Sunday 13 October 2019

Britain Confusing For Americans

American heiress, Hayley Bloomingdale, move to the United Kingdom to work on Vogue magazine and in her short time she has created a guide of the weird things she has noticed about Britain and the British for anyone visiting the UK from her home country although i am not sure she has been paying quite close enough attention to us.

She states that British people do not use umbrellas which is weird because unless umbrella means something different in America, it is hard to avoid having your eye poked out by all the umbrellas bobbing about in the street when it rains. 

She is correct in saying that everyone says sorry for everything, we do do that but not so much about a lack of bins in Britain, we have bins every few hundred yards which makes you wonder where she has been putting her rubbish.

She is obviously confused by our calendars and the way we say the day, then the month and then the year and asks how British women blow dry their hair as there are no plugs in the bathroom which is simple to answer, we go into the bedroom away from the water which will kill you if you drop the hairdryer in it. Is this really not a thing in America??

She doesn't like our use of the 24 hour clock because: 'if someone says 18:30, you will have to get out your calculator to deduce that they mean 6:30 p.m.' although the easy solution is to ignore the first digit, then knock 2 off the second number and that's the time.

Confusingly, us British people do not say 'cheers' and tap glasses when drinking but we do however, say 'cheers' meaning 'thank you' and something else confusing her is that we keep our eggs in the cupboard and not in the fridge.

She is right about British people talking constantly about the weather, that is not a stereotype, we really do talk about it all the time but quite a recent change is how you are not automatically given a bag for your shopping and she has had to juggle armfuls of stuff to her car because she didn't ask for one.

Something else she struggled with is our tall building flooring system with first floor not meaning the ground floor at all like it does in the United States and Bank Holidays happen several times a year, but no one actually knows what the holiday is in celebration of, to be fair i don't but it means a day off work we so don't care really.

I'm sure she will get the hang on it, as long as you hand her some eggs to put away in the second floor kitchen before 13:00 she will be fine, cheers.

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