We came up with a list of amusing, fun, and unique things we’ve experienced living in England compared to life back at home in the United States. It felt like a good time to inject some playfulness into our posts after the past few more serious/heavy posts.
- It’s called a ladybird, not a ladybug. We love seeing the bright red more frequently – we mostly saw the orange asian beetles in the last place we lived in the States.
2. Zebra is pronounced, zeb-ruh. Get it right!
3. Squash is rarely referred to in the context of squash you eat. More commonly, the reference can be one of two things. (1) The sport. No, squash is not racquetball. (2) Squash as in a drink you consume. You will see “squash” on an aisle sign in the grocery store or a kid’s menu. It’s referring to a fruit juice made with water, sugar, and fruit juice or some type of cordial. When we first went out to eat and I saw a kid’s menu, I remember thinking they serve slices of squash instead of an apple as a kid’s side dish. How interesting! HA! The joke is on me.
4. If we are talking, squash the food. The most popular squash you’ll find is butternut, it’s hard to find other types of squash at the grocery store.
5. Eggs are not refrigerated. You will find them at room temperature on the shelves in grocery stores. We’ve started doing that at home. It’s amazing how much extra space you get back in your already super small fridge!
6. “You all right?” is a very common British phrase for hey, how are you, hey what’s up, etc. I don’t think I will ever acclimate to this phrase. Every time I hear it, I forget it’s just a colloquialism. I end up spilling out way more information than the recipient ever expected to hear. I feel confident in this assessment judging by their confused facial expressions every time I finish talking.
7. Hiya! Is perhaps the most exciting, fun, playful greeting we have experienced in our lives. You need a true Brit to say it with all the pizazz to get the full experience. We are working up the courage to use it in our daily life so we don’t feel like an imposter.
8. Who knew there could be so many layers to walking? We have footpaths, bridlepaths, byways, a country code of conduct, right to roam, and so on. In case you were curious, the code of conduct hyperlink has a nice graphic on the differences between all these paths.
9. You will learn new tricks to bicycling that you never mastered in your decades of life before. For example, navigating a two-way bicycle lane that is extremely bumpy and probably only five feet wide. Pro tip, if you don’t want to lose balance or crash, only look straight ahead and never make eye contact with the oncoming cyclist. Luckily, these narrow pathways are rare and really only found as connectors between residential streets. Extra lucky, you usually have to take one at least once a day for a school run, when everyone else is using it too.
10. The feeling of bicycling in a roundabout with a handful of other cyclists never gets old. There’s this inexplicable feeling of being part of a symbiotic relationship with cars, buses, etc. where everyone’s exiting and entering at different places yet no one crashes or externally displays road rage. Has anyone experienced this high volume of multimodal traffic at a roundabout in the states?
11. It also never gets old to see how people cycle and what they transport. While cycling to the train station early one morning, I snapped the following image. I bet you can’t resist a smile or laugh when looking it!
12. Bathrooms don’t have normal plug ins, only plug ins for shavers. Shaver plug ins are different than the rest of the plug ins throughout the house. It gets confusing finding the best place to plug things into if you need a mirror.
13. Do mailboxes exist here? It is all mail slots through doors. On top of that, I think you need to find a post box or go to the post office if you want to put something to post (aka mail it).
14. More often than not, if a place closes at a certain time, it means it closes. We’ve arrived to a post office 20 minutes before closing and have been turned away to make sure they are done by 5 pm. Gotta respect the work life balance! This could also vary on where you live in the UK, we’re just going with what we’ve experienced.
15. Speaking of work, full-time work is not 40 hours a week, but 37.5 hours.
16. It’s not uncommon for Brits (even complete strangers) to respond with a xx (aka the kiss of hugs and kisses) at the end of text exchange. I used to find it really weird when I would try to sell things on Facebook market place and someone would be like, is this available? xx. Now I just go with it xx. 😉
17. No one has a yard here or a lawn. It’s called a garden. Even if it has zero plants and is all mud in the winter.
18. Periods (in reference to English grammar) can be called full stops.
19. When you go out to eat, a service charge is typically added to your bill. We actually kind of like this because it just takes the mental load off of having to decide on how much you would want to tip.
20. Calendar is referred to as a diary. This one still trips me up. The real question is, did Brits ever own the 90s electronic version of Dear Diary?
21. It seems like the Brits refer to “things” as bits here (e.g., are all the bits in the box?). Figuring something out is referred to as “sorted.” For example, in the States, we have, “if you see something, say something.” In the UK it’s, “see it, say it, sorted.”
22. Anything technically or mechanically complicated is referred to as “a great piece of kit.” They use “kit” very generally for a lot of different things.
We asked the kids, and here is what they say:
- You can see more swans.
- You kind of see trains often.
- It’s really mostly flat (where we live).
- The word aubergine is cool because it has a digraph.
- It’s really bike friendly.
- People seem really friendly here.
[…] been a while since we created our original list of quirks about living in England. So we figured we would pool our minds together as a family and come up […]