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Only in England…

November 9th, 2010 amguar12

OK, so I was going to write this post about my adventures over the weekend, but I am not in the mood for that right now, so I will just fill you in on some interesting snippets of life in England thus far.

Corridor Cricket: Last night, it was really rainy and my flatmates and I were all bored. So, we had this really large water bottle with only a little bit of water in it that we used as a bat to hit tennis balls down the hallway of our flat. Needless to say, I almost destroyed the doorbell and the hanging light, but this game lasted an hour and was great fun (and hopefully not too much of a distraction for our neighbors living below us). My flat was also responsible for setting off the fire alarm yesterday when we were making dinner, causing the whole block to evacuate.

Kitchen tales from lunch today: Today, I decided to make some scrambled eggs and toast for lunch. I have noticed that when you buy eggs in England, they are sold on the shelf, un-refridgerated and next to the cereal and cans of beans. But as I took the eggs out of the fridge today, my flatmates Charlotte and Harry were like, oh no! Refridgerating eggs is really bad for them! You need to keep them on the counter, sometimes for weeks. Anyways, I continued to make lunch and then I sat down and started to read a People magazine that my family just sent me. Harry looks at it and says, “what is that?”. I’m like, “People magazine,”. He claims he never heard of it before. Interesting. Another thing to note about the kitchen – it is always always ALWAYS a mess, except for when the cleaners come on Wednesday mornings, leaving it clean for about half the day.

Cider: Oh, what a great tasting drink only to be found in England!

The Big Lemon: This is a bus that runs on cooking oil, and is one of the main ways of transport into Brighton.

Daylight Savings Time: Yes, they still have this in England, but it occurred a week earlier than it did in America (this is actually not unique to England, as other European countries set their clocks back when England did as well)

Seasons much later: The leaves started falling from trees around Halloween. Definitely behind the States.

Popular main meals: Sundays are traditionally days when one would eat a roast dinner, consisting of roast beef, potatoes, vegetables and Yorkshire pudding. The full English breakfast contains eggs, sausage, bacon, toast, potentially a tomato and of course beans. Fish and chips are ever-popular, and one of the most popular foods is chicken tikka masala, as well as chicken korma (basically, Indian food is very popular here). Turkey is the main dish for Christmas dinner, and according to all the supermarkets I’ve been in, you can start reserving your Christmas turkey now! Tea beats coffee (they mainly seem to have instant coffee here, and iced tea is unacceptable). Oh, and Cadbury products are extremely popular when it comes to chocolate!

Another exciting thing is that since there is no Thanksgiving here, the Christmas season starts a lot earlier in stores and with Christmas lights hanging all around Brighton. It’s a beautiful sight!

OK, there is so much more I can probably think of as soon as I click “publish” to publish this post, but hopefully this is interesting enough, and I will post again soon!!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 9th, 2010 at 6:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.