London Year One

We have officially lived in London for one year, so it seems like a good time to look back and reflect on some of the plans and questions we had when moving here to see how it's going.

Live British One of my goals for the trip was to attempt to live British. We often hear of folks moving to another country and then looking for the most American experience they can find there. I wanted to at least attempt to live as the locals do. This has lead to many surprises with gas meters and grocery stores, but I do feel that it has added to the adventure of it all. We are doing fairly well on this front. I have gotten used to writing my dates backwards and I think that I am very close to a breakthrough on 24-hour time. We know a few common conversions from F to C and back. We know how to pay on a pub. I know how much one stone weighs (14 pounds, for what it's worth.) Going digital When figuring out what all to bring, I made some bold statements about having less stuff and going digital on more things. We did indeed leave our books behind, and have mostly stuck with e-books on the Kindle (though we can't resist Mary Roach's footnotes and silly pictures in physical form.) I have also (mostly) broken my desire to own physical copies of music media, though I will admit to buying a few CDs from particularly beloved artists. Mostly I have embraced Spotify as a good way to listen to music, though there is a part of me that still wants to run out and buy the physical discs from some of the artists I have discovered there. I had planned to move most of our video watching to streaming, but we've made less progress on that front. Rather than sign up for NetFlix here we went for a local option, though we later found out that Amazon had purchased them. I find that the steaming options are pretty limited, though we do use it when we can (we still get discs for the rest). From hearing friends in the US talk, it seems like limited (legal) options is at least a bit of an issue there as well. Have less stuff Overall we had planned to have less stuff here. On some fronts (books, CDs) that has worked out well, on others less so. Some of the items that we thought we could live without (toaster, microwave) we eventually relented on and bought anyway. Some of our American stuff just fundamentally doesn't work here (lamps, our too large sofa) and so more appropriate local solutions were procured (thank goodness for Ikea). It's unclear how much of this will come back to America wit us, so we'll call this one a wash.

Will we pick up British terms? We all knew that pretentious kid in school who spent two weeks in England one summer and came back with an affected British accent. While we didn't want to be That Guy, I was curious to what extent we would pick up local slang and sayings. We have acquired more than I expected to, but none of the very prototypical ones. Both Mary and I have started saying 'proper' when in America we would say 'real' as in, "It's impossible to find proper American bacon in British restaurants." I have started pronouncing 'weekend' the British way (with the stress on 'end' rather than 'week') which I attribute to all the small talk about weekends one does at work; Mary, conversely, works with very few British people which is why she has not picked this up and mocks me for it. We don't say 'quid' for 'pound', though we do say 'P' instead of 'pence'. While I know when you would use quid since it's almost exactly like using 'buck' for 'dollar', I am so used to saying 'buck' that I just blaze through and use that. I have said 'cheers' exactly once and it still felt very weird (even though I was IMing with a Brit.) How will the cats do? After a few days to get over the trauma of the transportation, the cats are completely unaware that anything has changed.