I had a very productive morning, hitting the gym, swinging by the office to take care of a few things, and then just riding buses around the city.  Right now I’m just relaxing a little before I head out again.  Manchester United is hosting Arsenal tonight in a 5th round FA Cup game.  I can go into great detail describing the FA Cup for pages, but it’s an awesome tournament where basically any football (soccer) team in the entire country can get in.  Some teams are people who are part time players, but have real jobs.  So it would be like the Yankees facing a small baseball club from a Chicago suburb where all the guys on the team have real jobs and just play baseball in the evenings.  The draws are completely random, and sometimes the Yankees type team has to go play at some random park since the home/away draw is random as well.  There’s lots of magic to the FA Cup since there have been some miracle runs in the past.  Now they’re down to mainly the big clubs, as the cinderella teams have been bounce for the most part.

 Anyway, I’m going to head to a pub in Arsenal’s neighborhood (they’re a London team, Manchester is 3+ hours away).  Man U is basically the Yankees, they buy all the superstars and run away with the league.  So I’ll be cheering on Arsenal.  Should be interesting.

 I did want to write a little bit about sort of the theme of my experiences so far, which is in the title.  As some of you might know, London isn’t an exotic place that’s so different than Chicago that it requires major changes, like say, moving to Vietnam.  There are times that I have to remind myself that I’m in a different country, thousands of miles away from home.  Given that, life here requires only minor adjustments.  This is both a good and a bad thing.  Everything here is just slightly different from the US.  I’ll give some examples below, but the negative part is that you get into a false sense of security at times because the changes are minor.  That leads to some things getting frustrated when you can’t get them to work right or you feel you can’t get something accomplished.

The People:  Walking down the street in London feels just like Chicago.  The demographic makeup is just about the same, predominantly white professionals of European descent.  There is a diversity in London, but probably in a similar proportion as you would see in Chicago.  So even walking down the street, if you ignore the cars driving down the wrong side of the road, the double decker buses, and the architecture, it’s easy to feel like you’re at home.  The slight changes settle in during conversation.  The most obvious change, of course, is the accent.  This only became a hurdle for the first couple of days.  It’s really just the initial shock of hearing different pronunciations that makes it difficult.  I was worried at first that it would take a while to adapt, but that flew by pretty quickly.  I still have to ask people to report themselves often, but people do the same with me, so it all works out.  However, it was explained to me that it’s much easier for Brits to understand Americans because they watch so many American movies and tv shows.  I guess if I watched Coupling and the British version of the Office all the time, then the transition would’ve been smoother.

The much more difficult aspect of the “language difference” is the slang.  There are the obvious words and phrases that most Americans know about, “loo”, “flat”, “lift”, “quid”, “mind the gap”, etc.  But there are so many more that I don’t know.  So even if I clearly understand each word that someone says to me, I have no chance to truly understand them, and that has been frustrating for me, and I’m sure for others as well.  To make it even tougher, some of their slang phrases mean the opposite of what they’d mean in the US.   I wish I could think of a couple examples off the top of my head, but I’m drawing blank.  The only one I can come up with is when you ask someone if they’re going to make an event, and they say they’re “out”.  In the states, that means they won’t make it, here it means the opposite.  I also tried to book a train ride to Cambridge for tomorrow, when it came time to pay, it said “Return from London Liverpool Street to Cambridge”.  To me, that sounds like a one way fare, but “Return” apparently works as “Roundtrip”.

Everyday activities:  I’ve mentioned a few of these in previous entries, but it seems like everything operates slightly differently here.  If it worked completely differently, it would be easy to accept that you need a full tutorial or you could just give up.  However, by instinct, if it looks like it works the same, you just give it a try.  The differences are usually subtle.  Lots of things around the flat drive me nuts.  My first couple dishwasher runs drove me mad, as the door that holds the detergent tablet doesn’t open.  It’s embarrassing to ask people at work about the simplest of tasks, but I did learn that because of the hardness of the water here, most of the items like a detergent door don’t flip open so easily.  So I was advised to just huck the tablet into the base of the dishwasher and turn it on.  The ironing board legs won’t fold out.  I can’t figure out if it’s broken or just works differently, but when I needed to get slacks ironed the other day and couldn’t get it open, I just about threw it through a window.  The toilet, “shower curtain”, alarm clock, electrical sockets, and many more items have been slightly tough to figure out, which can get very frustrating.

Sports:  Soccer is football, football is soccer.  Same game, different name, and over here, obviously people care a great deal about football, whereas in the states, the games are often played in half empty stadiums.  American football is much more similar to rugby, than football.  However, it’s played without pads and seems just a short bit shy of insane.  Cricket is semi-similar to baseball, but the games go on for 4 or 5 days.  It’ll be a while before I figure out the rules or how the game is scored.  There are both snooker and bar billiards, both of which are pretty different than pool, but the same concept of using a stick to knock balls on a board into holes.

Money:  England is still on the British Pound, one of the few European countries left not on the Euro.  The denominations of the bills are about the same with one notable exception, they don’t have dollar bills here.  They have coins for a pound, or two pounds.  By instinct, when I get home, I empty my pockets onto the counter.  On an average day, that could mean dumping 6 or 7 quid (slang for pound) on the counter.  Over the course of a week, I accumulate a pile of coins that can sometimes contain up to 40 or 50 quid.  So while most times, a pile of change doesn’t feel like much, that’s about $100 sitting on my counter.  It’s a little tedious to collect all the one quid and two quid coins out and load them into your pocket and head out for the evening.  To complicate things, debit and credit cards aren’t as widely accepted here, so you tend to carry more money than usual.

The other tough part of that is wearing a hole in your pockets and the ability of people to hear you from a block away.  You do hear about muggings happening here.  I’ve yet to feel unsafe anywhere, but calling attention to yourself through the sound of change in your pocket, probably isn’t a good thing.

I need to wrap this up and get ready to head out.  I’ll probably hit the Finsbury Circus neighborhood and find a reasonably crowded pub of Arsenal supporters to watch the game.  Lots of the people from work seem to be out of town this weekend, so there weren’t any options of joining someone from work.

Phil