Units

This country is having quite an identity crisis when it comes to a system of units. It's almost sad. Technically I believe they are transitioning slowly to using metric, but in the mean time this makes things a bit messy.

For example, distances on roadways are generally in Imperial units. Miles per hour, 2 miles until the next exit, no hard shoulder for 500 yards, etc. Sometimes you will get lucky and find a sign mentioning a height restriction in meters ('metres'). In one lecture this semester the lecturer (BO Dereg, and he's crazy and doesn't make sense at the best of times) made references to kilometers, miles, and hectares. I was looking at a table today regarding the calculation of road noise, and in one column it talked of speed limits in terms of miles per hour, and in another column it was in kilometers per hour. Apparently authorities will put signs at seemingly random distances from things, like 1 and a bit miles, so that if they make the switch to metric, they will be nice round numbers. Quite frankly I don't know how they take themselves seriously. At the gym there is a scale that is in kilograms. Above it on the wall they have a conversion chart so people can figure out what this works out to in stones and/or pounds. Don't get me started on this stone business.

Tomorrow is the official start of the new term, which means its just the start-up of classes again. I've been at the library all weekend and for some reason every single food and beverage source on campus has been closed, despite the coffee shop in the library having been open last week. It means getting your afternoon caffeine fix takes much longer than it should. It's also a little sad when you realize you are a little bit excited to have a campus-made sandwich for lunch.

Oh, and sometimes the English like to give things French names. A French press is a cafetiere. A zuchinni is a corgiette (or however you spell it). An eggplant is an aubergine (as is the shade of purple).