This college girl I know, late twenties, is obsessed with moving to England, and thinks it is superior to the US. She says she went there for a short vacation. She said that if she makes enough money in the US, she can get in some kind of special visa program for professionals?
What I wonder is how well would the average American fit in? Would they be considered ridiculous colonials in the wrong side of the pond? Would her accent charm the boys? Nobody will care? Or will she be ‘class pwned?’ (She goes to dinner party, uses ‘incorrect’ table manners, gets exposed to subtle but viciously witty comments, goes home and cries?)
If you think of it where all Britons closely resemble Monty Python skits, then your friend will probably be launched out of her lunch chair for not being miss-manners in England.
If you think of all Britons as normal folks - then she will get on just fine in England.
Dropping the stereotypes helps in acclimating to a new environment.
I can’t speak for moving to the UK specifically, but I’m a middle class American who has lived abroad from much of my adult life. In my experience some people do well and adapt and some don’t. If she wants to move to London, it is a huge and diverse city with many Americans already living there. If she moved to a small town she would have a different experience.
Of course there are differences both big and small in how people live in the UK vs. the US. What matters is how the person handles those differences, some people laugh at themselves and take a stab at getting along in their new environment, other people run back home. As for whether she is exposed to subtle and but viciously witty comments, that would depend on what type of people she spends time with: nice people will be nice and mean people will be mean; how they are either nice or mean is shaped by culture, but decent people are decent people and jerks are jerks.
I moved to the U.K. in 1987 and lived there for three years. In general, I think your questions show that you’ve been watching too much Masterpiece Theater. Brits don’t act like you think they do.
scrambledeggs writes:
> What I wonder is how well would the average American fit in? Would they be
> considered ridiculous colonials in the wrong side of the pond?
In three years, I never heard a Brit refer to Americans as “colonials.” That’s utter nonsense made up by Americans. Brits see Americans on TV and in movies all the time. They meet Americans visiting or temporarily living in the U.K. quite frequently. They don’t even find us to be particularly exotic. They just don’t care that much. You will find an occasional Brit who acts like a jerk towards Americans for the fun of it, just like you find an occasional American who acts like a jerk towards all foreigners for the fun of it, but it’s definitely an exception.
> Would her accent charm the boys? Nobody will care?
Some will like it. Some won’t. In general it won’t be the deciding factor. If they think she’s a nice person, the accent is irrelevant.
> Or will she be ‘class pwned?’ (She goes to dinner party, uses ‘incorrect’ table
> manners, gets exposed to subtle but viciously witty comments, goes home and
> cries?)
As an American, she will be outside the class system. Anything she does that seems odd will be excused as just acting like an American. She’ll quickly fit into the social group she wants to join based on her profession and her leisure interests.
Last spring I had an elderly docent in a museum on the Isle of Man make a few jokes at us colonials. I couldn’t see that happening outside of the tour, but funny in context.
Two things would make it difficult for this particular American to move to the UK:
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Pub culture:** I’m not a drinker, and so much of my British friends social life seems to be oriented around drinking. Maybe all my British friends are lushes, but “going down the pub” seems to be the default far more than with my American ones.
**
Public transit stopping at 11 PM:** What the hell is up with that? I live in Chicago, a major city and no matter how late it gets we can always get home by train and bus. But when visiting London, an even bigger city, the freaking Tube shuts down at 11! Nothing but the very limited Night Buses from Trafalgar Square or the hideously expensive cabs.
The Underground does not stop at 11:00 PM. I just tried to look up the hours, and it appears that the various lines start running somewhere between 4:30 AM and 5:30 AM and stop running somewhere between 12:00 Midnight and 1:30 AM. Someone with more knowledge of the system can tell us more exactly.
Well its a bit more complex than that, but that’s not to say its completely impossible. Don’t forget that we’re in the EU and the Commonwealth, meaning the US citizens are definitely quite far down the chain in terms of “people who will get visas.”
Only in jest. She’d be fully entitled to respond “Fuck off Limy!”
What’s she expecting to be doing?! Having tea with the Queen?! :dubious:
The last “dinner party” i was at involved a rather nice Lasagna cooked by the missus followed by some ice cream. Not much etiquette involved in that.
