This posting is mostly a retrospective on my time in Mountain View and how it compares with the UK.
Firstly, America is a great shock to the old-world me. The stunning regularity of the grid system, even in small "cities" such as Mountain View. Not that Mountain View is actually a real city. It has virtually no town centre (ahem, center) — though it’s way better than Cupertino in this respect. It has one road of 'downtown' comprising of a fair number of restaurants, a mortuary and remarkably little else.
The roads here are also awesome in girth. Virtually every road is a four-lane highway, making walking around somewhat difficult. Still, to compensate for this, there are traffic lights every few yards (not that Americans believe in the yard, preferring to measure in tens of feet). We were thrown out of the bar last night at around 10pm, not for rowdiness but because they were closing!
The people here are very warm, as is the weather. I encountered remarkably little ignorance among my colleagues (sorry, coworkers) and church friends. I was pleasantly surprised that most people accepted my English sense of humour (humor) and some even understood it.
I did, however, find that the media in the US are very insular: they seem barely to know of a world beyond the US and what it’s currently invading.
Some of the words that I use quite freely in the UK have a very different meaning over here in America. I am used to describing myself as an evangelical Christian. It turns out that over here, the word has been hijacked by the lunatic right-wing 'Christians' who want to legislate against anything that’s not strictly doctrinally valid, according to their limited imagination. So I have to explain that I'm evangelical in that I'm willing to live my life openly as a Christian; just not one who wants to enforce my opinions on others.
Then, there are the things about this country that are just utterly messed up. The most significant of these has to be the healthcare system. If you have no health insurance, I heard on the radio today, you're a "public health hazard". There are ads everywhere to persuade people that they must nag their doctor to prescribe PharmaCorp’s very own brand of pill.
Furthermore, many here seem concurrently contemptuous of European legislation to limit the hours of the working week and complaining that they're over-worked.
Things I like about America: the utterly un-self-conscious patriotism, the general optimism and feeling that Things Can Be Improved, the weather and the mountains that this place is named after.
I'll miss the friends I've made here but I'll be very glad to return to Dublin — for none of the reasons I've described above. My department, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), is scattered throughout the campus over here, whereas in Dublin we're all on the same floor and have a shared and very tangible camaraderie.