Conversions

When Wal-Mart Super Centre came to St. Albert I was one of those people completely baffled as to how to convert my produce and fruit purchases from $/kg to $/lb. In Bali I drove Blake crazy always asking him to convert the prices for me. Living on this island is giving me a sense of deja-vu. Conversions are not my strength.
We thought that moving to a British colony meant that the measurements would be metric, the degrees measured in celsius, and the primary language English. We were wrong, again. After a day of driving on the highway at 40kms/hour and probably pissing off everyone around us, we realized that the signs posted were in miles. That I can get used to. We had another surprise when we went to buy gas for the rental car. It too is measured in gallons instead of litres (which turned out to be a good thing since paying $3.89/litre was a scary thought). Another conversion is the currency. Most everything on the island is priced in Cayman Island dollars, which has a higher value than both Canadian and US, but downtown in the touristy area, all the prices are in US. I feel like I have to deal with three currencies every time I make a purchase! However, the hardest conversion of all is the temperature. I don't know who invented Fahrenheit (probably someone named Fahrenheit) but he is WRONG. It cannot possibly be freezing when a temperature is still above the 0 level mark. Everywhere we went last week people were remarking about the cold weather and how it was only 63 degrees on Sunday... I had no idea what that meant! So Blake and I finally sat down and pulled up a conversion chart on the internet and we have slowly been learning how to tell the temperature using fahrenheit. Apart from being a completely mind-boggling endeavour, I am most certain this will make me a hit with the over 50 age group back home who still use this backwards system!
The final and most unexpected conversion of all is the language. Most people on the island speak some form of English. By some form, I mean exactly that... a dialect. The South Africans are understandable until they are drunk, the Brits tend to talk to fast and use the word "literally" like it is going out of style. The Aussies probably win for the most coherent, while it will probably take you three minutes of conversation to realize that the Jamaicans were speaking in English the whole time.
I am giving you all fair warning: if we are crazy when we return home, the conversions made us this way... and the roosters.