1. Rude drivers - although drivers here tend to be somewhat more courteous towards each other than they do in the US, they are anything but friendly towards pedestrians. Despite much governmental huffing and puffing about increasing the number of walkers and cyclists, the fact remains that crossing any road here requires a combination of savvy, speed and stupidity. Even halfway across the road I've had drivers turn directly in front of me like I'm not there.
2. Myopic street crossing design - in the US, a traffic light changes from green to amber to warn drivers that the light is about to turn red. In the US, this warning generally means 'go like hell'. In the UK, the light changes from red to flashing red and amber to inform drivers that the light is about to change. It generally also means 'go like hell'. The unfortunate thing is that at many intersections, the green crossing sign is lit until exactly the moment that the lights change to flashing red and amber. I can't tell you the number of times I've nearly been run down because when the red/amber combo started flashing I still had one foot on the sidewalk, making me fair game.
3. Foxes and their excrement - the foxes themselves aren't so bad, though they do chew up anything that we leave in the garden. It's their poo - slimy, smelly, everywhere - that really gets me.
4. Chavs - I've heard that 'chav' stands for 'council housed and violent'. I don't know whether this is the origin of the term, but it's accurate enough. There's a certain look about this type of person - something about the condition of their skin and hair, their clothes maybe, that makes these types stand out. Oh, yeah, maybe it's the pit bull that seems to accompany them everywhere. What is it about these people that compels them to buy dogs that look like Mike Tyson after a heavy night?
5. Ageing thugs - one of the oddest things I had to get used to here was the elderly thug. Men in their sixties back home don't generally instill any sort of fear, but here that same quality of skin and hair clings to the chav through his whole life well into old age. Frightening.
6. Pebbledash - a mixture of gravel and concrete, this awful treatment is applied to the exterior of many otherwise lovely homes. It's cheap and hides, as my grandfather used to say, a multitude of sins. It also looks, in color and texture, exactly like vomit.
7. Clouds - it doesn't actually rain that much here, it just usually looks like it's about to. It IS cloudy here. A LOT. That gets old pretty quickly.
8. Short winter days - on the winter solstice, the sun rises after 8am and sets before 4pm. This makes it hard to get out of bed in the morning.
9. Rubbish - there's always trash blowing around in the streets and on the sidewalks.
10. Vomit - we have a lot of bars and nightclubs in town, so I often have to maneuver the kids around a fresh pile of pebbledash on the sidewalk on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Yuck.
11. Driving on the other side - still haven't quite gotten used to this.
12. Brutalist architecture - nothing says 'post-War cheap and nasty' like sootstained poured concrete.
13. Health and safety - EU health and safety laws are among the strictest on the planet. If I had a dime for the number of times I heard that 'we used to be able to do that, but can't any more because of health and safety'...
14. VAT - like sales tax, only much, much higher.
15. Smelly commuters - I realize that sometimes people just can't help smelling. But first thing on a February morning? It's not like they've been sweating on the train for an hour yet.
16. Pushy commuters - The daily bump and grind to get on and off the trains got old quickly. I'm a big guy, I'm not really sure what makes people think they're going to be able to shove me out of the way.
17. The cycling menace - I'm sure that most people who cycle are mindful of traffic laws, pedestrians, etc., but I've had more than one near miss with a Spandex-clad cyclist wearing one of those idiotic aerodynamic helmets. Generally he's run a red light so that he can ride the wrong way down a one way street or he is riding on the sidewalk. I've considered carrying a heavy stick to shove into the spokes of his back wheel.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Things I Miss About America
You've probably noticed that my enthusiasm for moving back to the US is not entirely unbridled. There are many, many things that I will miss about this place, and I'll share these. But there are also things that I miss about the US. To start my series of posts about the joys and pains of moving back, here is a list of the Things I Miss About America.
1. People I love - I won't list them all, you know who you are.
2. Space - although it has its tradeoffs for convenience, America has a lot more open space than London. Of course, whether you have access to it depends entirely on where you live.
3. A good steak - beef here tends to be stringy and fatty. I may have given up too soon and simply not found a good outlet, but I do miss the feel of a nice solid sirloin between my teeth.
4. Sandy beaches - the Jersey shore (the real place, not the show), is absolutely one of the gems of the Northeast, despite being inundated with marauding seagulls and tourist tat, and in spite of actually being located in New Jersey, the Essex of America. (Credit to Stephen Fry for that apt comparison).
