscellaneously weird things are: the light switches go up to turn on. Weird. They actually have dance circles and line dancing in clubs. Kinda cool. (I've attempted line dancing a couple of times now). And about half of the Americans I've talked to didn't know where NZ was (Europe being the most common guess, one person confused us with Iceland and another asked me where in the UK I was from, when I responded "New Zealand" he just nodded happily). This would be insulting except we are tiny, get little to no media coverage and everyone has been embarrassed for not knowing.

Dude dancing competitively in the middle of a packed club.Terrible photo. 

The animals are the last weird thing to me. I have seen an armadillo, a lot of squirrels, a couple of stork-type birds that I need to look into the identification of but they're like a meter tall, and a ton of lizards just chilling around the place.

And the lego Loch Ness Monster.

Here's a photo of Ben doing kung fu just because.

See ya!