The American Adventure - The Good Bits

One thing about seeking feedback is the risk that some people will mistake the opportunity to heap praise upon the humble author(s) for an opportunity to provide "constructive criticism" or as we call it "complaints". One of the valuable pieces of "constructive criticism" was that:

listening to you winge and whine about yanks is a trifle boring at times

This caused a great amount of thought on what we should include in our monthly reports. The final conclusion was that if we don't whinge and whine about yanks, who can we whinge and whine about? Admittedly we could have two sections - one in which Tim whinges about Kajsa and one in which Kajsa whines about Tim - but that wouldn't be conducive to a happy marriage. Tim could whinge and whine about the Navy but that may present a conflict of interests given that he would like to get promoted sometime in the next decade. Tasha would be a safe target but she doesn't provide much in the way of material - she doesn't even destroy the garden at the moment.

Three other targets were considered - Tim's colleagues, Swedes and Australians. Tim does make fun of his workmates and their partners, in real life as well as in these pages. Swedes are such easy targets that it is almost unfair to have a go at them and, as we are in America at the moment, it is unfair to have a go at Australians in general - plus Australians seem to be doing a good enough job of that by themselves if the level of support for Der Fraulein is any measure. Finally, the most common target for attacks is ourselves, mostly humorous we hope, but we do tend to observe what goes on around us and like to pass on what we find amusing or interesting.

The bottom line is that we will continue to point out things about the yanks that we notice and, if at times that seems like whinging or whining, we apologise in advance. You can console yourselves with the fact that if we are still whinging and whining about the Americans in two years from now, at least we are planning to come home - rather than staying here as some people before us have done.

So, that said, let us catalogue the good bits about Americans so that we can restore some balance to this discourse.

• Americans seriously kicked English butt more than two hundred years ago and have celebrated it every year since.
• America have far fewer McDonalds (per capita) than Australia (although that should be balanced against starting them in the first place).
• American papers have up to four entire pages dedicated to comics - every day!
• Bagels (particularly sesame seed bagels).
• Philadelphia cream cheese.
• Many Americans are decended from Swedes (guess who thought that one up).
• CDs are cheap as are certain computer products.
• Americans invented jeans and make some great boots. Can you imagine cowboys in jodhpurs or spandex?
• America had a civil war which gives them (and us) a lot to talk about a dinner parties.
• American politics is interesting (if you count having the President impeached for receiving favours from a girl a little older than his daughter as being interesting - otherwise replace interesting with scandalous).
• Americans make a lot of movies and some of them are good.
• They actually do play soccer (until they are old enough to play a sport that their parents understand or from which you can actually make money as a professional player).
• America is a lot closer to Sweden than Australia.
• America is a lot closer to Europe than Australia.
• America is a lot closer to the Isle of Wight than Australia.
• America is a lot further from New Zealand than Australia.
• Pauline Hanson is not an American (although you might want to consider that against a long list of well known Americans).
• Americans are far less self conscious than Australians.
• Americans are more comfortable with, and respect, success. They are also willing to risk failure and, as a result, they generally have more success than we do. An Australian's only advantage is being able to laugh when others fail. We don't tend to improve ourselves, after all who would want to be a tall poppy?
• Americans are very polite to each other (although they do tend to shoot each other more often, they do so politely).

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