Remember when the US tried to go metric?  Disaster!  Just how much is a gram, a liter, a kilo??

One of the vexing aspects of living in the EU is trying to adapt to the metric system.  Somehow 27 C doesn’t sound nearly as warm as 80 F, at least not to my American ears.  We encounter conversion woes every time we are given a recipe.  The result is that we’re living in a half-way house, marooned between metric and imperial measures.  An example is the new lasanga recipe over in the Recipes link to your right – I asked Louis to write it out for me (he made it several nights ago and it was very well received , especially by Massimo).  When he gave it to me the ingredients were in grams, for both solids and liquids, and the temperature was in Fahrenheit; fortunately a quick visit to a terrific conversion site made it easy to list the imperial equivalents for American and British friends.  Somehow I don’t think we’ll ever be completely at ease in this metric world.

Don’t even get me started on clothing sizes (bras come in 1, 2, 3 or 4… what does that mean??). And shoes (my size 39 sounds huge, but it’s really only 8.5).

At least the clock looks the same here – what would a metric clock look like?  We’d have to dispense with 2 hours on our clock face and come up with all kinds of strange names.  Turns out it’s been done!  It takes us about half a centiday (+/- 12 minutes) to drive from our house to downtown Rapallo… I think.  No, let’s stick with our present clocks with their friendly faces.  It’s hard enough to figure out how many grams of cheese to put in the lasagna!