More UK Culture Shock

Back by popular demand

Okay this is the peak culture shock: I caught COVID. Y’all gotta stop culturing this stuff, Plague Island.

Seems like every other person not only smokes but rolls their own cigarettes. I’ve only known one person in America to do that and it was in college. We prefer our cigarettes to burn at a smooth, consistent 900 degrees via being soaked in jet fuel first.

Every time I hear “TESCO,” I think of Fukushima, which is controlled by TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power COmpany) in Japan. Please fix this.

“Are you alright?” said with expected intonation but not said out of concern for obvious distress, as Americans would say it, but in place of, “Are you ready?” or “Hello! I recognize you, person on the street!” My heart skips a beat every time but everyone has always been clearly alright when asked this in Standard British English.

Someone suggested “eel pie” as a treatment for illness and it was not some weird word for an otherwise normal food like banana pudding, but a real suggestion of like fish eel pot pie with a crust. Eel goes on rice, Anglos. I went to Japan first and that means they have more of a claim to how to prepare eels than Atlantic islanders because I’m American and we’re a first-person-limited perspective kind of culture. If I learned about it first, that means it’s older.

I had to finally confront the difference between a pound, a quid, a pence, and Mike Pence. I wanna go back to my inno-cents.

I happened to book a room across from the famous Manchester“Haçienda” which I read as “hachienda” because I speak and read both Turkish and Spanish. Therefore, I know that the word hacienda is spelled “hacienda” and I read ç as /ch/. This is a typo that could have been addressed decades ago but better late than never.

I keep trying to get into the driver’s side of cars and panicking when I see we’re about to turn right from the left lane into oncoming traffic. Hence taking the train to Brighton.

The fact that your country has not figured out shower doors. I thought it was just bougie Mangchester and their slideless one-door wonder shower but my hotel in Brighton and their shower had not one but two doors that both swing both directions like I’m going back and forth between a main dining area and a busy kitchen.