Why I work in IT - we’re a meritocracy as well, and the few snobby toffs are both roundly mocked and if they don’t perform, they get their arses kicked!
I don’t know a lot of toffs; I know a few, mostly through rowing but a few through work, but I do see them every single farking day. I prefer the working class myself - they at least don’t mock me because I’m not one of them.
5 days into living in the UK and sofar the only thing that has realy annoyed me is the opening hours of stores - how the hell I am suppose to get groceries done if most stores close by 6pm?
I guess my 7 years of living the US have spoiled me more then I imagined - ah the luxury of going shopping at Whole Foods at 9pm, or Giants at midnight. Here am I lucky to make to Tesco Metro before they close at 8pm…
What a rip! Tesco closes at midnight in Thailand. (They call it Tesco Lotus here, but it’s the British chain.)
Why not go to big Tesco? Or Sainsburys etc.?
Oh - forgot about one thing that absolutely drives me round the twist!
There’s a big Tesco on the A3 out of London. It says Open 24 Hours. But it’s actually not open 24 hours. Actual opening hours?
Mon: 800 - midnight
Tue: 24 hours
Wed: 24 hours
Thu: 24 hours
Fri: 24 hours
Sat: open until 2200
Sun: 1000 - 1600
MAKES ME INSANE!
BTW - welcome to the UK. At first, especially for those used to 24 hour American grocery shopping and all it’s joys, it is a pain in the arse. But it gets better; it gets to the point where I actually like the fact that Sundays after 4pm I can do pretty much fuck-all except go to the pub 
Those limited opening hours during Saturday night and Sunday is due to the Sunday-opening laws which limits to six hours the opening times of stores that are over a certain size (measured in square meters).
I know why, and I’m not complaining about that. It’s just that there’s a great big sign saying Open 24 Hours and then little tiny print on the sign saying psyche! not really!
For Americans (like me), I think it’s especially disconcerting because in the US are laws about false advertising which are taken pretty seriously… and that’s what it appears to be to me at first glance.
Kiwi in the USA here …
Lack of footpaths / sidewalks.
Irrational intolerance of bare feet. I frequently went barefoot into fast food places, supermarkets, gas stations etc back in NZ without a second thought but try that here and … the reactions are not good.
Not being able to leave something in a friend’s mailbox. I’m told that would be committing a federal crime and the USPS delivery people do take it seriously if they find something “foreign” in a mailbox.
The conviction that everything Norwegian should be the best in the world… and, if it isn’t, that serves as conclusive proof that it is in fact the worst.
For Oslo specifically: the inability to decide whether to be a small provincial town or a real city. Given that it’s the capital of the bloody country as well as its largest city, and has a metropolitan population of over a million people, you’d think this decision would be simple enough :rolleyes:
(I’ve been here for eighteen years, so I guess this place doesn’t bug me too much…)
Try it in California instead of New England sometime; you’ll have a bit more luck. But yeah, mostly stores don’t want to see your bare feet.
My SIL went to school in NZ as a kid and talks fondly about going to school barefoot. Eventually they had to make a rule that you could wear shoes or not, but if you did wear shoes you had to keep them on all day–because kids would leave their shoes at school all the time.
Well I have yet to find them here in St. Albans…I’m sure the city/town has them but they’re probably not within walking distance of where I am at the moment.
Don’t forget the NY Yacht Club, particularly if you visit Newport, RI.
False advertising? Nah. They can just say: “Of course we’re open 24 hours. Just not THIS 24 hours.” 
You don’t, but it would be prudent to visit a country before claiming that all its trees had been cut down. In particular, it would be nice if the “Americans cut down all their trees!” contingent would take a walk through New England. Or Rock Creek Park, in DC. Or anywhere, really.
Too funny. I was catching up on the posts in this thread, and guess what started up in the background? We live near a VERY noisy mosque and sometimes I do wish they would shut up, but mostly it is very cool. Right now some guy is giving a sermon, which is rare (and tedious; who wants to hear unintelligible exhortations at top volume?), but usually it is the most wonderful MUSIC.
And I don’t mean just Koranic chanting, although that can be magnificent when done well. They actually sing exquisite duets, have drum accompaniments, and so on. (Sounds like Sumatran Islamic music to my ear, but I’m not enough of an expert to be sure.) I’ve never heard a mosque do anything like it. I keep meaning to stop by the mosque one of these days and chat them up just to learn more about why they broadcast such a lovely variety of sounds.
Getting stared at all the time. Happens even in Tokyo sometimes, and there’s a passel of gaijin around there. You learn to mostly filter it out, but every once in a while I find myself noticing someone who is being particularly rude about it, or who’s directing actual hostility toward me and it pisses me off anew.
“The Japanese are unique and they have different physiology, technobabble mixed with newagey chi bullshit, blahblahblah.” No, your intestines aren’t longer because of a long history of eating rice and little meat; every human’s intestines are about the same length. If anyone had longer intestines because of a vegetarian diet, it would be the Hindus or some Buddhists, who have been eating that way continuously for centuries, not the Japanese. No, Japanese are not genetically smaller and less muscular than Koreans, it’s almost entirely due to a different diet since they’re roughly about as different genetically from you as French are from Germans. And stop saying shit like, “kimchi power” when they spank you in sporting contests.
