Top ten American/British differences

I thought around this time it might be interesting to make a list of all the differences I’ve observed between the US and the UK so far. So without further ado, here are the top ten differences I’ve seen so far:

1) Laundry

Everyone in this city has a washing machine in their flat, but pretty much nobody has a drier. Weird right? You take your clothes right out of the wash and hang them up on these drying racks and wait two days for them to dry. This is strange to me because, in New York, it’s considered a luxury to have washing machines in your building, let alone in your apartment! And if you do have a washing machine, you will always have a drier to go along with it. I’ve never seen a washing machine all on its own before I came here. But everyone has them, and they’re always in the kitchen.

2) Heat

And speaking of appliances, also in everyones’ kitchens are these big gas heat contraptions which turn on and off to eat the unit (they look very scary, there’s fire inside!). Everyone has gas heat here, which I’ve never had before. Many people have their thermostats on timers, so that they turn off overnight and during the day while they’re at work. That’s right, turn off, not even a lower temperature or anything. “Why heat an empty house?” they ask me. “But…then it’s all cold when you get home!” My addled American brain tried to wrap itself around the concept. I suppose turning it off during the day makes sense, but overnight? It’s freezing!

3) Public Drinking

It’s allowed, and quite common. It’s so strange to me to be sitting on the tube and see the person across from me sipping a beer. Not that I’m complaining! I’ve fully taken advantage of this wonderful custom.

4) Corner Shops

And speaking of corner shops, they leave much to be desired. They’re kind of the equivalent of “delis” in New York, except that there’s no actual deli so you can’t really call it that. While in New York there’s basically three on every block, here they’re not nearly as common and you can end up walking for 30 minutes trying to find one. For that reason, I can’t really pull my legendary beer trick here. Not only because it would take too long to go from the club to the deli, but also because the delis/corner shops cant’ sell beer after 11 because of...

5) Blue Laws

Probably most of you are familiar with the fact that London has these ridiculous licensing laws, what we would call “blue laws” in the Northeast. Basically there are three different licenses. One allows you to serve alcohol till 11, another till 2, and another till 4. All of the pubs close their doors at 11. Some bars (a “bar” here is basically a fancier “pub” where you can’t wear sneakers) continue to serve after that but don’t let anyone else in, and legally they have to pretend you’re just a “guest” in their “private establishment” so they can’t “charge” you. But they do. If you want to go anywhere after 11 it’s going to involve a long wait in line and a cover charge. So fun right?

6) Language

They use funny words here! A few notable examples that have tended to confuse me: “brilliant” is used here as an exclamation of approval, like “awesome” in the states (but if you say “awesome” here people laugh at you). I was quite confused when I handed someone at work a stapler and they said “brilliant!!” as if I had just discovered the cure for cancer or something. Trucks are “lories”. You don’t go to the bathroom, you “go to the toilet” (something that sounds a bit too specific to me!). Instead of saying “how are you?” you say “Are you alright?” which tends to unnerve me because in the states you would only say that to someone if they looked unwell or upset. And finally, British people have this tendency to add “isn’t it?” at the end of their sentences for no reason at all. As in, “It’s right cold outside isn’t it.” It’s not as a question, it’s a statement of fact.

7) Politeness

Everyone here is very very polite to each other, almost eerily polite (at least coming from New York!). There’s greater civility in daily life. But at the same time, people are much more blunt here than they are in the states. I like this combination of politeness and directness, it seems to me to be the ideal way to interact.

8) Customer Service

Customer service here is a constant gripe, and its high quality in the US is continually praised by Brits. After living here a month I can see why! It’s truly abysmal, at least from an American perspective. Most everything closes at 6pm, phone numbers for troubleshooting things are hard to find, and everything is done by appointment. All in all though it’s really not a big deal.

9) Voicemail

Europeans have some kind of distrust or dislike for voicemail which I cannot understand. Most people don’t even have it set up on their mobiles, and many people don’t have it set up on their work phones either, which really frustrates me at work. They all send texts rather than leave voicemails. In fact, people call me and if I don’t answer, rather than leave me a voicemail (which I do have set up) they hang up and then send a text message with whatever they wanted. Weird right? I think I’ve been left one voicemail the whole time I’ve been here, and that was from my grandma! I even got a text from my liason at the bank to tell me my account had been opened successfully. And at work, people answer my phone if it rings and I’m not here, and then leave me a note. Why?? I can’t understand it. It’s so much easier for me to get the voicemail because then they can leave exactly what they wanted. A written message only has their name and number. And, having someone else take a message for me is needlessly involving someone else in the process who shouldn’t be bothered.

10) Commercials

This cracks me up. International companies will take American commercials and run them here, but they’ll dub them over with a British accent. If it’s something that requires a good deal of on-screen actors, they’ll actually remake the exact same commercials except recasting with British actors. So right now Mac is running British versions of the “I’m a Mac” ads they’ve been running in the states. Now the ones in the states, starring John Hodgman and Justin Long, are hysterical. The British ones have one key difference: they’re stoooopid! They’re so not funny. Maybe it’s just because they’re using the same dialogue from the US versions, but these two actors are just not as funny. Here, watch one and judge for yourself.

