England v. USA

You would think the English language and culture in Great Britain would be at least sort of similar to ours wouldn’t you? On the contrary ‘my dear boy!’ With all of the contrasting customs between us Americans and the English, we might as well have been traveling in China. We composed a short list of our favorite differences, neither point of view is right or wrong, we were just amazed at how opposite they were:

• For breakfast at home, put the carton of milk and the jar of jam directly on the table; they pour the milk into a craft, spoon their jam into a bowl, put their toast in a toast rack and place their eggs in fancy little egg cups.

• We have finger food and napkins, they eat everything with a fork and knife and never set the table with napkins. For example, we eat our hamburger between two buns with our hands, they serve it without a top bun and eat it off a plate with a fork and knife. They even have funny looking oversized double pronged toothpicks designed specifically for making sure you don’t use your hands when eating your ‘chips’ (aka french fries).

• We wash our dishes with soap and then rinse them off, they skip the rinse.

• We server our beer cold and carbonated, theirs is more like tap water; flat, a wee bit warmer and missing a whole lot of flavor.

• We have straight highways and multi-lane roads with sidewalks, they have a maze of curvy hedge lined single lane roads that are used for two way traffic. The hedges are so close to road that pedestrians have to walk in the middle of the street and the brambles scratch up cars as they pass by.

• Our humor is lush, and moist with insinuation, theirs a wee bit dry and missing some expression.

We tried our best to fit in by speaking with an upward tone and ending our sentences with ‘isn’t it?’ or ‘doesn’t it?’ but our nasally accents didn’t fool them. We have now come to the shocking conclusion that to other people we actually have American accents. It makes you think, doesn’t it?