The last time I visited the UK was in March April of 1990. I was traveling with a group of students from my school as part of a student exchange program. We were still Soviet citizens, and traveling abroad – and to such an obviously capitalist country, too – was a big deal. After I came home from the trip, groups of people would come to our place for months to listen to my stories about England and to ask questions. The questions were often very unexpected.
“Do they have curtains in England?”
“How big are the windows?”
“What do the heating radiators look like? What color are they?”
The things that impressed me the most in the UK were not the curtains or the radiators, however. I was 14, so I concentrated on very different aspects of my trip.
Here are the things that I found especially unusual in England:
- how little people ate. At that age, I still ate very little according to the standards of my own country. But the British people ate even less. For the very first time in my life, I felt perennially hungry. I was staying with two very well off families, so it wasn’t lack of money that prevented them from feeding me like I needed to be fed. It was a cultural difference. We are Northern people and our metabolism is different from that of the people in warmer climes. We need calories to warm our bodies in winter. Which is why I felt cosmically misunderstood when my hosts would ask me, “Are you hungry? Then should I boil you an egg?” And seeing my crestfallen face, they would add, “Two eggs, then? Or maybe you prefer an apple?” In Ukraine, we don’t consider an egg or an apple to be a meal, so I went hungry for the entire duration of the visit.
- how fixated everybody was on the weather. Never before had I witnessed people engage in an actual conversation about the weather, so I was completely unprepared to participate in such discussions. I could see that this was a subject that fascinated people but I had no idea what to contribute to the weather-related conversations.
- I wasn’t especially surprised by the abundance of consumer goods in the UK. This was a capitalist country, so, of course, it was supposed to be overflowing with goods. What I did find shocking was how a significant portion of the wares was placed outside of the stores on the pavements, with nobody supervising them. It was as if the goods were spilling out of the stores. “Don’t people steal these things?” I asked my hosts. “Yes, all the time,” they responded phlegmatically. I haven’t seen anything like this in the US and Canada, and I can’t wait to see if that is still done in the UK.
(To be continued. . .)
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