Easter Cooking

I saw some hot cross buns at the supermarket today; the scabby little American ones with the icing cross. No, I wasn't even tempted to buy some. I'm making the chocolate sort again this year. I'm using the same recipe as last year except this time I added some orange zest.

They're not all that pretty as I just scored the tops and drizzled a cornflour mix over them. (It was only after I'd done this that I remembered that I actually had a piping bag and could have done it neatly! Oh, well; next batch.)

American Illness

I'm just getting over a cold so I thought I'd give some more info on what Americans call things:

American	English
acetaminophen	paracetamol
Tylenol	Panadol (i.e. the most popular brand of paracetamol)
Advil	Nurofen (i.e. most popular brand of ibuprofen)
analgesics (even in the supermarket they use the technical term)	pain killers
allergies	hayfever
mono(nucleosis)	glandular fever
sinus infection	sinusitus
pink eye	conjunctivitis?
strep throat	tonsillitis?

I think I mentioned before that they have nothing here as good as butter menthols. Luckily I had some on the days I had to teach.

My cold's almost gone now. Just a bit of a cough so I'm taking expectorant tablets to try to clear that up before the end of the week.

Sink the Bismark

Tonight Cindy and I had a free dinner at one of Bloomington's most famous pubs, Nick's English Hut. (No, there's nothing English about it.) It was free because Chevron has sent recruiters to the geology department and they're trying to soften up the students. I don't mind eating and drinking their dirty money!

While we were there we noticed that many of the other tables were drinking their beer in a very strange way. They had small galvanised buckets in the middle of their tables and were pouring beer from their cups into the centre. The buckets were almost full of beer (about 1.5L) with a small glass floating in it. When they'd poured enough beer into this floating glass, whoever had sunk it had to drink it. Ah, American College students!

It turns out this game is called "Sink the Bismark" and it's quite a tradition at Nick's, you can even buy sets so that you can play the game at home.