Tau Beta Pi is the national honor society for engineering students. Eta Kappa Nu was for Electrical/electronic engineers. BKN was absorbed by the Tau Beta Pi society at some point, not sure if the honor is still separately conferred or not. Seems like the mechanical engineers might have had a specialized honor society, but can’t really recall.
That I earned such accolades was a big deal to my parents, especially after my poor performance in high school…but not really something I mention.
It is only something to be mentioned at graduation or on a resume/CV or an obituary. Perhaps to be displayed on a wall of credentials if you do consulting. I would not (have not) list it in my bio for publications, for example.
Later in a career, it matters far less, but with young engineers it is a shortcut to concluding “this one was a good student, near the top of the class”.
To a large degree this depends on how rural the area is. Rural areas will offer fewer options for entertainment, and the sports offer an opportunity for the sparse community to interact and cheer for a common goal. Many people will go to the games just to catch up on the gossip. Sort of like church that way. It is also often the case that in a very rural high school, more than half the boys will be on the football team, and they may still have to alter the rules to play with fewer than the nominal 11players per side.
In some cases you will build up multiple generations that played for the same school. In those places sports will be like a religion, only taken seriously!
I had a similar real-life experience in Barcelona when I walked into a cafe and the owner started addressing me forcefully in Catalan. Though it should have been obvious by the blank look on my face that I didn’t speak any Catalan, he kept repeating himself. Finally he switched to Spanish and said, “Leave your umbrella by the door.” I guess his desire to keep his floor dry outweighed his national pride.
There’s a Honeymooners episode where Ralph witnesses a bank robbery. He doesn’t want to go to the police, because then the press would expose him as the one who got the robbers caught. Apparently the police would print his name AND address.
That definitely isn’t now. Printing someone’s residence address in the paper would be a major safety violation. Same reason birth announcements are no longer printed.
No reason on earth why a foreigner would want to eat a foreign breakfast except as a travel experience, but I like an American Breakfast now and then. Just as a treat. Even more so if I’m feeling alien and hungry.
An American Breakfast is what McDonalds sells. Pancakes, sausages, sausage meat, eggs, “french toast”, bacon. It’s not an English breakfast (baked beans on toast?) French breakfast (coffee and croissants?) German breakfast (cheese and cold meat?).
I’ve had some dreadful examples of all 4, particularly at cheap international hotels (museli, baked beans, coffee (no milk), 1 kind of processed cheese, 1 kind of cold meat. all at eye-watering price), and it’s a real pleasure to see any of them done right.
Like any kind of ethnic food, it can be difficult to support a quality product if you don’t have the skills, materials, and customer base.
I do think you’re hitting on something. I think breakfast is the most habitual of meals; it’s early in the morning and you just don’t want to think. You want familiar.
I know this first-hand. Over 20 years ago I became ill in Japan and was hospitalized for a month. The hospital was quite modern (unusual for Japan at the time, when many hospitals were shockingly aged and dingy) and I felt well cared-for, but breakfast was just a killer for me. Oily roasted fish on a very empty stomach? Oh no, no-no-no. I got friends to bring me a stash of granola bars, which helped enormously.
Before I moved to HK, the whole concept of a hotel breakfast was new to me. Mid-market US hotels often include a fairly basic breakfast, but I usually found it only barely edible. But since traveling more in Europe and Asia, my partner and I have become devoted to the big hotel breakfast, often included in the room rate at no additional charge. (Surprisingly, you’ll see the same price listed for “no breakfast” and “with breakfast,” even for identical rooms.) In the region it usually covers English-style eggs-beans-tomatoes-bacon, American pancakes-French toast-cereals, European pastries-meats-vegetables, Chinese congees, and lots of fresh fruit. So long as I can get cereal or toast in me first as prep, I’m ready to dig in on whatever else looks good.
We then eat only one more meal, typically an early dinner, with maybe a snack later on.
Now, this sort of spread is usually available only at the larger chains. But even smaller, cheaper, locally-owned places often do something pretty nice. And when you’re in a country where water or fresh fruit can be risky, having a reliable hotel meal can be a huge help.
chokes on her coffee. An English breakfast isn’t beans on toast. It’s a combo of your choice including eggs (fried, poached, scrambled), bacon, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes and beans (if you want them). And toast on the side. Not so alien for an American.
But I get your point about wanting something familiar for breakfast. Although, to be fair, I don’t eat English breakfasts on a daily basis. I’d be dead by now if I did.
I’ve endured many American breakfasts. Without exception, they always include eggs.
Problem is, I cannot eat eggs. Not sure why, and neither is my doctor, but I cannot. This makes things difficult when every breakfast menu item is “two eggs, any style, and _____.”
What I have found is that if a place offers breakfast, they have the ingredients for a BLT. So even though it is not on the menu, I order a BLT, coffee, and juice. I always get it, and it is so good!
Mushrooms, tomatoes and beans are most definitely alien for an American at breakfast. They’re not alien foods, certainly, but they’re most strange when presented as a fry up at breakfast time. We might put sliced mushrooms in an omelet, but we do not do them as a side. We hardly ever grill or fry red tomatoes for any meal, and beans of the English Breakfast style (we call them “baked beans”, even if they’re not baked) are something we have for lunch or dinner, generally alongside a hot dog or hamburger.
Inexpensive motels here (USA) will often - not always, but often - have what they call a “Continental Breakfast” included in the room price. Continental breakfast is cold donuts and pastries, coffee, hot water for stale teabags and sometimes orange juice. Sometimes they also offer cold cereal and milk.
