They do things differently here

After a slightly disastrous attempt to pick up the car, we're now in Newark in a wicked cool room with a spa bath and all kinds of crazy ass furniture. We've been here in the US for just over a fortnight and learnt some things about the differences between our two nations:

The American's don't have the peculiar paranoia about people stealing coat-hangers from hotels that you find in Europe - everywhere we've been has had real hangers, none of those weird nubbin headed hook-in hangers that feature in almost every hotel I've been to back home.

Toilets are not as universally similar as you might think (or at least as I thought) - around half the toilets we've encountered here have the bite mark out of the front that I've only ever seen in schools in the UK. They also have a completely different flushing system, which is weird as you would have thought there would be one best way which everyone would use, but then what do I know about plumbing?!

TV advertising is completely different here too - there's the usual lack of restriction on naming competitors and comparing features directly, but there are also a surprisingly high number of ads for prescription medications, and a worrying tendency to have disclaimers at the bottom of the screen to tell people that the stunts are performed by professionals.

Driving seems to be a much less disciplined affair - it may just be in Manhattan that there is such a love of horn honking, but while we were there there was constant blasting at traffic lights including a particular honk which seemed to mean 'I reckon the lights are about to change, and I'm not sure you're as ready to move off as I would like you to be'. Coming from the UK where you can easily go for weeks without hearing a car horn, it was particularly perturbing to hear them every two minutes and used by people travelling in free-flowing traffic, apparently just to hear themselves making a noise.

Eating out is quite an adventure - with the exception of maybe two places, we have been given a glass of water as soon as we've sat down everywhere we have been. When we've ordered soft drinks, they mostly seem to come with a shed-load of ice and a straw with a tiny little paper hat on the drinking end, presumably to demonstrate that the straw is clean, which I would have believed anyway. Aside from the three egg minimum, there also seems to be a love of 'home-fried' potatoes, which come in plentiful supply with almost every breakfast order and consist of pretty much anything you can fry up with potatoes.

There were a few food items which we were previously aware of being named oddly, like eggplant, zuchini and capsicum, but we have also come across cilantro (coriander), arugula (rocket), rutabaga (swede) and the peculiar incomprehension of the concept of squash (in terms of a drink cordial).

One of the main things which impacts on us is what we call 'random taxation' - tax is applied to the advertised price, but apparently according to some potentially unfathomable system which we have yet to figure out. Sometimes we are taxed at around 10%, sometimes more and sometimes less and although we know that anything pertaining to tax is strictly regulated and is clearly not as ad hoc as it seems, coming from a country where tax is always included in the price you see on the label it does seem particularly confusing.

Alcohol - there seem to be two types of shop, those that sell wine and spirits and those that sell beer. Why the two haven't met, I don't know, but there's no sense to it.

Lightswitches - they are ALL upside down. Everywhere we've been has switches where you hit the top to make the light go on and the bottom to switch them off, which is counterintuitive, a little confusing, and exactly the kind of thing that we will get used to while we're here and then find even more confusing when we get home.

No sleep 'til Brooklyn

So, after spending the best part of a week in a teeny tiny hotel room in Manhattan, we have now decamped to Brooklyn. Our hotel room is lovely - large enough for us to move around without having to move everything to create floor space, free wi-fi and a full-size fridge. No more squeaky bed which wakes us both up each time either of us moves, no more window looking into someone else's apartment so you can't tell whether it's daylight outside or not, and no more stupid broken TV with only three working channels. I'll be honest, the area isn't great - we went out earlier and it was enough for us to implement a 'no leaving the hotel after dark' rule so we bought a load of beer and had pizzas delivered to our room. Seeing as we are basically waiting for the car to arrive so that we can get cracking on our trip to New Orleans, we are hoping the the wealth of TV channels and wi-fi will be enough to keep us entertained until next week. It is intriguing how many places will deliver to a hotel room - I suppose in an area which is rather prosaically called 'little Latin America' we probably aren't the only people who don't want to go wandering about late at night.

Torrential

Well, we've been in New York for three days so far and it has pissed with rain pretty much consistently. The storm is responsible for power outages, felled trees, damage to buildings and beach erosion, on top of which the satellite TV in our hotel is completely out, meaning that our tiny hotel room offers even less opportunity for entertainment than it did previously. However, given the astonishingly unpleasant sensation of wandering around with squelching shoes and sodden jeans, it's still the best of the options available to us, so the Boy Wonder and I have procured some cider, snacks and an internet dongle (they don't call them that here by the way - cue some strange looks in the Verizon store) and spent last night listening to I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue on the computer in an admirable display of British stoicism. The Verizon store was an experience in itself - there's always something a little unnerving about shopping in a strange place as every country has its own peculiarities when it comes to the simple things, but I have never actually failed to shop before until we went there. Part of the confusion arose because despite giving all the outward appearances of working there, the guy by the door who nodded at us when we went in subsequently watched us wandering around looking at the displays and trying hopefully to catch the eye of a member of staff who could help us, without thinking to mention once that you have to 'check in' on a computer and put your name down in a queue to be served. However, once we had mastered that, the rest of the process was relatively simple and we returned to our room sodden and disenchanted with the Big Apple, but at least with an internet connection which has gone some way to relieving the boredom of the constant downpours and allowed us to Skype our parents and read the New York Times's predictions for when the weather might break. We did have an hour of reasonable weather earlier today and used it to enjoy the luxury of going outside and breathing air which wasn't fresh from the alley between our hotel room and the next building, which was nice while it lasted, a period just long enough for us to get ensconced in a diner from where we watched the renewed downpour while we ate three eggs each. This seems to be standard - everywhere we've been that serves eggs so far has offered three eggs or more. I asked for two eggs today and was told that I could have two, but would be charged the same as for three, so I bit the bullet and went along with it whilst secretly wondering whether I might single-handedly have discovered the root of the USA's obesity epidemic. When we last had TV, they told us the weather should be fine again by Tuesday, so here's hoping our shoes will have dried sufficiently by then to go out and make the most of it - there's a Grateful Dead exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, so no prizes for guessing where we'll be once the sun comes out.

