In my ongoing efforts to learn Spanish, I'm highlighting a Spanish word each day during April as part of the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. I'm also sharing the random thoughts that pop into my head when I try to pronounce them.
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Today's Spanish word is >>kilogramo<< (kilogram). And now for some random thoughts:
1 - Kilograms make me think of food shopping and cooking in New Zealand.
2 - Unlike us Yankees, they use the metric system. Such enlightened people. Americans of a certain age, will remember when we tried to go metric back in the 70s. It was dismal failure. Although, we do buy soda pop in liter bottles. So there is that small victory.
3 - Kilograms were pretty easy to work with. When it came to shopping for meat, you just figure that two pounds of ground beef (or mince) equals roughly a kilogram.
4 - Now I'm thinking about cooking in New Zealand. That's how random my thought process is. That's a picture of our stove on our boat in New Zealand. No oven, although it did have a broiler which was handy for garlic toast. The other picture is of our provisions for one of our cruises. You'll note the Bombay Sapphire Gin (courtesy of duty-free at the airport) next to the coffee. Both indispensable items.
Do you use the metric system? What would you consider to be an indispensable provision if you were setting out for a cruise or trip? What's your favorite word that starts with K?
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I think I was in 3rd or 4th grade when they tried to teach the metric system.
ReplyDeleteI'm still perplexed as to why it never really caught on here.
DeleteIt was such a headache working in a United States plant mixing material that would then be sent via tanker across the border to Canada. The conversions for shipping/selling and creating customs paperwork were atrocious nightmares. Ugh... Sad to say, the main fellow I worked with couldn't understand that 12PM is noon and 12AM is midnight, either. ??? With their plant working around the clock that made my job still harder. Goofy dude. ~grin~ Makes me glad all over again I left that office for early retirement, returning much joy and sanity. Be well!
ReplyDeleteThat does sound like a nightmare. And not knowing how PM and AM work? Not ideal if you work shifts. You might not show up at the right time. Early retirement sounds much better :-)
DeleteI love cognates! But you're off a bit on your conversion from pounds to kilograms. If you bought 2 kilos of ground beef, you'd actually have close to 4.5 pounds (not that I know from personal experience, lol).
ReplyDeleteSee - that's how hopeless I am when it comes to conversions. I had it backwards. It's the other way around. 1 kilo equals about 2 lbs (well 2.2 lbs really). I used to get a half-kilo of mince for recipes that called for a pound of meat. Anyhoo, good catch - I've edited the post.
DeleteI've not used the metric system, but I'm sure it wouldn't take long to learn. I got a kick out of Darla's comment. If you would have used military time that poor guy would have never known what time it is.
ReplyDeleteHave a fabulous day. ♥
Oh, can you imagine that guy trying to deal with military time? It would be totally confusing.
DeleteI only use the metric system in my science classes. The conversion are so much easier.
ReplyDeleteOnce Upon a Time
The multiples of 10 does make things a lot easier.
DeleteI love metric!
ReplyDeleteWhy am I not surprised :-)
DeleteFun fact! There is a stretch of US highway in Arizona - I-19 that is measured in kilometers and not miles. Apparently when the US was flirting with the idea of going metric in the 80s, the highway was just being built so they decided to jump on the "metric bandwagon" and measured their "mile markers" and marked their exits in kilometers. After realizing they jumped on that "metric bandwagon" a little too soon, they decided to keep it as it was not to mess up exit numbers for businesses and what not.
ReplyDeleteI think metric is pretty cool - I think I'd like to be metric fluent or bi-metric-lingual and not have to convert in my head every time or envision pouring 3 3/4 liters of soda in my gas tank when we fill up in Mexico.
That is a fun fact! You have lots of fun facts and stories :-) I'd love to see that stretch of highway.
DeleteI grew up in the metric world, but working with old buildings and blueprints I’ve come come across many old measuring systems, such as Swedish and Russian inches, feet, fathoms and many more. I love them all, mostly because the old terms sound so beautiful, not so much for the conversions. Never been very good at maths! Despite the metric system we measure boat lenghts in feet - not the beam, not the draft, those are in metres, but the length is in feet! It’s really strange!
ReplyDeleteSwedish and Russian measurements - how fascinating! In New Zealand, we always talked about our boat length in feet as well, despite everything else being metric. Strange.
DeleteEverything in the U.K. is sold in metric units. I was just discussing this with my sister last week. We agreed we are perfectly happy with that and metric is much easier, yet for personal things such as our own height and weight we revert to the old imperial measures. I suppose because those are what we grew up describing ourselves in. My nieces have no clue about the old system, and as for pre-decimal currency, they just laugh.
ReplyDeleteWhat always confused me in Scotland was weighing yourself in stones. Although, I always felt tinier than I was as you're talking single digits, not triple digits like I do with pounds :-)
DeleteWhile i know i should learn metric, it's very hard for me to think in those terms. Maybe i need to do it a little at a time.
ReplyDeleteI have a hard time thinking in those terms, although I do think about soda in terms of liters so maybe there is hope for me yet.
DeleteI lived in the UK for decades - with a brief stint in Canada - so metric feels normal to me. But my American wife struggled with it when we lived in the UK, but now we here in the US so I leave her to the old-fashioned approach.
ReplyDeleteI definitely struggled with it when we first moved to the UK. So confusing. And then when you add in stones and imperial measurements, I got completely lost.
DeleteI was teaching (early ‘70s) when the metric system was introduced in Australia. We were told to use no conversions, just go for the new measurement. Butchers shops got into trouble if they advertised their meat in pounds. I found temperature the easiest, then mass ( we were not supposed to say weight) and height as I related everything to my own height. Our boat and caravan were and are still measured in feet. The other change was instead of miles per gallon we had litres per hundred kilometres. I just thought more than ten is bad, less than ten is good. Nowadays we expect a lot less than ten. For temperature we said “tingling teens, temperate twenties, thirsty thirties and fiery forties”. We didn’t have to worry about below ten degrees too often.
ReplyDeleteCrazy to think you would get in trouble for advertising in pounds. But I guess that's one way to get people to change.
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