In the past few years, there’s been a move towards “Hot Breakfast”, which tends to be all of the above plus little paper cups full of waffle batter and a waffle iron you can pour batter on and make yourself a waffle, and sometimes a toaster so you can make toast and/or a crock pot of oatmeal. They sometimes have yogurt in the fridge next to the orange juice, too. But the “Hot Breakfast” is still largely DIY, in that there’s no service, and if the coffee runs out you’ve got to go to the main desk in the lobby and tell the bored clerk that he needs to make more coffee.
And now we’re starting to see “Deluxe Hot Breakfast” which is more in line with the “American breakfast” **Melbourne **speaks of - eggs and/or omelets, bacon, eggs, sausage, sometimes even biscuits (savory scones, sort of) and sausage gravy. Deluxe Hot Breakfasts often have actual people to cook them to order. The more expensive places have table service, even, though the cheaper ones are more buffet in nature.
They include them in the room price here because they’re marketing leverage. The rooms themselves are all about as cheap as they can make them. Breakfast is becoming the marketing angle to distinguish yourself from the other eleventy-three other similarly priced, similarly appointed hotels/motels in the same area.
But the European hotels which offer “English breakfast” don’t put everything on the plate: most of them are a buffet, so while pancakes will usually not be present, you can get a plate with, say
a fried egg, scrambled egg or hard-boiled egg (some places will offer only one, others will have several choices)
sausages (again there may be several kinds available)
bacon (may be the striped kind or the kind that’s called bacon in the UK, depending on location),
and toast (sorry, it won’t be French toast, just toast)
When the whole buffet covers five tables and offers twelve different fruits, a dozen pastries, three kinds of cold milk, coffee, tea, five kinds of breakfast cereal, make-your-own cocoa or hot cocoa… you’re not supposed to eat everything! You don’t like 'shrooms, don’t eat them; I don’t like hash browns and I’ve never been assaulted by a plate of them.
The Pizza Hut in Glasgow is the only place I can definitely say I’ve ever seen sweet corn on pizza, though I have a vague feeling the Pizza Hut in Bahrain may have had it, too. I’ve absolutely never seen it on an American pizza!
A pizza I bought in in Toulon (France) had a soft-fried egg on it. That’s another thing I’ve never seen anywhere in the States.
When I was in Dunoon, my flatmates and I would go down to the Rock Cafe for breakfast once a month or so. An egg, chips (fries, to Americans), a slice of black pudding, a banger, bacon (back bacon, not streaky!) and toast. I’d get a raspberry shake to go with mine…
I can so well imagine how this must’ve felt! For me it’s tea that can do that, relating it to the question about England and tea up thread.
I normally drink very un-English herbal teas, but if I am really tired or down or homesick there is just nothing like strong, milky English tea.
As has been mentioned, it’s still a very common drink. If you order “tea” you will get it the English way, whereas in other countries you are usually asked what kind you want. Almost everyone I know drinks lots of milky tea. My granny keeps a few “funny teas” just for me, which she considers wildly exotic of herself.
I don’t know about Iceland but I know more than a few people including family who whole heartedly believe in tommyknockers ( not stephen kings, but the original mining spirits.) we ducked into a cave to get out of a rainstorm and some rocks fell further back in the cave, than a minute later more fell.
My uncle hauled our butts out into a lightening storm rather than upset that tommyknocker. personally I figured it was probably a fox or possum we’d disturbed, but he swore it was a tommy knocker.
I think about 10% of the population of the UK are serviced by water companies that add fluoride. It’s controversial in Europe (most of Europe doesn’t get fluoride in the water) because it’s considered a form forcing medication on the population.
I’m nearly 50, I’ve never heard of a school giving a damn about the kids teeth except for the one week a year colgate (and it was always colgate) donated money to the school district and provided little toothbrushes and tiny tubes of toothpaste, and during that week we’d be rabidly nagged at to brush our teeth after lunch, then we had to chew up these nasty red tablets that would show up where on your teeth that you hadn’t brushed well. Then they wouldn’t let you go back and brush that nasty taste out of your mouth, you had to put up with it all day.
If you tried to continue following the practice of brushing your teeth after that one particular week though you got screamed at. Extra time and supervision was allowed that one week only, you were told to brush when you got home.
One of my greatest rants is that the “standing joke” for years was how bad british dental health is/was, but I’d say from about 1990 and most definitely in the current economy, the US probably have worse teeth than anyone in a technically advanced country unless you are wealthy.
“dental insurance” is very rare and what there is only covers a pittance of actual dental work, mostly it covers an annual exam and a tooth cleaning, MAYBE it will cover 10 percent the cost of a filling or a crown, which is a crazy amount of money considering the dentist himself does almost nothing anymore the dental tech does about all of it. The vast majority of us can not drop a thousand bucks on a crown out of the blue.
I had excellent teeth up until mid 90’s, when a combination of the fact m braces had been applied incorrectly and damaged my teeth and certain meds I was taking were damaging my teeth it all went to hell despite me spending every spare penny and even taking a loan to try and keep up with the outrageous bills. Right now my teeth are bad off enough that I have trouble eating and I have nightmares that they are all coming out and I’m choking on them. I have no hope or chance of getting them fixed unless something in this country changes regarding dental care or if I win the lottery.
IUPUI in Indianapolis has a dental school that is free but only available to the people who live IN the county that Indianapolis is in (I don’t) they have had as long as a four year waiting list.
Dear god no wonder kids are so messed up. When I was growing up it was get out from under my feet and go outside and play. The rules were to stay within hearing range of my dad’s whistle (which was about 4 block, I had good ears the other kids swore I was part hunting dog or something) don’t mess up other people’s property, don’t set anything on fire, look before crossing the street and don’t bring home any bugs/snakes/dogs/cats/interesting roadkill. Everbody pretty much headed outside and we met up on an empty lot and did whatever. No plans (unless it was spy on this one old creepy lady who was always burying weird things in her yard)
