A Very American Thanksgiving

Our first Thanksgiving in the USA! We had a nice quiet night at home, cooked an applewood smoked turkey roll, some potato cake and vegetables, cranberry and apple sauces and a New Zealand Pinot Noir... very nice. Then we decided to pop down to Walmart about 10pm to see if we could get some toys cheap - they have a tradition of big sales at Thanksgiving ("Black Friday"), usually starting on the 25th, this year Walmart started their toy sale at 10pm on the 24th. Packed is not the word. Not only were there thousands of people there but most of them had shopping trolleys. A quick look revealed that they didn't have what we were after so we left, glad we weren't queuing up at the checkouts.

But I still got up at 6:30am to pop down to Officemax to pick something up on sale, turns out the place was quiet! No queues, very few people, so I was in and out pretty fast. I guess their sale wasn't as sought after (Best Buy had a queue around the block before midnight so I didn't bother going in). But the best fun was yet to come...

We had been invited to go target shooting, so after breakfast we set off west, to a small gun club out near a town called Polo. Andy was there with his wife and some other family members and a surprising array of guns - a 7.62mm AK47 with modified stock, a .22 MP5 knock off, a 9mm MAC-11 uzi type thing, a couple of .22 pistols, a Ruger 9mm pistol and there was also a Civil War pattern black powder revolver and rifle and a Colt 45 cowboy revolver as well!

Just some of the selection...

He had a range of targets set up including some blocks of ice. I had to have a go with the AK of course, powerful and surprisingly accurate (it was a semi-automatic, no autos allowed).

Striking a pose for la revolucion

The black powder rifle was impressive - smoke and noise!

And I wasn't the only one having fun.

So, much fun was had, the black powder guns produced a lot of smoke and an almighty deep bang, the .22's were very accurate and the Colt 45 was surprisingly easy to use (I don't know how those cowboys fired them one handed while riding a horse though). I managed to hit the targets a fair amount of times but by far my best effort was when a Walther PPK pistol was produced - the James Bond gun - and I got to have a go. 7 shots and 7 targets down, very easy to use and aim. Nice!

A short vid showing some of the action:

Getting my Illinois Drivers Licence

OK, I haven't done a lot of driving over here so far, a bit of local stuff and some cruising to Chicago and back. Luckily I have my navigator ;), by far the worst part of driving in any new place is finding your way around and when it's on the other side of the road trying to concentrate on navigation is just one more undesirable distraction.

So far I have been just using my NZ drivers licence, as far as I can tell according to Illinois law it is perfectly legal as long as I have a valid visa, so on my F-1 I am good to drive with that for at least a couple of years. However it is also a requirement to have insurance, and the insurance company demand that I get an Illinois licence within 30 days, or be in the process of getting it.

To get an Illinois Drivers Licence however you need a Social Security Number (SSN). If you're unfamiliar with what this is, it is a magical number that is required to do most things in the US, but if that number gets in the wrong hands then it can cause problems (think credit issues linked to you via your SSN). It is not just a tax number (like the NZ IRD number or the NI number in the UK).

As a foreigner I have to apply for a SSN, and this can take several weeks. You may be able to spot the potential issue here with my drivers licence... Anyway, I could apply through the university, a Social Security representative turned up to go through all the paperwork of the hundred or so of us in the line and told me I would have mine in a few weeks.

In the meantime I was reading through the Illinois road code - as Illinois has no licence recognition agreements with any other countries (or indeed other states from what I can tell) and requires you to sit the full test. I was a bit nervous, I haven't sat a driving test in years and this was in a foreign country driving on the other side of the road. I think I have it down pretty well but who knows what I would need to do - parallel parking for example is pretty rare here and I haven't done one while driving on the right. As an aside I am surprised how much less flexible I seem to be looking to my right through the back window than when I had to turn my head left to do it. Seriously, I am a good few seconds slower at orienting myself in the car as well, I guess all those years of practice have made it second nature and now I have to learn a new side!

In the end it was a bit of an anticlimax. I turned up and took my number, waited,  handed over all the documentation, proof of address, passport, visa etc and went over to a little booth to sit my exam. 20 questions on basic road code (about a third was "what does this sign mean") and I was back to the desk to let them know I was done. I then just had to wait until a driving examiner was available.

The driving test was super basic. I mean, all I really did was turn left and right and do one three point turn. I also had to pull over at one point and then tell the instructor how I would turn the wheels if I was parked on a hill. No parallel parking, no hill starts (no hills), not even driving on multi-lane roads. I did clear up an argument for the staff though, they were evenly split over whether we drove on the right side or the "wrong" side of the road in New Zealand

So now I have a US drivers licence in the state of Illinois. One definite benefit is now I have a State ID, invaluable as otherwise I had to use my passport for everything. And I have only driven on the left once so far...

Red sky at night... Shepherd's delight!

An amazing red sky tonight, unfortunately I didn't have anything other than my phone at the time and I don't think it did the colour of the wispy clouds justice, they were a deep purple/red.

Luckily I managed to get home and get my camera in time to catch some of the sunset near home.