Measurement Units and Language Confusion

Hi, I am back after a week of many things that need to be done.

To continue my last chapter (yes, I call these blog posts chapter), I am going to write something about measurement unit differences between where I used to live and here, the mighty USA.
Like the rest of this civilization, my country uses the metric system as a mean of measuring length, area and many things like that. I was born in it, molded by it. I can easily think and calculate everything in metric units. For example, my house is x square meters and it is big. For me, x square meters associate with BIG.

However, United State denied all of these metric standard, and plays in its own rules, like a stubborn child who does not want to listen to anyone. It uses the Imperial System.
This made my life here harder, of course. Now, when people say that their house is Y square feet, I can not associate that information with big or small in my brain. Usually, in a case like that, I will have to open my calculator, and convert everything into meter... Despite of all the struggle with this new system, I always try to comfort myself that, one day, I will master the conversion process and throw away my calculator.

That day has not came yet. Meanwhile, I discovered something else...

My hearing is SUPER bad!!! (Three exclamation marks for extra dramatic effect). When I hear people speak Vietnamese, even if they speak in small volume, my brain still can extract keywords and tone from the conversation to build the full sentence for me. However, if people speak English in a similar volume, I can not hear anything at all. I am not used to the language, and still learning it. Therefore, my brain have no idea about the tones, the patterns of a conversation in English. If I want to fully understand the speakers, I will have to ask him/her to speak louder and/or speak again. This leads to some problems, including but not limited to wasting time, missing the key points of the speaker, misunderstanding jokes, and even making barriers between me and native speakers. I remember this situation in Lowe's, when I tried to talk to the sale person about a washing machine, I had to ask him to speak again for more than a dozen of time during our conversation. In the end, he showed me a piece of paper with written information about that washing machine and asked me slowly: ""sir, this is the information about that machine you are looking for, can you read English?".

I was like (-_-")

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
  std::cout << "Hello World!";
}

Well, I have to say this was the first blog entry I made after 6 years, since Facebook completely killed Yahoo!360.
But why? Why do I need to come back to the blogging world?
Hmm, lets say one of my friends has a project, that requires all participants to have a blog, and to write entries in English. First of all, she will surf those blogs, and correct the writing of these bloggers in a way that will help them improve their English. Second, she will give me 30 dollars for making 2 entries per week. So I got that going for me, which is nice...

Enough of unrelated information about things that nobody cares, let me say something about this famous University I am doing my PhD at, and how do I handle various situations there when I was arrived three weeks ago. My university's name is Utah State University, which is one of the biggest funded research facilities in Space Dynamic in the mighty United State. Furthermore, it has sent more experiments into space than any other university in the world! Impressive, hah?
However, I am studying Computer Science, so no Space Dynamic for me anyway. Although, people who live here are very nice. I watched a lot of Hollywood movies before, and I thought every single man and woman in this country swear at least two times in each sentence they speak out. But not here, everyone was nice to me, no intense arguments and angry faces happened, maybe not yet. This small town is so peaceful that they can put a huge cemetery in the middle of my university and nobody cares. Seriously? That is not how things were in Vietnam. Back in Vietnam, people complain, fight, argue with the government about why a cemetery is located near the rear of Hanoi was not moved to 100 Km always yet. Their arguments are: We are living humans here, we can not sleep near dead people, they give me cancer! They are dead, they need to rest in a place that is peaceful and far away from people who are still alive! OMG, So creepy! blah blah blah.

For me, US citizens are weird.

Next time, I am going to talk about how I adapted to the imperial measurement system.