UK vs North American Cultural Differences

one thing i think people need to realize when classifying things as being a certain way in the states is that this is a gigantic country and astonishingly different from region to region.

in discussions like this i always see a lot of talk about how gigantic our houses are. we don't all live in texas is these monstrous homes. for instance my husband and i live in a 1 bedroom 600 square foot (just under 56 square meter) apartment. i can not fathom living in one of these HUGE 2000 square feet (185 suqare meter) homes. so much wasted space. so much to have to keep clean.

i haven't owned an automobile in over 12 years. i only know a few people who actually do in my city. 80% of us live in urban areas.

hershey's chocolate does taste icky. you can get cadbury everywhere here that i have ever lived. ranch dressing is disgusting. hp sauce is delicious. iced sweet tea is a lovely summer time drink but i prefer my tea earl grey, hot, and with milk and sugar.

the majority (meaning over 50%) of us do not own guns and don't feel the need to.

But then, it seems you're generalizing a bit, too. 2000 square feet is a good-sized house to me, but not HUGE by any stretch of the imagination. That would generally be a 3-4 bedroom home. The bedrooms in newer homes are generally at least large enough to hold a queen-sized bed. I'm actually LOOKING for reasonably priced 2-3 bedroom homes in my area and would be very happy with 2000 sq ft. Now, there are "monstrosities" in my suburb that I can't even fathom living in or what you would do with. I saw one the other day, selling for $3.5 million, 8 bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, over 13,000 square feet. I can't imagine living in a place the size of yours (my apartment is 1210 square feet), likely because I was born and raised in central Ohio, and not an urban area where homes are necessarily smaller.

Public transportation around here is the city bus or very expensive taxi cabs, so more people around here drive than don't.

I don't currently own a gun, but will soon become a gun owner.

US - Eggplant
UK - Aubergine

i wasn't generalizing i said for instance my husband and i. just showing another often unknown side of the coin ;-)
i've actually met people from many parts of the world that honestly think every single person in the states drive giant suvs, live in huge houses, and eat nothing but beef and potatoes. no idea how these rumors start but they do seem to nevertheless. i was talking to a british friend about how when he, a vegetarian, told him friends he was moving tot he states they all gasped sincere concern about what on earth he was going to eat in a country with no vegetables.

i've always thought the eggplant aubergine thing was funny. especially since most people still use the word aubergine for the color just not the vegetable. :-)

eta - holy smokes that is one massive house!! i can't even wrap my head around that. LOL

Cost of housing depends on where you live here in the US. Here in the Los Angeles area you might be able to find a small townhouse for $380k. Prices have gone down over the last 5 years, but $380k will still only buy you a cardboard shack in Malibu.

come on now! there is NO way you could get a cardboard shack for $380K in malibu. you can't even buy a parcel of land large enough to turn in a circle on for that price!

you can buy the shack for 380k but you have to move it because the ground it sits on is $1 million

My parents have a 3-bedroom house with a half acre of land and were trying to sell it for $60k. This is in small town NY. Oh, for those who don't know, New York is a State, not just a city! I get that a lot when I travel. I remember in Vienna I had someone say, "Wow! Vienna much be so small to you!" When I responded that I'm from a town of six THOUSAND people, they were speechless, haha, so I found myself explaining that NY is a state, not just one giant city Now when I travel I just say I'm from Niagara Falls, since that's the closest landmark people recogniz(s?)e.

I haven't been to the UK (yet!) but I have studied in Germany and Austria, lived in Italy, worked in Korea, and traveled a lot of north-Eastern and Central Europe so I'm very used to both small and massive cultural differences, language differences, measuring differences, etc. I also teach ESL/EFL, and that's a whole lot of fun because there are even grammatical differences between UK and US English such as I'm laying in bed vs I'm laid in bed.

Here's one that's fun: I'm also a big socc.... er football fan (supporter), and when I talk about that, I switch up how I say things depending on who I'm talking with. With fellow knowledgeable Americans, I use British terms (examples: pitch, kit, shirt, match, nill), but with Americans who do not follow the sport, I use American terms (field, uniform, jersey, game, zero)

one thing i think people need to realize when classifying things as being a certain way in the states is that this is a gigantic country and astonishingly different from region to region.

in discussions like this i always see a lot of talk about how gigantic our houses are. we don't all live in texas is these monstrous homes. for instance my husband and i live in a 1 bedroom 600 square foot (just under 56 square meter) apartment. i can not fathom living in one of these HUGE 2000 square feet (185 suqare meter) homes. so much wasted space. so much to have to keep clean.

i haven't owned an automobile in over 12 years. i only know a few people who actually do in my city. 80% of us live in urban areas.

hershey's chocolate does taste icky. you can get cadbury everywhere here that i have ever lived. ranch dressing is disgusting. hp sauce is delicious. iced sweet tea is a lovely summer time drink but i prefer my tea earl grey, hot, and with milk and sugar.

the majority (meaning over 50%) of us do not own guns and don't feel the need to.

That's a bit of an exaggeration. There are plenty of 2000 sq ft apartments in even the most urban areas of the US and they are not considered huge by most people. SF has nation's highest rent and there are plenty of 2 and 3 bedroom apartments that size, mine included and it's fairly average. And there is no wasted space.

