Borat IRL

Like many of you probably still do, I once believed the only food America had to offer was burgers and fries, and the occasional cheap cheese pizza. Topped with an XL Coke.  I was wrong, and so are you.  America has many of what I'll call "subcultures". Therefore, when I went to South Carolina, I was introduced to Southern culture and therefore Southern food. And let me tell you, some of those dishes showed me a whole new world.  Some people would call me fat and lazy because I have eaten out more than I have cooked during the year I was there, but I like to call myself a food connoisseur, a cuisine enthusiast, a taste bud mentor.  And because of this bad habit, I tried some American delicacies I still think about when I get super hungry.  So yes, burgers are nice and Coke is fun, but at some point we all need to grow up.  Which is why I spent most of my lunches at Chick-Fil-A. And drank an Arnold Palmer any chance I'd get. You can't say ch...

There's a lot of pros and cons to living in a dorm. In my case, I wasn't given a choice so that saved me some time but it definitely didn't save me some money. Dorms are expensive. Like not cute expensive where you get your moneys worth by having a nice little room in the middle of campus. They're "I'm gonna make you suffer" expensive.  I didn't have a choice. I had to live on campus, that was part of the exchange. You can imagine my disapointment when I opened the door to my room just to find something that looked like a room from a mental hospital. It was small. So small. At that point I almost would have rather slept in the elevator of the building.   I payed about 4,000$/semester (3 and a half months, not even 6) for a bed in a shared room and a bathroom I was sharing with 3 other girls. It's safe to say I was definitely not king in the castle.  That wasn't even the worst part. One kitchen. 2 fridges. For the whole ...

(my apologies for the explicit language) School rivalry... Every school has that one school they love to hate. In the case of my school, Clemson University was THE worst enemy and the biggest sport rival when it came to games. As you can see from the video above, it is serious. A gigantic tiger is put together just to be burnt down, for the pleasure of hundreds of students.  If you couldn't tell, football is a big deal. And since I still don't understand the rules even after watching games for hours, I can't go into detail about the sport itself, but I can talk a bit about what it represents for the school and the students.  So college football season lasts throughout the whole Fall semester. So almost every weekend, people started drinking early on game days. You could feel the atmosphere changing on game days, there was something in the air. Maybe it was the smell of alcohol being poured right and left, or maybe it was people grilling meat on barbecue...

  (the frat guys from the movie went to my uni. the more you know am i right)   If anyone wonders why I picked Borat as a reccuring joke for this blog, it's because my experience in the US relates a lot to the movie. And if you have not seen the movie, I'm so sorry sweetie.  As a starting point, I'm going to talk about my university, the University of South Carolina, home of the "Gamecocks". The very first thing that really struck me was the school's team spirit. In fact, South Carolina is often reffered to as "football country" by locals, simply because football, or even more generally, the school's sports teams, are what really drive the school spirit.  From what I've seen during football games against other universities, being supportive of your team is the key to your integration. The merch store in unis are incredibly profitable. People pretty much only dress in the merch, they drive cars with stickers on them, their m...