Ok I could probably go on all day with this but I’ll leave it there.

Angela Merkel: supreme president of Earth?

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has really been grabbing the headlines lately, attracting attention for the way she has used German's time at the helm of the EU presidency to revive the rejected EU constitution. She also seems to be laying out an ambitious plan for Europe's future. Her address today in Davos at the World Economic Forum was the latest example. Take a look at this article from The Australian:

The British might say she is the most important female head of state since Maggie Thatcher. But whereas Thatcher changed Britain, Merkel plans to change
the world.

I found this picture of Merkel in a Darth Vader outfit on some German website by the way. I have no idea what the context is, but I think it's hysterical. I'm just getting to know Ms. Merkel really, but I have a feeling she's going to make her mark on Europe in a big way during her time as Germany's leader.

Chav-bashing

It’s freaking cold here! The temperature dropped dramatically on Monday, ending what had been a very mild weather streak the past few weeks. I was actually lulled into thinking that was going to be how it was all the time. I had read that the average temperature here in January is 5 C (42 F), but this week it’s been consistently 0 C (32 F). I guess it snowed overnight because there’s snow on everything this morning.

Whenever the temperature changes I get a cold, so of course I’m now sick. Although this may have something to do with the ridiculous amount of alcohol I drank Saturday night in Cologne. It was fun but made for a miserable plane ride back.

I thought I would write today about this really interesting idea here of “the chav,” a concept which doesn’t have any direct translation in American English but has some close relatives based on regions. Chavs are sort of a euphemism for “the great unwashed,” low-income, ignorant people preoccupied with tacky designer fashions. The defining features of the stereotype include clothing in the Burberry pattern (notably a now-discontinued baseball cap) and other things such as tracksuits, hoodies and sweatpants. Ali G was a caricature of this type of person. Vicky Pollard from Little Britain is another example of such a caricature.

I suppose our analogous terms might be a “Guido,” or in New York, the “bridge and tunnel” crowd. However these terms only apply to people in specific regions of the Northeast. “White trash” might be another comparable example, but this term tends to be applied more to rural populations in the US, rather than chavs who are typically more urban.

British reality TV

It’s strange, who would have guessed that Celebrity Big Brother, which I became so curious about when I first arrived here, would spark a major international incident! The proportions of this have really gotten huge. Could the end result of all this be, finally, the death of trashy reality TV? I do so want to believe that, but my natural skepticism doubts it.

I’m not sure how much play this is getting in the states, so I’ll briefly recap for you. Big Brother is a huge phenomenon here, with a live TV feed and the inane details of the show plastered across the front pages of the tabloids every morning. This seasons Celebrity Big Brother invited on Jade Goody, a woman who became a “celebrity” (the term is used loosely here) through her appearance on a previous Big Brother. Basically, she became well-known for her outrageous stupidity.

Controversy erupted when Jade and two other contestants started picking on Shilpa Shetty, a Bollywood star from India. They said some things that were vaguely racist, such as saying Shilpa should “fuck off home” and saying Shilpa “wants to be white” because she bleaches her upper lip hair. Basically the things that were said were more stupid and ignorant than overtly racist. Well she did call Shilpa “Poppadom,” but I have no idea what that means.

A weekend in Cologne

This weekend I went to Cologne to visit my friend Hale, who is there doing a program with the state department and was having a birthday party Friday night. It was really fun. I went Mark and Vanessa, a Dutch couple who recently moved to London who know Hale from San Diego. We stayed at a hostel right in the city center (next to the Dom) so what was pretty cool.

Hale had the party Friday night at the bar he’s working at, and there was a pretty good turnout. I met a lot of interesting people, including one girl who’s being living and working in Germany for five years. We were swapping stories of the difficulties Americans face getting work visas in Europe, and she told me that next time I enter the US I should be prepared for a thorough grilling. She said every time she comes home they ask her a million questions.

“Why were you in Germany?”
“Studying””Why can’t you study in the US?”
“I preferred to study there”
“Why have you chosen to work there?”
“Because I wanted to”

It’s kind of ridiculous. And this is just to get back in to your own country, which, by the way, is still taxing you even while you work abroad (the only country in the world to do so as far as I'm aware).

What do they teach the Belgians?

Tuesday night I went out for a beer with this Belgian guy I met when I was here in September, Leiven. We were talking about my usual favourite topic of conversation, the EU and European history. He’s pretty strongly anti-US, but I found a lot of his perceptions of the country are just wrong.

I find handling these types of situations to be rather delicate. After all, in correcting their perception and telling them the way it actually is, I don’t want to come off as an arrogant American who thinks he knows everything. But at the same time, it’s not in my nature to look the other way when someone says something that’s factually incorrect.

But this isn’t the point of my story. During the course of the conversation one of the incorrect things he said was that the sinking of the Lusitania by the Germans was what brought the US into World War II (he was so sure of it he even bet money on it, I won £10!). I informed him that it was in fact the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor that brought the US into WWII, and that the sinking of the Lusitania was the cause of our entry into WWI. To my astonishment, he wasn’t even aware the US had participated in WWI! We only ended the war for you, you ingrate! But I digress…