We moved to the UK two years ago and we want to talk about our first impressions of British food, driving, and weather! Overall, we love it here!
FOOD
All our friends said that the food in the U.K. was not very appealing; they said all you had to offer was fish and chips and maybe haggis, which apparently is some meat inside a stomach of something, I have no idea.
We ended up going to a restaurant here that no one really likes. It’s a chain like we have in the U.S.–Applebee’s, Friday’s, Ruby Tuesday’s, etc. This chain we love in the U.K., however, occupies old buildings that sometimes have been pubs before, other times other things. They generally take classy old looking buildings and make them restaurant/pubs for families. The chain is called, Wetherspoons! We…love it!
We love it because it takes old places that could be shut down or abandoned and makes them alive again. They up-keep historical buildings, preserving their value and I think that people do appreciate it. You could say that Wetherspoons “Makes Pub Life Great Again”! Whenever we would tell our British friends that we were taking the bus rides into town for Wetherspoons, they almost laughed themselves off the chair! It’s like saying, “I’m a British person living in America and I just fell in love with Ruby Tuesday ’cause it’s so spectacular”.
At Spoons you pay £5 and get the meal and a drink so it’s quite nice. They also serve the full English breakfast. You’ve got sausage, English bacon, hash browns, this thing called black pudding (it’s pig’s blood in a fried bread form I think), cooked tomato, mushrooms, beans, fried eggs, and toast. At Wetherspoons it’s like £5 for this huge, large full English. Now they’ve gotten really advanced and there’s an app for it on your phone. You can order straight from your phone and it comes really fast!
DRIVING
When we first got here we hired a car and there was one occasion where I had to drive Felipe to work–it was really scary! The roads are so narrow. I don’t remember the size of the car we had, but the roads were so narrow that the car felt massive. You have to drive on the left, not the right, and the car wheel is on the right, not the left. We didn’t even get an automatic, but instead got a manual. It would have been nice for me if we had a manual, stick shift.
I ended up hitting a sideview mirror on one occasion, and on another occasion I hit someone in the back! Thankfully they didn’t get upset! After that, Felipe told me that I wasn’t allowed to drive, so I did a lot of walking and pushing our daughter around in a pushchair. We moved into our place and returned the rental, but didn’t get a car of our own for over a year. I took the bus a lot, but not having a car saved us a lot of money: we didn’t have to pay for petrol, insurance, road tax, and MOT (which I think is like emissions testing in the U.S.). On first impression, driving was really scary, so I didn’t drive for the entire first year we lived here.
For Felipe, driving was exciting and awesome. He learned how to drive in Nicaragua without licensing, without rules. In Nicaragua, Felipe’s uncle was really adventurous, let’s just leave it at that. They would just get into a car when they were maybe 13 or 14 and just drive around town. He learned to drive there, experiencing roundabouts. There really is no road etiquette or anything there; it’s really aggressive driving. So driving here was wonderful for him!
WEATHER
Felipe spent 10 years or so in Syracuse, and I spent 6 or so years there, so we’re quite used to really cold, really grey, and dreary weather. I think our pastor from Syracuse used to say there are only two seasons in Syracuse: Winter and Construction. We haven’t seen a lick of snow since moving here and I like it. We love the weather here: it’s mild, it gets warm. In the wintertime it doesn’t snow and so you don’t have to worry about warming up the car before you get in there. British people probably have never heard of remote starters.