Most of the things I would like to talk about right now can’t be made clearer by a photograph. My biggest adjustments were to the general atmosphere and the way people here behave. But first I can talk about some of the more concrete differences that I noticed, and of which I took pictures:
1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p, £1, £2
It’s been really hard to adjust to the money here. The bills are fine, sure, they’re pretty straight-forward. The numbers are there big on the paper just like ours. But after going through the change I was accumulating and doing a little research to verify, I found out that England has 8 different coins (pictured here). Furthermore, their sizes don’t really seem to follow any particular pattern. The only one that I have no problem distinguishing is the pound coin (second from right), which is thicker and heavier than the other coins, and is also gold-colored. I guess I’ve also picked up that the tiny one is 5p.
I’ve heard that American coins are not user-friendly for someone who is used to the euro, and apparently the pound has the same problem. Neither American nor English coins are clearly marked with their value. Euros have large numbers on them so it’s easy to see which is which (see previous link for pictures), but with American and English coins, you just have to be able recognize the coin. I guess the U.S. actually has six different coins, but we really only use four of them. As far as I can tell, all eight of the English coins seem to be in use. And rather than spend five minutes at the register trying to count out change, I usually end up using bills, which leaves me with a large amount of loose change (which, according to my online research, can be referred to as “shrapnel” or “slummy,” though I’m not sure how common these terms actually are).
Another POV adjustment I had to make when I got here was getting used to the fact that everyone drinks. Maybe that’s an exaggeration–I’m not saying that everyone here is a raging drunk–but everyone at least is allowed to drink, and apparently it’s not uncommon for a student to have a drink with a professor when meeting to discuss an assignment, etc. It’s just strange, coming from a dry campus in a town that was dry up until ten years ago. I don’t really have a problem with it–not morally anyway; I’m not judging the country for its legal decisions–except that the Venue (the campus bar) is about 100 meters away from my single-pane window. Hey, people party. I get it. I just hope it calms down a little bit now that classes have started.
Anyway, it was a little weird at first to see that they sell alcohol and tobacco products on campus, but I’m pretty much over it. I really wanted to buy a cider from the campus store, but kept chickening out. I worked myself up to it after two or three “attempts.”
On a side note for which I have no pictures, I attended my first class today (WRI1011: Intro to Fiction). As a rule I hate first days, because introducing myself in front of groups scares me. I can’t help it. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here before, but I have a stutter that for the most part doesn’t make much of an appearance unless I’m trying to say my name or speak in an official setting like a classroom or job interview. I’m always scared of embarrassing myself or of scaring people off, and it was certainly even more scary coming to a different country where I don’t know anyone to try to just insert myself into a culture and settle there for three months.
So far my experience has been pretty good. I even went to the meet-and-greet for the media department on Friday, and when I got there and didn’t see anyone I knew, I went and sat and talked with a group of English strangers. I was pretty proud of myself. For the most part, I’ve found that people are pretty friendly here. I have a bit of a rough start with introductions, but when I tell people here I have a stutter, they do not 1) act embarrassed for me, 2) stop talking to me, 3) talk down to me. These are things I’m afraid of happening when people find out I have a stutter, and none of them seem to happen around here. In my class today, I had to introduce myself in front of everyone and talk about myself (we were playing the two-truths-and-a-lie game), and once I explained my problem, no one seemed to mind. Maybe I have my “Americanicity” in my favor, but people seem to be genuinely interested in talking to me, which is somewhat of a foreign experience for me (that everyone is really nice to me, not that someone is).
Marissa