Me thinks she may be projecting a bit too much “BBC Drama” onto our daily lives. We’re pretty much the same as you lot (especially the age demographic she’d fall into) - just generally funnier and much more handsome.
Depends where she was. If She moved to Lower Bumfuck in Bumfuckshire then yeah, it’d probably draw some attention (just as I would if i moved to West Bumfuck, Bumfuckichussets) but in London no one would blink an eye at it.
Well its a bit later than that - depending on where you are on the line its normally about 12:30am or so. That’s after most Pubs have closed for the night (at about 11:30pm).
You have to remember that the Tube is one of (if not the) oldest metropolitan underground transport system in the world. Sure, its been modernised plenty since, but some things can’t be changed. One of those, unfortunately, is the fact that it lacks multiple “same way” and reversable lines - and the cost of adding those now is obscenely prohibitive.
Want to run any kind of maintenance or move trains around? You have to shut the line down. Only time you can do that is at night.
Basically they currently manage to do all that in about 4 hours each night, which is actually rather impressive when you think about it.
Also - most main bus routes still run regularly until at least 1am (before the whole “night bus” thing kicks in).
Basically getting around “after hours” in London ain’t that hard. Problem is that you have to know what you’re doing, and most people (even people who live in London) don’t. They don’t look further than the Tube Map for options and panic.
The thing to remember is that Pub Culture != Drinking Culture (or at least it doesn’t have to).
That’s not to say that alcohol isn’t a bigger thing over here than in the states - it often is. What it means though is that depending on the demographic you are hanging out with, drinking may not be as big a social requirement as you’d think.
Tonight, for example, i will be meeting up with 5 mates in the pub for a couple of hours. In that time, 3 of us will be on the beer (and probably get through 4 or 5 pints), 1 will get through about 1.5 pints of cider, 1 will get through 3 Gin and Tonics and 1 will probably have half a pint of beer then switch to cokes.
Basically everyone will drink to their limit.
Generally the people who stigmatise those who “don’t keep up” are normally either students, teenagers, yuppies or rugby fans - and who wants to hang out with any of that lot?!
The social structure of the UK is a lot different, with the pub culture mentioned above being a prominent component. This can be a huge selling point, or complete deal-breaker depending on your personality - it’s impossible to generalise how an American would react. I lived in the US for 2 years and found middle class people to be highly protective of their private lives, whilst simultaneously projecting a relentlessly polite and cheery exterior. I found this warm coldness hard to adjust to.
There are so many subtle differences that it would be futile to point them all out, whole books are written on the subject. The grass is always greener - here in the UK I find the negativity and cynicism, particularly towards professions, can be wearing. The other side of the coin would be the relentless optimism, conformity and bullshit that one can encounter in the US workplace, which is equally tiresome.
Yeah, but that assumes that a non-drinker will enjoy hanging out with people who have downed two and a half quarts of beer. Personally, I’d rather go out to dinner, visit their home and hang around, see a film together and talk about it after…I just don’t get why a pub is the default.
In Chicago, most bars are open till 1 AM or 3 AM.
I guess I got spoiled by Chicago’s “L” which managed to run 24-hour service on most of the lines (though sadly not the one closest to me). I’ve been stuck by the system twice visiting, once when we went to a movie in a London suburb and missed the last bus - had to take a “mini-cab” to get back to the hotel. The second was after a concert at Sadler’s Wells.
I love London and would love to live in the UK, but it’s not an easy place for a night owl.
I guess what i’m saying is that you need to remember that every place is different, and therefore has different needs. Don’t get me wrong - having an all night Tube would be wonderful, but it ain’t going to happen for the aforementioned reasons so London itself has, to a certain extent, adapted to that.
London is not a 24hr city in the same way that New York or by the sound of it Chicago are (and having spent some time as a New Yorker myself I know how wonderful that can be), but then its never claimed to be. I can understand why people expect it to be, but generally they’ll have a far better (and easier!) time of the place if they accept it for what it is!
And that assumes that people who have downed two and half quarts of beer are drunk. As i say, s’all about personal limits.
All perfectly fun activities sure, but:
dinner can be expensive and a nightmare to organize.
we all live in different directions (and mostly don’t have big houses - true for most Londoners), and
cinemas are costly and full of Chavs (and we’d only end up in the pub for that afterwards discussion anyway :D)
Finally, most of those require people turning up at roughly the same time - with the pub people can drift in (or out) as and when they feel like it.
