This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: More USA trip thus far... Feed Title: Michael Lucas-Smith Feed URL: http://www.michaellucassmith.com/site.atom Feed Description: Smalltalk and my misinterpretations of life Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Michael Lucas-Smith

One thing of interest is how similar the commercial aspects of the USA and Australia are. The people, suburbs and culture are different - but all the products on the shelves in supermarkets are pretty much the same. There's a smaller range in Australia, but they are basically all the same thing anyway. We have virtually no American cars in Australia with the exception of GM and Ford, so seeing the wide variety of badges on the front of cars is interesting - the car shapes themselves haven't changed. Also, some of the big cars out here are truely huge, way overpowered :)

Oh yeah and the radio stations are shocking. Absolutely shocking. They're either ranting on about god, playing bad music or are impossible to get a good signal on. I miss triple-J (JJJ) already. The food here is nice though. Things aren't too different in general. The hardest part to driving here is getting in and out of the city. Driving around the city is fine and driving along the highways is fine, but the complex artery roads are a bit of a mess.

As for pollution. The air is pretty nice. If you look up you can see blue.. if you look to the horizon though you can see the grey-brown smog (it's not over there, it's above you - you can just see it over there because you can see more of it at that angle). That's a little disguisting actually but I've been told that this is pretty much the cleanest part of America. It shows, Portland and Seattle should be proud and keep working to make it cleaner.

If any one from here wants to come to Australia you have no need to fret that everything will be different. It generally isn't. Even the TV is basically the same. Different ads - same ad formats. Different actors, same ad concept.

American accents are still a novelty to me since I've only been here a few days. It still sounds to me like everybody around me is "putting it on" :). Most people don't have too much trouble understanding us but sometimes it takes two goes before we get our message across. So at my talk I'll endevour to talk slowly and clearly.