Living in the United States

Living here feels really good! It is nice to experience that this country is open to so many cultures and people are very friendly. Nobody says just "hi", but usually something like "hi, how is it going?" also to strangers (never ever in Finland). Of course, this is more a phrase belonging to the greeting, but if you answer "good", the other person might even reply "I'm glad to hear that" which sounds then less to belong to the pure greeting phrase, but I heard that more in California than here in Illinois. Still, people seem quite open and willing to help.
Yet, I encountered two negative aspects in this coutry as well: It is hard to survive
1.) as a vegetarian
2.) without a car.
And I happen to be in both categories. The four main courses served at the canteen are nearly always with meat. Sometimes there is a vegetarian soup or a vegetarian piece iof pizza. But otherwise only salad. After soup and salad for two weeks, now I start to cook myself. There is a little supermarket close to the entrance near Fermilab village. But in order to find a better one, I went a lot around by bike. Unfortunately, many roads do not have bicycle lanes and car driver are not used to bikers, so it is pretty dangerous. Even worse, the chain of the bike I borrowed from the housing office broke when I was furthest away in Batavia. I walked back for 3 hours. There is no public bus connection to the laboratory. At least the train to Chicago stops only 3-4 miles away from the lab so that it is possible to go there by bike.
I still have to get used to all the other measures like length (mile), volume (gallone), weight (lb, oz), money (dollar, half dollar, quarter, dime, nickel, penny) - only time is measured in the same units...
The language works better than I had feared. They seem to have a quite clear accent at Chicago. But I have some difficulties to understand people from other regions. My two supervisors are both from UK. And I should learn more English myself! Besides, the woman sitting next to me in the plane back from San Francisco asked me where I was from. I answered Germany and she replied that she had already heard that from my accent...