Who taught: Andrew, Jake, Carol and Jean

Have you ever walked any street in the United States? If you have and paid careful attention, you would have noticed that there are some differences between roads. Do you know what that is? It is the name of streets. As far as I know, there are 7 different names. They are Ave, St, Rd, Blvd, Pl, Ln and broadway. Broadway is kind of unique in a sense that it does not have any specific name. It is just broadway. Most of cities I have visited have this road but I do not think Pittsburgh has broadway. I have never heard of it in Pittsburgh. Anyways, the most common ones are Ave (Avenue), St (Street) and Rd (Road). On these, there are usually many traffic. Blvd (Boulevard) one is tricky. It is kind of hard to pronounce correctly. Why don’t you try it now? Do you think you can speak it correctly? Good for you!

You would not see Pl and Ln very often. They are usually narrow which means not that many cars are using those. Well, when I first saw those, I had no idea what they are. I actually pronounced Pl as “pai” because I thought “l” is not lowercase L but uppercase I. But, it is lowercase l and shortened one for Place. Ln is Lane. Are there any other ones? I cannot think of any but I am sure there are more.

Short bus (source: http://conorheffernan.com/)

Two times on weekdays, you can see so many yellow vehicles running around in the United States. They are school buses. Typical school bus is always yellow and pretty big and long. Here is one interesting fact related with school bus I found on Wikipedia.

Every school day, over 480,000 school buses transport 26 million children to and from schools and school-related activities.

This is very different from Korea. Most of students in Korea either walk or use public transportation to or from schools. Well, anyways, they look very simple but they do have many safety features including something related with seats. It is called compartmentalization. Google it up! You will find it very interesting.

A few months ago, my friends and I had dinner and they used an expression, riding the short bus, which I had no idea what they are talking about. This is of course related with school bus. As I said, typical school buses are pretty long but there are short ones too. Well, before I heard of this expression, I thought those short ones are just short because there are not that many students using the bus.

Well, it turns out that those short ones are mostly used to ferry students with special needs. So, if you are in that bus, then what? Well, I do not want to go too far and leave this to your imagination. You can use this expression to your friends when they say something dumb or do stupid things. But, this expression is derogatory so that I would not encourage to use it. Once again, it is good to know so that, if someone uses this to you, you can properly respond. If you know what I mean!! 🙂