The reason America puts HCFS in everything is to make a new type of soldier that will help cement their plans for world domination.

So with America properly purged from my system I went home. There is some shock at the airport, but when you’re getting a connecting flight to somewhere you’re stuck in your own little cordoned off environment which protects you for a couple more hours. But, for me, the first bit of reverse culture shock came with a sip. Food choice in airports varies little and in the US you’re usually given the choice of pastries, food court, or somewhere like Applebees. Being cheap, I went with McDonalds, which was fine, but I made the horrible mistake of choosing to drink a Coke.

If you go overseas for a while and are able to drink a soft drink from somewhere that is the US, you will realize that there is major difference between the two, the sweetener. Because of subsidies for corn, they put HCFS in Coke instead of sugar. When you aren’t used to drinking/eating the American version of something, the HCFS version tastes slightly off and leaves a coating of freedom in your mouth that you can’t get rid of since all you have to drink is this crap they call soda/pop. Luckily I had $1.05 on me.

The coat of freedom gives +2 to bust size.

The other thing that you immediately are aware of is that everyone around you is speaking the same language you are and, therefore, can understand what you say. When you live somewhere where you essentially have your own little secret language that you share with a small minority of the population you become quite acclimated to it and, maybe eventually, prefer it over having everyone around you speak your mother tongue. I was speaking to a Swedish guy in a train about this and he agreed with me. His justification of it was that when he was on the trains in Amsterdam, where he was going to art school, and he saw a cute guy he liked he didn’t have to whisper to his friend, they could just talk in Swedish.

Unfortunately the coat of freedom is also cursed and adds +5 to weight per turn.

Well, when your secret language is abruptly taken from you it’s very disquieting. To give an analogy, it’s similar to an episode of Oprah I watched a long time ago. A woman hadn’t cut her hair in over a decade and her family, in their deep and never-ending love, made her get her hair cut on the show. After the hair cut she was standing in front of the audience with a took of fear, like the audience weren’t really women with overflowing levels of estrogen, but they were actually ravenous lizard people that were going to devour her alive after the cameras stopped rolling. Since I don’t think she played football or received a flurry of blows to the head she probably didn’t think they were lizard people, but you get a similar sort of reaction when you realize that you have just been transported to a place where everyone can understand what you say, maybe, and you might have to start using your brain-mouth filter a little more often.