Vol. 1, No. 10 — This chapter was my tenth entry in the newspaper column series. It’s hard for me to believe, but I managed to make it this far without addressing the elephant in the room for any American in Europe: the metric system. Distances, temperatures, weights, speeds, volumes, and even some expressions of speech are all suddenly placed beyond an intuitive grasp when the world around you uses a different system of measurement. Most of it is straightforward to adapt to once you memorize a couple of conversions but getting used to another system of measurement is similar to learning a new language.