Not My Native Tongue—Metric for Americans
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re in Vienna, Austria, which is 878 kilometers from Florence. How far is 878 kilometers? One short flight, or 8 rows of my current knitting and two podcasts, or one piece of gianduiotto and a cappuccino plus four chapters of the book I’m reading.
Do you speak metric?
Our eldest child, Toby, has lived abroad since he graduated from high school (aside from one six-month pit-stop in NC). Because the rest of the world uses the metric system, he seems to have fully internalized it—he speaks metric. For some reason (perhaps my middle-aged bullheadedness) I’m still translating in my head, or worse, on my phone.
It’s a daily issue in our lives; you don’t realize how much we measure until you suddenly don’t understand the system. Weight, distance, temperature, volume—I’m constantly trying to interpret a system that I rarely encountered for most of my previous life.
Speed limits, washing machine settings, serving sizes—they all require metric, in addition to the local language. On top of all that, sometimes the system itself is incomprehensible—have you ever tried to buy baklava by weight? How many grams would I like? I have no idea.
In Turkey, I spent weeks buying baklava, and never once getting exactly what I wanted. I went into a shop one day, pointed, and held up two fingers. They young woman behind the counter packed up four pieces. I went back to the same shop the next day, and did the exact same thing. This time, an older woman behind the counter yelled at me, then packed up six pieces.
At least now I know exactly what I still don’t know: how many grams is two pieces of baklava?
I can manage kilometers, as long as the numbers are low, or roughly similar to race numbers: five kilometers is a distance I comprehend in my bones. Same with ten. When the numbers get much higher than that, I start doing math in my head. Marathons? Yeah, those are still in miles.
I know that I like the air conditioner set around 18, for sleeping. Not sure what that is in Fahrenheit, and all air conditioners are different, so it always takes a night or two to understand each system, but more often than not, I land on 18, give or take, for optimal hot-flash avoidance.
Sometimes the systems even intersect, like in Icelandic hot tubs (known as hotpots): they’re generally in the 38-40 zone (Celsius), as is the air (Fahrenheit).
Centimeters aren’t too difficult—when the doctor said my tendon had a lengthways tear, I didn’t have to do math to understand that 8 cm is definitely suboptimal.
100 grams is equivalent to the quantity of loose-leaf tea I used to buy, or one Swiss chocolate bar. One kilo is a generous quantity of cherries, or an absurd quantity of mushrooms. Lee says half a kilo is the right quantity of cherries, but he also says he won’t eat them all, and then he does. I’ve learned to just go ahead and buy the whole kilo.*
*[What Lee actually says: one kilo of cherries = three days of diarrhea.]
I no longer have to think about what 2 meters means: it’s how much distance I should leave between myself and the person in front of me in the grocery store line. The bigger question is whether the person behind me understands, and on this point, I suspect my comprehension of metric is better than basically everyone else’s. I realize that most of my readers have probably been vaccinated by now, but the rest of the world hasn’t been, so social distancing isn’t going away any time soon. Two meters, six feet—metric, imperial—whatever you speak: leave some space.
From my writer’s notebook:
Vienna, like Florence, is an Art City. My attention, though, has shifted a bit, from the Renaissance to a more modern era. Specifically, I’m obsessing over the works of Gustav Klimt.
You’ll be familiar with his work—I feel like they occupy the same place in popular culture now that Monet’s Waterlilies occupied when I was in college, but that could just be that phenomenon where you notice the thing you’re interested in. Yes, I plastered the walls of my dorm room with Monet posters—apparently I’ve moved on to shinier, sexier images nowadays.
But there’s a darker story surrounding one of Klimt’s most famous paintings, which is the subject of the film Woman in Gold. It’s worth a watch, for a sense of the current struggles within the art and legal communities regarding restitution of works that were looted (in various ways—confiscated, stolen, bought under duress) by the Nazis.
Take care,
Lisa
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