Sweet Home, Chicago

BUFFALO GROVE, IL, USA -- Well, a 15 hour hop, skip, and jump later I made it home last night! What is the first thing you do after being away from home for 3 months? You guessed it: Lou Malnatis! Other than that I pretty much passed out right away. Overnight I actually only woke up once, which is pretty good, and today I have been able to stay active at a pretty good pace. I made myself a nice breakfast (so nice after eating dining hall garbage food for the last 3 months, or just a muffin from the mini-mart, or nothing at all), had some Matzo-ball soup at the Buffalo for lunch, got a haircut, activated some of the domestic features on my phone (hello, text messaging!), went to the post office, and here I am!

I also stepped on a scale this morning and realized that I lost weight. Well, I knew I lost weight, but I lost a lot of weight. Over 15 pounds of weight. Yeah, definitely more than I had expected! How did I lose so much weight in only 3 months? No, I didn't starve myself. But I do attribute it to two things: 1) Walking EVERYWHERE all the time in London - I have a minimum 4 miles of walking every day; and 2) The fact that high fructose corn syrup just does not exist outside North America. I mostly just drink water, which is so much healthier, but even when I do have the occasional Sprite or Fanta, it is made with actual cane sugar, which doesn't have any of those nasty chemicals that you find in everything here. This point kind of goes along with another thing I noticed yesterday.

Three instant observations upon entering the Philadelphia Airport yesterday.

1) American's are fat. Not just fat, but obese, and to the point where it actually hinders everyday things. You should not have to "squeeze" through the metal detectors, or be driven to your gate, unless you have some additional condition beyond "I ate too much and didn't exercise."

2) It was so nice to see people make commercial transactions in US currency. I hadn't seen anybody actually use a dollar in quite some time, and what remaining currency I had in my wallet was beginning to look fake.

3) It was also very nice to dial home and cell phones and just hit send, without any +'s or 0's or 00's or any other crazy international calling combination. Just 847-... and send. Nice and easy, like it should be.

Okay that is all for now - I am SOOOO EXCITED for my first Blackhawks game this year tomorrow night. Yeah, all kinds of crazy excited. LETS GO HAWKS!

Reading material: I wrote this article yesterday on the plane as we were coming into Philadelphia, and it posted this morning on G-1 Billion:

A survey of climate-related advertisements in The Economist:

http://g-1billion.org/?p=3156〈=en