So...after an unforgettable two years and three months living in a country which for most of my life I've been fascinated by and wanted to live in, I'm now back in the USA. Specifically in New Mexico. It's not such a letdown after Baden-Württemberg, though I honestly would have preferred Colorado.

I have been pleasantly surprised by a few things. In Germany I could always buy blocks of hard cheese from supermarkets, and from vendors at farmers' markets and Christmas markets. I thought I'd have to go back to Kraft and Sargento slices, but it turns out you can get blocks of cheese at upscale organic stores, and there's also pretty good Mexican cheese at the supermarkets here. Plus I can now find my favorite craft beers again, like Left Hand Milk Stout.

Still there's a few things about this country that I never liked, which before Germany I just sort of tolerated without noticing, and I got a little too used to not having to deal with them in Germany.

Bumpy Roads

The very day I got my car back in Dallas, two months after shipping it, one of the first things I noticed as I drove around the north Dallas suburbs was the condition of the roads. They're all full of cracks and bumps. Everywhere I drove there were cracks all over the roads, often artificial cracks cut and filled in by construction workers who had previously patched up an even worse crack or pothole. Maybe my memory is flawed (it often is), but I seem to remember roads being smoother in Germany. I know it's not an issue with the car because it is the exact same car I was driving over there.

Awful Public Transit

I'm going to quote myself. This is what I wrote almost a year ago about San Antonio's bus system, Via. After explaining how Stuttgart's transit system works, I wrote this:

Compare that to San Antonio, which is a little bigger and more populous than Stuttgart, but only has a bus system, and a pretty lame one at that. Last year I spent a few days in SA to catch up with the friends I left behind, and had to rely on the clunky VIA buses and their bewildering route network to get around. More often than not I had to blow money on Ubers because I kept missing connections. A day pass is $2.75, though, so you get what you pay for.

Little has changed since that last visit. I was just spending a few days in San Antonio last week. I had my car, but still used Via because I wanted to drink all I wanted at the breweries without having to worry about driving, buses are cheaper than Uber, and my hotel was just a single bus ride away from downtown. But transferring between buses is still an exercise in frustration. While trying to get from the Pearl complex (north of downtown) to Huebner Oaks (roughly at the intersection of I-10 and I-410, near the northwest edge of the city) I took bus 10 north, with the intention of catching one of the counter-clockwise buses that run along 410. So I stepped off at the stop near 410, which was on the south side of the highway, meaning I still had to walk across the access road, under the overpass, and across another access road to get to the next stop where I would catch westbound bus 552. Can you guess what happened before I could even do any of that? That's right, I saw 552 go rolling right by before I even had a chance to cross the highway! So I had to burn up 15 minutes standing around waiting for the next one. In my experience this is typical for Via.

Shopper Stalkers

"Can I help you find something?"

"No thanks."

"Hi, can I help you find something?"

"No thanks..."

"Is everything OK? Can I help you find something?"

"No thanks."

Am I the only one who finds this intrusive and bothersome?

Telemarketers

During the last year or so that I lived in San Antonio, I was often getting bombarded with irritating telemarketing calls. Weirdly they always started off asking to speak to Lewis, which most certainly isn't my name. I think it was part of a script, because one time I said my name was Lewis and the person on the other end actually seemed surprised. By the time I left for Germany these calls were getting on my last nerve, and one time I remember responding to the thousandth or so "Hello, can I speak to Lewis?" by angrily spitting back "I don't have time for this shit!"

During two years in Germany I'd apparently gotten so unused to this, that when earlier this week I got a phone call that my phone ID'd as "PROBABLY SPAM" and I still answered it, and when the person on the other end said this had to do with car insurance I worriedly asked "What's wrong with my car insurance??" It was only someone with an offer to save some amount on car insurance by switching to State Farm. "I'm not interested in switching thanks bye!!" I said before quickly hitting the hang-up button. And then I thought Welcome back to America. And speaking of insurance...

GEICO Commercials

I hate GEICO ads. Well, I hate any ads that unexpectedly interrupt the YouTube videos I'm watching, but these ads are 15 seconds long, just as idiotic as I remember, and I have to suffer through the whole thing and can't skip over it. Why can't they bring the gecko back?