eptivity

Now that we have been in England for 12 whole days, I am fully qualified to pass judgment on the country and culture at large.

Great

Vegetarian foods are labeled with a green “V” symbol, which makes them very easy to find.

When you’re on a one-way street, there are lighted signs with blue arrows indicating as such.

If you get caught having not paid for the train, they add your name, home address, and amount you were fined to a poster that is then prominently displayed at all the stations.

Programs like this are called “schemes” instead of “programs,” which makes things sound much more devious.

Somebody actually said “toodle pip” to me the other day, and I don’t think he was entirely joking.

On April Fool’s Day, the BBC ran a commercial featuring a group of penguins that flies to the South American rainforest for the winter.

At the Sunday market, you can buy meat out of the side of a van and barely outdated magazines at 3/£2.50, which is considerably cheaper than their £3+ retail price.

Starbucks lets you drink out of real mugs if you aren’t getting your coffee take away (to go).

The sandwiches and fresh fruit and vegetables, when we can find them, are phenomenal. Which I would expect from the country that invented both the sandwich and not getting scurvy.

Not only do the “school crossing” signs display children running toward education with an eagerness usually reserved for a parent, child, and teddy bear sprinting across the US/Mexican border, but the “elderly people crossing” signs feature silhouettes of presumably elderly people hunched over their canes.

On the way back from Stratford-Upon-Avon, there are lambs wearing little red jackets.

Not So Great

The exchange rate is almost $2 to £1, which with the addition of the higher cost of living and VAT means it costs about $20 to go to Subway.

Non-mixing taps. I still have no idea how to wash my hands. I may have to skulk around the basins in the WC, spying on proper English ladies.

Our apartment, in a brand new building that doesn’t even have carpet yet, has not a single closet (”fitted wardrobe”). Silly Americans, we didn’t even check, and now have to buy wardrobes.

Flytipping: a completely made-up word to describe dumping in unauthorized areas, which in the US would eventually result in criminal trials involving 8×10 color glossy photos with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was, but which here appears to be something of a national pastime.

Different

A subway is a pedestrian walkway that goes under the street.

All kitchen appliances are a standard 60 cm wide—refrigerator, stove (”cooker”), dishwasher, and washing machine. Washer/dryer combos are very common, and apparently the dryers “dry” by running a sheet of cold water through the back of the machine, which is supposed to condense out the hot water in the clothes. So far we have heard of approximately zero people who have had success with this method.

There are CCTV cameras everywhere. Particularly eerie since I just finished reading 1984.

Tram tickets are bought once you board the tram, which means that the conductor has to monitor exactly who gets on at each stop and track them to their seats to extract the correct fare.

In Other News

Yes, I already have my library card.

We decided to not get a furnished apartment after all, which means that the apartment that we move in to next weekend will be a veritable Ikea showroom.

We met a real live Scottish woman whom we could barely understand.

We got 2 or so inches of snow the night before last, but it’s gone now.

This week, we’re off to a hotel in Swindon. All I know about Swindon is that my friend Eddie Izzard described it as a “knackered, sort of Fresno town.” Meaning absolutely nothing to me, having never been there either.