The more things change…

I moved away from the US just over six years ago, and have been hanging out in the olde world ever since.  I come back to the US several times a year, either to Texas, where my family lives or to the east coast for work / to visit friends.  This week while in Austin, I’ve been amassing a list of things that seem to have changed since I lived in the homeland, and I thought I would share it with you:

1) The price of groceries, and lunch.  Prices are a bit like a child.  If you’re around a child all the time, you don’t notice how much it grows.  But if you go away for a while and come back, those prices have grown more than you could have imagined!  That’s the way I feel about the price of food in the US.  I used to spend $5 a day in downtown Manhattan for lunch in 2001.  Now, a normal lunch seems to cost $10.  Ditto groceries: it seems impossible to escape the grocery store without spending at least $60.  Inflation’s been busy while I’ve been away.

2) The number of political talk shows on CNN and other networks.  And the partisanship of the comments on those same shows (the myth of neutrality in American journalism seems dead to me.  We have Fox to thank.)

3) The number of stadiums named after corporations. 

4) The girth of baseball players (can you tell we’ve been watching American sports this afternoon?)

5) Fashion sense.  Generally I would say Americans are much more fashionable than they were 6 years ago.  Maybe its the explosion of design / fashion television.

6) The prevalence of goat’s cheese / sun-dried tomatoes / mixed greens / “micro-brew” beers and other food that used to seem “fancy.”  Though note that people still find Obama elitist because he said he liked arugula.

7) The size of bagels.  They’re HUGE.

8) The size of cars / trucks.  They’re HUGE.

9) Counter-balancing the above, the number of people that drive a Prius, or another hybrid.

10)  The Bush-bashing.  It crosses party lines.