Casual racism toward any non-Japanese. I personally know people who were refused apartment rentals because they’re not Japanese. It’s hard as hell to get a job outside of English teaching, even if you have great Japanese skills and other qualifications. (And no, I’m not talking about me, I know I’m no great shakes on paper.)
When some shithead went on a shooting spree at a gym a couple of months back, there were a few newspapers who reported his description as being a foreigner. He was wearing a helmet, a down jacket, and gloves. No possible way to see anything other than that, but because he was tall and shooting people he had a “foreigner feel.” He wasn’t, he was Japanese.
Any wrongdoing by any foreigner is seized on as validation of the stereotype of the violent outsider — as with the US serviceman who stabbed a cabbie last month — while the recent stabbing sprees two separate young Japanese men went on recently warranted only a short article in the newspaper. The Olatunbosun Ugbogu case has been used as political leverage to attempt US base closures and change rendition laws, and it will undoubtedly lead to even more discriminatory practices like the airport fingerprinting and separate processing for even long-term Japan residents they recently instituted. While some point to the US as the bad example the Japanese are following, it is really just one more step backward, in line with the depreciation of the official foreign resident’s card relative to passports as acceptable identification.
Institutionalized binge drinking and social pressure to get completely shitfaced. I beg off going to any nomikai that I possibly can because I don’t like people trying to force me to drink to excess, and I don’t like being around 60–80 drunk-off-their-asses Japanese. Every celebration season (of which there are several throughout the year) there’s puke on the train platforms, puke in the gutters, puke in the stations, people actually passed-out on the street, and occasionally a plowed dude pissing somewhere in public.
Linked to that, crowds of people drinking. This is a typical picture of what cherry blossom viewing (hanami) looks like. Any main park looks like a disaster area afterward, even though most people are halfway decent about cleaning up after themselves. By the end of the main gathering time, you’ll see more than one person passed out on a tarp. And yet, a group of foreigners in the same park will still get dirty looks sometimes for talking slightly louder and more animatedly than most Japanese, even though we don’t get belligerent with gaijin to prove our manhood, blunder into neighboring groups at random and harangue them at length on the slightest pretext or none at all, puke in the trash cans or pass out because we drank too much, or leave our trash in a heap next to where we sat like they sometimes do.
A few things are well-intentioned but annoy the crap out of me anyway:
Strangers coming up to me and asking some variation of, “Where are you from?” Listen, I’ve had this conversation a hundred eleventy billion times since I came here. I’m not in the slightest interested in making another 5 minute “friend” in some random restaurant or bar. Leave me the fuck alone and let me read my book and finish my food.
“Wow, your Japanese is so good!” That’s not a compliment anymore. It was patently false when I could barely make myself understood due to lack of vocabulary when I first got here, and it’s even less sincere now. Besides, I know that I’ve got some serious flaws in my spoken Japanese that I can’t seem to eradicate, still encounter gaping holes in my vocabulary, and stuff like this makes me even more conscious of those problems. I get this even from people who know I’ve been living here for several years. Knock it off.
“Oh, you can use chopsticks so well!” Please. I learned how to use chopsticks when I was five. There’re a metric buttload of Chinese in the US, particularly California. Plus, I’ve been here for over 7 bloody years, and I don’t like either eating with my hands or going hungry. Of course I can use chopsticks.
Oh, I dunno, I always think it is kind of charming how encouraging Indonesians are about Westerners speaking Indonesian. (I suppose there is an implied racial insult – “oh my! a foreigner can speak our language? Who knew?” – but only if you are hypersensitive).
The only problem here is that Indonesians are so kind and encouraging that foreigners get a mistaken sense of their own linguistic abilities. I can’t tell you how many foreigners with dreadful accents, lousy grammar and a vocabulary of about 10 words are convinced they have great Indonesian language skills because they’ve been flattered by the locals so many times.
I know, it’s not truly false advertising, but it still hacks me off. Why say ‘open 24 hours’ instead of just telling people the real opening times? It’s not that big of a deal, and most British folks and anyone who’s been here for a while plans on shopping for anything after 5pm on a Sunday anyways. Why lie to us in the first place?
It’s not enough for me to man the barricades and start making petrol bombs, but it is a gripe I have. That and paying the equivalent of $50 for a Mexican meal for 1 person with just 2 beers, which is just wrong, and which just might get me all cannoned up
On the language skills thing: I too am annoyed at people who compliment my Bulgarian. It’s irrational, because they’re just being nice, but I’ve had that conversation so many times, it’s gotten to be irritating. Also, people sometimes seem to focus more on my language skills than what I’m actually saying.
Me: I’m so annoyed with the seventh graders! They don’t bring their textbooks to class, they never do the homework, and they don’t pay attention! I don’t know what to do!
Colleague: Wow, your Bulgarian has gotten really good!
Me: ARGH. Thanks for the advice.
I know exactly what you mean. It’s like that with Thai, too.
