Now I am confused.
Now, people often say that American people are fat. That simply isn't true. And that's because fat doesn't adequately describe quite how huge these people are. I went shopping yesterday and when this really huge woman waddled past, I could have sworn that I felt a pull from her very own gravitational field (I hasten to add that this was the only attraction I felt).

This brings me on to my first question: How do they get so fat?

In order to investigate, I decided to go shopping. Lisa (the lady we are staying with) dropped us off at the shops. I always think that it is polite to learn the language in the countries that you visit and this is where I learnt my first American word, Maarwwwl. We went to a place called Florida Maarwwwl, I think this translates to 'Florida Shopping Complex'.

And so back to our question. The first thing I noticed about the Maarwwwl was how big it was. It was huge. I didn't realise how big it was until I saw Sir Ranulph Fiennes and even he looked tired. So, if all the fat people walk this far each day, how do they stay so big? Well, I found an answer for the Police (they are called 'Cops' over here). Whilst most people would have thought that the best way to patrol the Maarwwwl would be on foot, the Florida state cops travel around on Segway Scooters. Aside from making them look like extras from Doctor Who, I seriously think that these devices must render their crime fighting abilities obsolete.

All this observing was making me thirsty so I decided to get a drink from one of the many vending machines dotted around the Maarwwwl. This is where I made a discovery. In the machine I expected to find a selection of the many popular drinks that we have (these are called 'Soda's' (and by the way, if you try and use any other word to describe them you might as well be speaking Japanese)). Instead of normal drinks, the machines contain only energy drinks. And to use the word 'drink' is pushing it as these things are nothing more than a bottle full of damp sugar and caffeine. Anyway I decided to buy one. In England, after putting in your coins, the curly arm turns around and quite happily allows your drink to tumble to the bottom of the machine. This fizzes it up so much that it leaves the bottle in a similar state to a live grenade. In America however, a little arm appears which gently collects your drink and places it carefully in the tray at the bottom. I thought this was neat (another American word I learnt), until I realised that due to the chemical potential energy crammed into the bottle, if the machine let it fall to the bottom it would result in an explosion big enough to destroy a small building. This is what propells these fat people around.

So after having consumed this narcotic syrup, I hopped, skipped and stumbled around the shops and things only got weirder. I can understand that if you own a shop you want to fill it with things that represent your shop and give it a topical feel, and that great. For example, a shop selling walking shoes might have some fake shrubs and trees to remind you of that places that you might walk. So far so good. So I decided to have a look in a surf shop. Surf shops are cool I thought, and I wouldn't have been surprised to see a surf board or two in the surf shop. Or maybe a bit of sand. Now at first I thought that I was tripping out on my energy juice, but after rubbing my eyes it was still there. Someone at some point had decided that the best thing to put in the surf shop to remind people that it was a surf shop would be......... a wave. That's right, at the back of the surf shop was a massive tank with a wave inside. Now in case you couldn't have made the connection between a wave and a surf shop, there was a man on a surf board surfing the wave! And every time you wondered over to the massive glass window the man would flick his board and spray the window with water. Only in America.