Accents, line drying, and paths Oh My!

Someone recently asked me what the main difference between England and Canada was, and it took me a while to find an answer. Because really, when you get right down to it there isn’t much of a difference. People speak differently, and it’s a generally accepted practice to hang your clothes up rather than use a dryer (very strange), and the outlets are different. But people are pretty much the same. So it took me a while to come up with an answer, but once I did it was fairly obvious: Asian food.

In England, there is a distinct lack of good Asian food. I had a California roll at a Japanese restaurant the other day, and what with it being primarily imitation crab and rice I was expecting a fairly low price. Not so. £5 for a low-quality roll, dear god. I may never eat sushi here again. (Okay, that’s probably a lie. I just won’t eat good sushi.)

Speaking of food, I’m having a bit of cognitive dissonance between “chips” and “crisps.” Also between “dollars” and “pounds,” although on that I’m getting slightly better. Half the time I notice it myself. Obviously, the other half I don’t. Oh well. (JP: I notice it the other half as well.)

And continuing my misadventures with toes, the other night I slammed my foot into a wooden staircase. In my defense, the steps are a lot smaller here than I'm used to. Also it was dark, and the wood was a hard wood, and also did I mention that it wasn’t my fault in any way? In any case, all that was required was a band-aid and not a trip to the emergency room to reset a broken toe, so I’m ahead so far.

Yesterday we took a trip into the unexpected dilapidated factory that was on our route to the store. (Note: the last half of that sentence should be read with sarcasm quotes.) What should have been a 30 minute trip was instead a two hour operation that involved a lot of prickly plants. It started out well enough, with a brilliant observation from the obviously smart one.

Me: “That path looks well trodden. What’s that way?”

The answer that sensible people would know is “Nowhere good.” From there it went downhill. My shoes got very muddy, and there was an unfortunate incident with my jeans and some kind of red dye. Luckily, we arrived home with the newspaper that we’d first set off to get.

The rest of the day’s adventures included being confused by quiche, tin foil, and ovens in general. I really think that I should be smarter than this, but when it comes to cooking we are sadly at a loss. The one good thing is that we are fairly alright at cooking things out of a freezer, in a very general and loose sense of the word “cook.” (As I was typing this I was handed a plate of food that JP made. While it did come from the freezer, it’s also very good. It contains vegetables! Seems like I’m the only one that is completely hopeless.)

One thing I’ve noticed is that television here seems to be primarily a mixture of Top Gear and Friends. Top Gear is interesting, in that I know nothing about cars except that I like them fast and that the challenges are amusing. This is really all I need out of TV. The Friends thing was surprising. It’s taken the schedule that Seinfeld always had in Canada, which is to say that it was always on some channel three times a day. Right now there’s some random show on that I cannot recall the name of, but it looks like a soap opera. The word “chav” springs to mind; now all I need is a better understanding of the term.