America Pt2

didn't realise i took over 4000 photos whilst on holidays. going through them is taking forever.

after over one week, i've finally finished unpacking! when i unpack, i have to take photos of what i bought, then put them where they would reside, and cut all tags etc. finding places to put "crap" as my parents would say, but stuff i like to keep like tickets and business cards if sometimes hard to find when your previous place is already full. still need to order all the food we bought, or else we probably won't even realise we have expired food until a year later...

the most annoying thing about america is their money. the first country i've been to which still uses paper money. what's worse, they are you typical greenish, creamish bills. all amounts are the same sized notes. they have notes for $1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, so to differentiate between a 1 and 100, you have to look at the number. no time to pay attention to the detail/picture on it, so you have to make sure you look at the number correctly. the bills also stick together, and you have to rub them a bit at times to make sure they aren't stuck. i love our currency, it's the most colourful (brighter than NZ notes) and different sized, plus it's plastic. hk have a base colour of white, then add different colours. i remember china thailand also have different colours but were dullish. also, americans still have dimes and quarters. dimes are 10c, quarters are 25c, and they also have 5c and 1c which are completely useless. actually, the only time i remember using a 1c was in DisneyWorld where you pay 51c and use those pennies to press into a memorabilia coin. a lot cheaper than HK Disneyland, where you pay and equivalent of $2.50 aussie dollars, and you only press a button instead of turning the handle yourself and the coins you put in don't turn out to be your printed coin (hence it's shinier and 5 times more expensive but not as cool). america disneyworld is actually not too expensive, but that's a post for another time.

on the rare occasions we have dinner at home, my brother's first thing to do is to turn on the tv. in our apartment we had "cheap" cable tv, but there were so many channels! in my uncle's apartment, he has normal cable tv, and wow, there's over 100 channels and it takes over 10mins just to flick through it and quickly glance at the title of what's showing. there's a million news channels, sports, and other channels which only america would have, like channels which screen simpsons 24/7. i love american tv.

canadian tv isn't that great, but still more channels compared to our 7,9,10,abc and abs main channels.

coming back home, we realised how slow australian internet is. maybe our internet isn't that fast, but still overseas is a lot faster. i'm pretty sure we had "cheap" internet at the apartment, as if you would rent out a house with the best internet speed, but even with supposedly "cheap" internet, it was super fast! hk internet was super fast as well even though we stayed at the edge of HK. this definitely reminds me that i need to upgrade and switch internet companies since our internet is just way too slow. brother was all sad since all his video games lag slightly due to out slow internet. i guess he has enjoyed 5 weeks of super good internet.

wifi could sometimes be found in shops, but i mainly relied on my 3g since i had unlimited. phone plans are something which aren't cheap in america, about the same as your standard phone plan in aus, around $70 a month. on the first day, it was a public holiday, so the main mobile provider was closed everywhere, hence i couldn't experience american 4g, and had to go with another provider which only had 3g. they don't even have many 7/11 there, so it took almost half the day trying to walk past a place which sold sim cards. their 3g is pretty good, when you're not in the subway.