5. Oscar Meyer bacon - we used to be able to get this here, but I think we were the only ones buying it so the economics didn't work for Morrison's. I've grown accustomed to the local equivalent - streaky bacon - but it's hardly the same thing, is it?
6. Dryers - you'd think that in a climate a cool and damp as this, necessity would have mothered an advance or two in the technology of clothes drying, but you'd be wrong. A clothes rack placed near a radiator is still the best - indeed the only - way to get your clothes dry, winter OR summer.
7. 24 hour drug stores - I once tried to find something for Michael's fever on a Sunday morning. It's a good thing it wasn't a serious illness.
8. Air conditioning that works - maybe it's because we really only need A/C about one week per year here, but buildings that are air conditioned might as well not be during that week. It's also worth pointing out that air conditioned public transport, while slowly making inroads here has been perfected in New York, where a couple of cow carcasses on the 1 and 9 train could have been the setting for Rocky's meat locker punch-up scene in .
9. A long drive in the country - America has something like 150,000 miles of roads. Many of these are shady and pleasant and green and are a beautiful way to spend an afternoon, the tarmac ribbon unfolding over gently rolling hills and winding below the ancient arching boughs. There's a reason America is so in love with the automobile: she's lovable.
10. Roadside diners - chrome and cigarette-scarred Formica, ancient Germanic waitresses, greasy food, milkshakes, bikers on crank. What's not to love?
11. Good French fries - thin, crispy, a little greasy. The market here sells frozen 'American Style Chips'. Like the streaky bacon, they're just not the same thing.
12. Decent pizza - Don Pepe's in Penn Station in New York is, hands down, the best pizza on the planet. There is no Don Pepe's here. Pizza here is almost without exception flaccid, doughy and light on sauce and cheese.
13. Window screens - Seriously, guys, it's not that complicated. A roll of wire mesh, a wooden frame, a few tacks. I could show you.
14. Ice - I'm not sure why the concept of using frozen water to make things cold is so alien to people here, but you'd think it was an exotic notion. It may be a small thing, but it's a useful one.
15. July 4th - I generally don't go in much for patriotism, but I do love a good flag-waving parade and a marching band. The 'Star Spangled Banner' makes my eyes wet - even as I write this, the screen is getting blurry. Silly, really. Sniff.
16. Autumn - this past Fall here was probably the best yet, but it doesn't hold a candle to the fine weather, the honeyed sunshine and the brilliant foliage we enjoyed back in the US.
17. TiVo - we have DVRs here, yes, but they're just pants.
18. A decent postal service - every time I mail a letter I wonder whether it will arrive at its destination, and when. In February 2011, the kids received a pair of Halloween cards from Michele's parents. From 2009. I sometimes get past due notices from the utility company several weeks before I get the bills themselves. The Victorians apparently had such high quality mail service in London that the socialite set relied on it rather than messengers to deliver communications between themselves in a timely fashion. I'm not sure what's happened since then, but it's not pretty.
19. Customer service - with the exception of every shop I've been to in the King of Prussia mall, a riduculous temple of vulgar comsumerism and poor taste, most people who sell things in America have at least some concept of customer service. Not so here. Napoleon called this a nation of shopkeepers, but he apparently never actually went to a shop here.
20. High quality dentistry - the joke about British dentists isn't a joke, they're shockingly bad. We actually pay to use the dentist back in the US because they're so awful here. Michele tried, with my insurance, to make a cleaning appointment for the kids, a semiannual routine in America, but was told that they're too young.
21. Non-roaming data - I've learned that my beloved iPhone is of only slightly more use than a rock when it's without data. I've also learned that roaming data is obscenely expensive. I cannot comprehend why, when the mobile carrier in Malaga has the same name as the one I bought the phone from in London, do I pay £8/megabyte for data. Yes, Spain's another country, but it's about as far from London as Chicago is from Philadelphia and Verizon seems to manage just fine in both American cities.
There may well be other things that I miss and will be glad to get back to - this list started out considerably shorter, and I've been adding to it through the weekend - but these are the biggest ones that come to mind. Up next, I think, a list of Things I Won't Miss About the UK.
1. People I love - I won't list them all, you know who you are.
2. Space - although it has its tradeoffs for convenience, America has a lot more open space than London. Of course, whether you have access to it depends entirely on where you live.
3. A good steak - beef here tends to be stringy and fatty. I may have given up too soon and simply not found a good outlet, but I do miss the feel of a nice solid sirloin between my teeth.
