Metric Mania

Sorry that it has been awhile. It’s not that I haven’t had inspiration….there’s plenty of that here, but time has gotten away from me lately.
I have lived overseas before, so this topic comes as somewhat of a surprise to me. I was prepared to have a car that registers in Kilometers per hour and speed signs that do the same, but I don’t remember the metric system invading my life as much as it has this time around.
I remember cooking quite a bit in Japan, but this time my kitchen has become a foreign land in itself. First, my oven is in Celsius. This is fine if I am cooking something that has directions in the metric system. Some of the things I have bought (chicken nuggets, frozen pizzas) have the correct Celsius temperature to prepare them in. However, the wide majority of the foods I have purchased here have Fahrenheit temperatures (as well as any recipe I have ever followed in my life). Now why do you suppose in a country that is totally converted to the metric system, would they sell items without converting them? All items sold in the grocery stores have Arabic directions applied to them before they are sold…why not add Celsius temps as well???? I guess the good side to this is that I can now convert C to F and vice versa like a champ! And I didn’t even mention that my washer is in Celsius also. That’s a whole other story!
Another side of the metric system in the kitchen is measuring ingredients to add to things. For example, I was making some rice the other day and the instructions told me to add 425ml of hot water. 425ml?????? It’s a good thing that I am a nurse and I am familiar with milliliters, but do I have a measuring cup which measures in them? NOT! (Well, I do now) I also invested in a calculator to keep in one of my kitchen drawers.
Even buying the food at the grocery store becomes a complicated affair. Everything is sold per kilogram. As if it weren’t already complicated enough (I have to calculate in my head the conversion from Dirham to Dollars), but then I also have to figure out how much I want. For example: If I want to buy some ground beef, and the sign says AED 32 per Kilo, what exactly does that mean? Well, 32 Dirham (AED 32) is about $9. Then you have to convert from Kilograms to pounds (at least I do to figure out how much I want). Each Kilo is 2.2 pounds, so it turns out that a pound of ground beef is about $4. Whew! Did anyone follow that? Steve wonders why it takes me so long to go shopping around here! I now keep a little calculator in my purse.
I’ll summarize by saying that it has definitely been a learning process or a relearning process (I vaguely remember studying this in school at some point). Man…I wish I had paid more attention in math!