I set off away from London today off to Bath, got very lost, ended up on the wrong train and traveled to Taunton instead. It was lovely though. Along the way however, I met two wonderful women from Taunton and we sat on the train together for a little over an hour and chatted. It was really nice to meet them because they were both getting ready to travel to America in a couple of months so they wanted to know as much about my culture as they could, which allowed me to ask lots of questions about theirs!! The thing that surprised me the most during our in depth conversation was their confusion regarding Soda.

They asked me, “I’ve read so many books that talk about this, what is Soda??” I was soooo stumped I didn’t know how to explain what soda was. See over here, if you order Lemonade you get sprite. When I told them that they asked what we usually drink when we ask for Lemonade. When I told her it was basically water, lemon, and sugar she was horrified. She said that sounded disgusting!!

The other thing is, with the drinks over here. You cannot find anything that is not carbonated. You order apple juice or orange juice and its carbonated…it doesn’t even really taste like orange soda..it’s just orange juice with spritzer water inside. When I explained that we drink all of our juices without carbonation she said, “so when I order a drink over in America, I should expect it to be flat??”

Then she wanted to know what an Ice cream Soda was, or a Root Bear Float….yea try explaining that to someone who doesn’t know what Root Bear is. So that took a while, and needless to say she wasn’t very excited about the prospects but I made her promise to try one when she does get over to America. Which of course led us on to compare ice cream over here. Their ice cream tastes very different from ours, and they stick (what looks like a chocolate covered churro) in their ice cream. I haven’t gotten to try it yet but it looks weird.

So we had a long conversation about the different kinds of food that each culture has, they are very excited to try some of it, and they were kind enough to recommend a lot of good stuff that I intend to try. All in all, I am rather pleased that I did in fact get lost!!

Angela