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. . .)
Clarissa's Blog 
(As an English 20-year old I’m putting my responses here, this post amused me greatly.)
1) I was born two years later than your visit, so obviously things may have changed. I would still consider an egg a meal though, albeit a light one. Two boiled or scrambled eggs and a slice of toast is a good, filling breakfast over here. An apple would be more of a snack. The perception here is that the British now eat much more like Americans, and our health is suffering becuse of it.
2) We’re still fixated on the weather. It’s because it’s so changeable-this year we had a relatively mild January, a freezing February with snow, a blisteringly hot March, and an extremely wet April. Even as a little girl, I can remember talking about the weather to other children, probably as something we learnt from our parents.
3) We still put things outside our shops. It seems to be really common, I came from a very well off touristy town in Kent, and have moved to Leeds for university, a more nothern city and therefore poorer, but it’s done everywhere. Never been aware of people stealing them, but I suppose it’s logical.
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Thank you, rainwitch! It’s good to know that when I arrive in London on Monday, I will find that some tings have remained the same. 🙂
At least, I can control my own meals now. 🙂
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I notice that we have plenty of stores that place stuff outside of them in the US too. You’d have to be in a “downtown” sort of area, rather than inside of a shopping mall though.
Also, where I grew up, we had some part-time farmers who couldn’t afford to pay a person to sit at their farmstand all day so they would just put up a sign with the prices of the vegetables, and there would be a box for you to put your money in, if you decided to buy some.
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” I notice that we have plenty of stores that place stuff outside of them in the US too. You’d have to be in a “downtown” sort of area, rather than inside of a shopping mall though.”
– I’ve seen second-hand stuff and used books placed outside like that in the US. Or heavily discounted stuff. But not shiny brand-new stuff, though.
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Huh, when I went to Europe in 1981 I experienced some opposite things in regard to eating. Everywhere we went we were told “American women are too thin!” I will say, though, we got that on the Continent more than in England. But I remember thinking that they sure had a lot of fat kids in England. Back then a fat kid was rare in the States. (That’s where we get that whole idea of “that one fat kid that everyone bullies and makes fun of in elementary school” — it used to be that kids were mostly skinny because they were encouraged to run around outside all the time, and if a kid was fat it meant there was something wrong with him, at least to the average evil child brain.) Anyway, all I remember is when we got back home I had gained twenty pounds and could no longer fit into the nice new clothes I’d bought for the trip.
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The funny thing is that the people I stayed with were really not thin at all. I was a lot thinner than any one of them. I think it happened because they ate potato chips and drank lots of soda, which I was unfamiliar with. We ate a lot but it was all fresh and cooked completely from scratch.
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Yes, I think it is processed foods like chips and sodas that are making people fat. When I was young these existed, but we kids weren’t allowed to graze on them all the time like people do now. I won’t say we always ate “fresh” foods — there were a lot of canned things my parents relied on — but we just didn’t gorge on junk food, and restaurant meals were a rare treat, not an every week occurrence. Also meals were a lot smaller, and balanced more towards protein, not carbs.
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Canned goods also vary. My aunt made her own canned meats at home from the pigs she raised and practically nursed. Obviously, she monitored what went into each can. It’s very different with today’s store-bought cans which can be any number of years old.
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Oh, my grandmother canned a lot of stuff too (well, it went into jars, but for some reason we call that “canning”), mostly jams and pickles. But I’m talking about the commercially canned stuff — my own parents didn’t do any canning. Actually, all that has a shelf life. Canned goods are supposed to last from two to five years, depending on what they are and other factors.
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The reason we talk so much about the weather in the UK is because it changes so often nobody can keep track of it. Two weeks ago it was blisteringly hot but just yesterday it snowed.
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Sounds like Virginia. Two weeks ago we were having freezes and today the high was near 90F and it was hot and sunny and we just finished having a huge thunderstorm that I can still hear in the distance.
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And Southern Illinois, too! There was a day when I had to turn on both the AC and the heating one after another. I hated doing that but the temperature dropped like a brick from a mountain!
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//We are Northern people and our metabolism is different from that of the people in warmer climes.
If a Northern person immigrates to a warmer clime, should s/he eat less now because no need for calories to keep warm? Or is it genetic and s/he can eat as usual?
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