This is really turning into a rant now, but on a similar note, am I really the only person in the Western world who doesn't care which way up my fried egg is? (I always reply "over easy", but that's only because I can't remember what the other way up is called.

Amen to that brother...

I find the constant "would you like...", "how would you like..." questions in the States entertaining for the first few days, but after that it gets boring real quick.

The other problem is that the people asking the questions have asked the particular question so many times in their working life that all meaning has been slurred out of it. So when some Chinese woman in Quizno's was asking us "white or rye", it took about a dozen attempts before we could even hear the words that she was saying, let alone work out what our answer was.

I need to have a rant about US road signs now. Why is the language in them so "odd" ? Surely no one would ever say "Right turn yield on red", I mean when was the last time you heard some one use "yield" in general conversation ?

I got caught by a great sign in Seattle the other month. I was driving along the I520 from Bellevue, towards Kirkland. We were trying to find a road that came off the I520 and headed north into Kirkland. At that point the I520 curves around from heading north to heading nearly due south.

As we were driving along there was a sign saying "Next exit last east bound exit". The the f**k ? At this point, without a compass we had no firm idea of which direction the road was currently pointed, so the sign meant nothing to us. Even if we had know which direction we were headed it wouldn't have helped as looking at the map afterwards clearly shows that the exit it is taking about heads north, not east.

Suffice it to say we spent far to long trying to make sense of the sign and did not take the exit. The next exit was five miles away in the centre of Seattle.

If the sign had said "Next exit last exit before Seattle centre" or something then we would have taken the damn exit...

Driving in the US is entertaining though.