Plus in the pub we can chat, watch some sport, maybe playing some darts or pool or even billiards.
Don’t assume that pubs are solely places in which drinking happens - our Local certainly isn’t. In fact, during the week we’re most likely to go there for one of the above, or possibly to join together as a team and compete in the monday night quiz. The fact that we can have a beer whilst we do it is a pleasant bonus.
Don’t get me wrong - that’s not what all pubs are like, nor what everyone goes there to do, but its more common than the media (both here and in the States) would have you believe - after all, it doesn’t make as sensationalist a story as binge-drinking and debauchery does it?
Hell, tonight i think we’re playing Dungeons and Dragons in there!
Actually, in Chicago they have 4am liquor licenses available for weekday and 5am licenses for Saturday.
I had no idea the London tube shut down so early. How civilized. Somewhere down the line the United States went into a 24/7 lifestyle. Big chain grocery stores, retail stores and gas stations never close.
There was a time when most towns rolled up their sidewalks at 8 o’clock. When I was a kid my town’s fire department would blow it’s siren at 9 pm. You had better be home by then. didn’t matter how old you were.
I find London to be very fucking expensive, even by NY standards. I’m usually over there at least a week once a year. It’s also inconvenient if you want to do your own thing and not go by the crowd (see the posts on bars and such). Also, in terms of space, everything seems so much more cramped and purposely done so, especially when you compare it to the areas immediately outside the London-metro area, but then again, back to cramped living conditions when any sort of population center appears. If she’s from Manhattan or just across in NJ, this won’t seem like a huge adjustment. Oh, and prepare for a tax on just about everything.
I don’t think the US is as big on all day drinking in pubs either.
For example, if there is a big rubgy match on (say Ireland v Wales in the Six Nations) my husband and I, plus about 20 of our friends will meet in the pub at about 1pm. We’ll have a pint and a chat over a pub lunch,then a few more drinks while we watch the match which kicked off at 3pm.
Then we’ll keep on drinking til 6pm, maybe go home for a bite to eat and a change of clothes before we go back to the pub for more drinking and chatting, or maybe we’ll stay in the pub for dinner and keep wearing our daytime clothes.
At about 10pm we’ll go to a nightclub or the upstairs of the pub where there may be a dancefloor. By this time cocktails or shots will have replaced the beer and cider for most people. At about 1am we’ll go home, having picked up a kebab on the way to the taxi rank.
There will usually be one person who has drunk too much too fast and had to go home early and someone else will have picked up a new companion and headed off early with them. Somebody will be driving or too horribly hungover to drink, and they will therefore be as sober as a judge throughout. Everyone will have had fun.
From what I gather, that would not be considered a usual Saturday in America.
Nor Canada. Well, maybe if you’re 20 years old. Drinking alcohol is a different sport altogether in North America.
For the most part, there’s no such thing as “the local pub.” There are any number of bars, restaurants, and night clubs, but walking over to the local and joining “the gang” is not really an option. Over consumption of alcohol has a lot of negativity associated with it and is generally viewed as a lower-class activity here.
One goes to BBQs and has 4 or 5 drinks over an entire evening here. Of course there are plenty of exceptions to the rule, but having your social activities coordinated around a drinking establishment is not common.
There were lots of things that I loved about England (spent 6 months there as a student), but I think it would be difficult for me to live there permanently.
As others have mentioned, attitudes towards alcohol tend to be very different than in the US, in ways I found good and bad. I liked most of the pubs, and I loved that you could walk to them. I was floored by how much people drank, not just college students, but folks from all walks of life. It’s a reflection of where I grew up as much as anything, but it completely surprised me to see well-dressed, middle-aged women shit-faced in public. There also seemed to be the attitude that if you weren’t puking or falling over, you weren’t drunk.
I can also identify with what Busy Scissors said about people guarding their private lives very carefully. I was never invited to anyone’s home. Most of the folks I met were perfectly friendly, but didn’t seem at all interested in becoming friends, if that makes sense. It’s not worse than the US, just different.
It’s got a role as a social leveller. Nobody is anybody’s guest, nobody cares how fancy or how small your house is, and they don’t really care what you’re wearing, either. The one thing you can bring to a pub is your personality.
