People.

I know it would be premature to begin analyzing a culture I’ve only just dropped into, but I’m going to anyway.  The past few days have been filled with a barrage of surprises and new things, and having never traveled before, it’s been overwhelming.  It’s all good fun, but things are more different here than I’d expected.   

1. People talk quieter.  I know that I’m not the best judge of proper conversational volume, but I’m beginning to wonder if the stereotype of the Loud American is really a result of the Quiet Englishman.  Perhaps because their population density is so much higher, each person has a decibel quota, to keep nationwide decibel levels reasonable.  It's a theory.

2. Accents.  So far, no two accents have been the same.  What has been the most difficult to get used to has not been understanding the accents, however, but becoming the one with the accent.  The first night we arrived, a number of us went to an Indian restaurant (which was fantastic, incidentally).  The waiter’s first words were, “So where is this accent from?”  Since then, I have become to hear my speech as accented, and am very self-conscious every time I open my mouth.  I really do sound… American.  

3. They talk about the weather.  Constantly.  And not if it happens to be a nice day, but because it is so perpetually gray and wet.  At home (Pacific NW), we sort of try to ignore the fact that it’s so cold and rainy all the time, and might comment once in awhile about how we’d wish it would stop.  They take the other approach here, perhaps confronting it?   

4. Queuing.  Do not mess with the queues.  Jokes about how much the British love their queues do not exaggerate.  If there is more than one cash register open, they still only form one queue, unlike in America, where we agonize over which line we think will move the fastest, then spend the rest of the time in line convinced that the other line is moving faster.  There might be something to their method here.

5. The food.  And I don't mean liver pies; I mean the processed foods.  A lot of companies here have taken over products that we have in the States.  Like, do these potato chips remind you of anything?

P.S. The Smoky Bacon tastes disturbingly like real bacon.

And Cheerios are made by Nestle. What?

6.  Their signs are very polite.  The crosswalks are all marked with signs like this:

Which have turned out to be extremely useful.  Steven overlooked one and barely got out of the street in time after I shouted at him (yeah, I saved his life, it was no big deal). The Tube has two-foot-wide yellow painted areas on the platform which say, "Mind the gap" to keep you from getting too close to the trains.  In the U.S., I think it would probably say, "STAY OFF YELLOW."  Their exit signs are either pleasant yellow writing saying "Way out" or hieroglyphic signs with a person, an arrow, and a rectangle (these took us awhile to decipher).  Compare to "EXIT."  I think we try to make our signs super-direct in the States so they can't be interpreted any other way, to prevent lawsuits.

7. Also, this is legal here:

I went into Waterstone's Booksellers yesterday to buy The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (those darned books are like crack) and spent an inordinate amount of time in the bestseller's section looking straight at it but not seeing it, because the covers are different here, too.  Feeling stupid and frustrated for the umpteenth time and thinking I'd never be able to adapt to this unexpected sense of culture shock, I walked into a Starbucks.  The large display as I entered was promoting the Pike Place Roast.  Pike Place Market is a very popular farmer’s market in Seattle, near where I live.  So I got a sandwich and some coffee, and when the cashier rang it up, he smiled and said the coffee was on the house.  And I realized two things: it really is a small world after all, and no matter where you go in it, you will always be able to find good people.