Start spreading the news

Well, we arrived in New York last night but fortunately spent longer in the queue for immigration than we did actually being grilled - they were very nice (although the signs around the place suggest that this is a concerted effort) and even told us that the only reason we were pulled aside and subject to extra questioning was because we wanted to stay for nine months and most people only stay for six. They asked a few questions about our plans for the trip during which the Boy Wonder said the word 'ancestors' several times and then made free with the noisy stamp and we were on our way. So, a short-ish cab ride into Manhattan and a miniature trek up three flights of stairs and we were safely installed in our teeny weeny hotel room with it's much larger than average bathroom - the Boy Wonder can touch both walls with outstretched arms, but we're well situated, en suite and seem to have a neighbour across the alley who alternates between singing and having hysterical laughter attacks which is all good. Our first, slightly spaced out exploration of the surrounding area revealed a pizza place which served not only pizza topped with pasta, but also one with lasagne on it, which made us think of the Gift - if anyone appreciates dangerous levels of carbohydrate within a meal, it's him, so we'll have to encourage him to experiment back home. We moved on to a complicated bar which had around 8 different basketball games on screens around the walls, loud and strangely mismatched music and a host of loud New Yorkers making merry - it was a treat to be IDed as we went in, although the novelty of that might wear off given time. Plenty of sleep later, an unreasonably large breakfast and the news of an incoming storm sweeping the west coast until sometime next week and we're all hooked up with internet, some free papers and a vague plan for the next few days including tourist spots and a southern brunch at BB King's club. All in all, a pretty successful trip so far...

My brother from another mother

I can't believe that I have only recently realised that I genuinely have a brother from another mother. I mean, it's not the kind of thing I say very often, but I'm surprised that in the few years since it has been in common parlance that I haven't made the connection.

C-peck-mockle country and the magic basil plant

The Boy Wonder, whilst being generally brilliant, is prone, as we all are, to moments of surprising specialness which always crack me up and then go in my mental hilarity bank to be revisited whenever I need reminding of how simple pleasures are by far the best. One of my favourites was a misunderstanding in which I was unwittingly complicit and involved a month-long holiday to Canada. We had a basil plant in full growth when we left, which I optimistically left on the windowsill despite the fact that it clearly needed watering at least once a day to survive, so naturally when we returned from our trip, despite the poppies at the front of the house being so large we couldn't see out of the window properly, the basil plant was a brown, dried-up husk of a plant sitting on the windowsill like a memorial to our neglect. Being the super efficient little worker bee I am, I spent the day of our return doing all our laundry and ordering a shopping delivery, so within 24 hours of returning home, we were more or less back on track with normal life. I put our new basil plant on the windowsill and the Boy Wonder joked that obviously his giving it a pint of water the day before had worked magic on its health. It was only the next day when we went round to visit his sister and wonder at their new house, and I heard him telling her the magical story of how he had resurrected the brown and crispy basil with a pint of water and how incredible it was that it had come back to full green leafy goodness within around 24 hours, that I realised he hadn't been joking the day before, and was under the illusion that he had brought it back to life. Needless to say, I explained what had happened through my chuckles and tried to convince him that I hadn't intended to let him think he had magical powers, but I was secretly sorry that I had said anything as I would have liked to hear him tell the story at least once more before bursting his bubble. The most recent example of his capacity to crack me up is down to a music programme shown on the BBC iPlayer called 'Ceol Country' showing (often bizarrely lame) excerpts from various country music festivals around the gaelic speaking world with the occasional subtitle in English. We had been happily calling it 'Ke-Owl' Country until one day I insisted that the Boy Wonder look up the correct pronunciation before we watched another episode. He consulted the oracle on the laptop and after a few moments of looking confused he announced 'Well, that can't be right!'.

I asked him what he'd found, but he was just standing their muttering to himself 'C-peck-mock-l- hmm, that doesn't sound right'. I went and looked over his shoulder, and he was looking at a site which had pronunciations of Irish words, and next to 'Ceol' it said c, e-peck, o-mock, l. The Boy Wonder was very sweetly taking this literally, and it wasn't until I said 'I think it means to pronounce the 'e' as in peck and 'o' as in mock', not to actually pronounce the whole words!', that he said 'I thought that didn't sound right!'. I nearly wet myself, and from now on that programme will forever be called 'C-Peck-Mock-L Country' in our house.