4. Sandy beaches - the Jersey shore (the real place, not the show), is absolutely one of the gems of the Northeast, despite being inundated with marauding seagulls and tourist tat, and in spite of actually being located in New Jersey, the Essex of America. (Credit to Stephen Fry for that apt comparison).
5. Oscar Meyer bacon - we used to be able to get this here, but I think we were the only ones buying it so the economics didn't work for Morrison's. I've grown accustomed to the local equivalent - streaky bacon - but it's hardly the same thing, is it?
6. Dryers - you'd think that in a climate a cool and damp as this, necessity would have mothered an advance or two in the technology of clothes drying, but you'd be wrong. A clothes rack placed near a radiator is still the best - indeed the only - way to get your clothes dry, winter OR summer.
7. 24 hour drug stores - I once tried to find something for Michael's fever on a Sunday morning. It's a good thing it wasn't a serious illness.
8. Air conditioning that works - maybe it's because we really only need A/C about one week per year here, but buildings that are air conditioned might as well not be during that week. It's also worth pointing out that air conditioned public transport, while slowly making inroads here has been perfected in New York, where a couple of cow carcasses on the 1 and 9 train could have been the setting for Rocky's meat locker punch-up scene in .
9. A long drive in the country - America has something like 150,000 miles of roads. Many of these are shady and pleasant and green and are a beautiful way to spend an afternoon, the tarmac ribbon unfolding over gently rolling hills and winding below the ancient arching boughs. There's a reason America is so in love with the automobile: she's lovable.
10. Roadside diners - chrome and cigarette-scarred Formica, ancient Germanic waitresses, greasy food, milkshakes, bikers on crank. What's not to love?
11. Good French fries - thin, crispy, a little greasy. The market here sells frozen 'American Style Chips'. Like the streaky bacon, they're just not the same thing.
12. Decent pizza - Don Pepe's in Penn Station in New York is, hands down, the best pizza on the planet. There is no Don Pepe's here. Pizza here is almost without exception flaccid, doughy and light on sauce and cheese.
13. Window screens - Seriously, guys, it's not that complicated. A roll of wire mesh, a wooden frame, a few tacks. I could show you.
14. Ice - I'm not sure why the concept of using frozen water to make things cold is so alien to people here, but you'd think it was an exotic notion. It may be a small thing, but it's a useful one.
15. July 4th - I generally don't go in much for patriotism, but I do love a good flag-waving parade and a marching band. The 'Star Spangled Banner' makes my eyes wet - even as I write this, the screen is getting blurry. Silly, really. Sniff.
16. Autumn - this past Fall here was probably the best yet, but it doesn't hold a candle to the fine weather, the honeyed sunshine and the brilliant foliage we enjoyed back in the US.
17. TiVo - we have DVRs here, yes, but they're just pants.
18. A decent postal service - every time I mail a letter I wonder whether it will arrive at its destination, and when. In February 2011, the kids received a pair of Halloween cards from Michele's parents. From 2009. I sometimes get past due notices from the utility company several weeks before I get the bills themselves. The Victorians apparently had such high quality mail service in London that the socialite set relied on it rather than messengers to deliver communications between themselves in a timely fashion. I'm not sure what's happened since then, but it's not pretty.
19. Customer service - with the exception of every shop I've been to in the King of Prussia mall, a riduculous temple of vulgar comsumerism and poor taste, most people who sell things in America have at least some concept of customer service. Not so here. Napoleon called this a nation of shopkeepers, but he apparently never actually went to a shop here.
20. High quality dentistry - the joke about British dentists isn't a joke, they're shockingly bad. We actually pay to use the dentist back in the US because they're so awful here. Michele tried, with my insurance, to make a cleaning appointment for the kids, a semiannual routine in America, but was told that they're too young.
21. Non-roaming data - I've learned that my beloved iPhone is of only slightly more use than a rock when it's without data. I've also learned that roaming data is obscenely expensive. I cannot comprehend why, when the mobile carrier in Malaga has the same name as the one I bought the phone from in London, do I pay £8/megabyte for data. Yes, Spain's another country, but it's about as far from London as Chicago is from Philadelphia and Verizon seems to manage just fine in both American cities.
There may well be other things that I miss and will be glad to get back to - this list started out considerably shorter, and I've been adding to it through the weekend - but these are the biggest ones that come to mind. Up next, I think, a list of Things I Won't Miss About the UK.
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