1. You may drive through red traffic lights.

No, you don’t need to be a firefighter or the police. Ordinary people may do that. But only if you want to turn to the right. And only after you stopped and made sure that no other cars are coming, especially not as a surprise from the other side. At first this arrangement really made us feel confused and many Americans honked at us. Until we transposed the entire situation in our heads to South Africa: imagine you are waiting to turn left at a red traffic light; if no one from the other side wants to turn right, traffic will flow better if you turn instead of wait. In America, however, you have to be alert for sometimes a white sign with black letters that forbids you to turn on red may hide somewhere. Americans do love to write long messages instead of using symbols. Oh, and if you ever go to New York, you need to remember that there you may not at all turn at a red traffic light.

2. There are terrible and strange fauna.

• Little horseflies with such a painful bite that you get goosebumps when you just think about them.
• Gigantic crickets with loooong sensors waylaying you in the bathroom during the night (grr).
• Suicidal squirrels dashing ahead of your car or balancing themselves like veritable trapeze artists on the power lines.
• Squirrels running so fast that you never really see them.
• Birds with red feathers making their sweet appearance in summer.

But my favourite is the fireflies that also appear in summer and whose tail lights flicker on and off as they flutter during dusk.

3. Things are HUGE, really huge.

Milk, mayonnaise and fuel you buy in gallons (one gallon is almost four litres), antihistamine you can buy up to one thousand tablets at a time and tissues come in packs of ten boxes. We once heard they wanted to export South African fruit juices to America. That would really have been a great idea because Yank juices do not come close to those from our southern country, but the giant quantities needed to infiltrate the US market was a major problem. America often feels like Makro… on steroids.

4. We’ve never been so cold or so hot.

The cold we expected because we were not familiar with snow. But the heat was an unpleasant surprise. To the east of the country where we live humidity is the big issue. During our second summer in America our local library sent out an official email inviting everybody who could not stand the heat to cool down in the library. Temperatures rise to forty degrees and the humidity reaches 90%.

5. In some ways, America is very old-fashioned.

People here still often write cheques and drop it in the mail. The postal service works perfectly. We’ve ordered four large lounge chairs through the mail and the four boxes were waiting for us in the driveway as sentries of old, unharmed in the snow. Electronic banking does exist, but is not geared nearly as vigorous as in South Africa. At some banks ‘electronic payment’ means that you email the bank a payment instruction and they will then mail a check on your behalf. And suddenly the logos of some US banks, like the one below, make more sense.

6. Americans are pragmatic and resourceful.

On the beautiful Bay Bridge, where our family like to drive, they exchange the middle lane as necessary for traffic needs. Friday afternoons when everybody heads for the coast the middle lane runs in that direction; Sunday afternoons it runs in the opposite direction. At a bargain shop we saw buyers inserting a coin into a slot on the shopping trolley to loosen it. Once you return the trolley back to the line, a mechanism returns your coin – a clever way of getting everyone to return their trolleys.

7. Each house has a gullet.

This is what our family calls the cutter in the drain of the kitchen sink. When you switch it on it makes unearthly sounds that suggest that there is a troll in the pipes and someday it will gnaw off someone’s fingers. By now we know that one can throw almost anything in the troll’s gullet and it will happily polish it off. But cherry pips it does not eat – they tighten its gears and then it freezes. And then someone (usually a sulking male member of the family) really has to put his hands in the gullet and fish out the pips one by one.

Also read: Out and About with the Haasbroek family