And while you and your friends may not own cars, there are still millions of automobiles owned by Chicago residents. Just like in SF and New York City. Our urban cities are not nearly so urban as you make it sound. We still drive cars and live in decently sized apartments/houses. It's not like the US has this huge divide between tiny studios with no cars in urban areas and monstrous 16,000 sq foot homes and 4 trucks out front in rural areas.

i didn't say that i said i, me, we, my husband and i. i am stating what MY life is like. i just downsized from a 1200 square foot 3 bedroom apartment to a 600 square foot 1 bedroom and would not dream of going back. too much upkeep. to much wasted space. i, personally, only know one couple who lives in a chicago (where i personally live) apartment what is over 2000 square feet and judging that it houses 2 people and cost over a million bucks i personally think that is a lot of wasted space and in turn a lot of wasted money. at no point in my statement did i say what anyone's life was like but my own. i'm just commenting on that this place we live in has a lot of different kinds of lives in it.

one thing i think people need to realize when classifying things as being a certain way in the states is that this is a gigantic country and astonishingly different from region to region.

in discussions like this i always see a lot of talk about how gigantic our houses are. we don't all live in texas is these monstrous homes. for instance my husband and i live in a 1 bedroom 600 square foot (just under 56 square meter) apartment. i can not fathom living in one of these HUGE 2000 square feet (185 suqare meter) homes. so much wasted space. so much to have to keep clean.

i haven't owned an automobile in over 12 years. i only know a few people who actually do in my city. 80% of us live in urban areas.

hershey's chocolate does taste icky. you can get cadbury everywhere here that i have ever lived. ranch dressing is disgusting. hp sauce is delicious. iced sweet tea is a lovely summer time drink but i prefer my tea earl grey, hot, and with milk and sugar.

the majority (meaning over 50%) of us do not own guns and don't feel the need to.

But then, it seems you're generalizing a bit, too. 2000 square feet is a good-sized house to me, but not HUGE by any stretch of the imagination. That would generally be a 3-4 bedroom home. The bedrooms in newer homes are generally at least large enough to hold a queen-sized bed. I'm actually LOOKING for reasonably priced 2-3 bedroom homes in my area and would be very happy with 2000 sq ft. Now, there are "monstrosities" in my suburb that I can't even fathom living in or what you would do with. I saw one the other day, selling for $3.5 million, 8 bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, over 13,000 square feet. I can't imagine living in a place the size of yours (my apartment is 1210 square feet), likely because I was born and raised in central Ohio, and not an urban area where homes are necessarily smaller.

Public transportation around here is the city bus or very expensive taxi cabs, so more people around here drive than don't.

I don't currently own a gun, but will soon become a gun owner.

US - Eggplant
UK - Aubergine

i wasn't generalizing i said for instance my husband and i. just showing another often unknown side of the coin ;-)
i've actually met people from many parts of the world that honestly think every single person in the states drive giant suvs, live in huge houses, and eat nothing but beef and potatoes. no idea how these rumors start but they do seem to nevertheless. i was talking to a british friend about how when he, a vegetarian, told him friends he was moving tot he states they all gasped sincere concern about what on earth he was going to eat in a country with no vegetables.

i've always thought the eggplant aubergine thing was funny. especially since most people still use the word aubergine for the color just not the vegetable. :-)

eta - holy smokes that is one massive house!! i can't even wrap my head around that. LOL

That's funny about no vegetables. And yes, aubergine sounds so much nicer for that shade than "eggplant." lol And I can't wrap my head around it either. I even looked through the photos and it just seemed like so much wasted space.

That's funny about no vegetables. And yes, aubergine sounds so much nicer for that shade than "eggplant." lol And I can't wrap my head around it either. I even looked through the photos and it just seemed like so much wasted space.

i just...so much cleaning!! yuck!! though i guess if you can afford such a house you can afford a cleaning lady?? maybe??

I'm thinking at LEAST one cleaning lady, perhaps a whole TEAM of them....

I'm married to a Brit and I've picked up the following - GAR-aj for garage, vit-a-mins for vi-ta-mins, and I say vits (Brit way) a lot. We live in the USA outside of SF in a 2 story house. I did not want a 2 story house as I grew up in a mid-century 1 story ranch type but he insisted & all the newer homes in the USA are 2 story these days.

One thing about USA 2 story homes is the wasted space in them. For instance ours has cathedral ceilings & it's ridiculous. In the UK his sister and BIL live in the home counties and there's a complete floor above. Wish we had that instead. I find cathedral ceilings a complete waste of energy and our house energy prices in the SF Bay Area are high, possibly the highest in the land, more than what the UK pays. Our average PGE bill here for our 2 story home is $300 a month and up to $500 in the cold Dec/Jan months.

We go to Europe a lot & the UK is obviously included in that "go to Europe" thing.

Brits say "reckon" & in the USA the only people that say that are Southerners. Also Southerners have kept all these old time sayings that Brits say and have added their own.

OTOH, in the USA we have our own pool (unheated - see that PGE bill above) but that's ok because where we live it gets HOT & we don't need the heater on a lot of times, in fact it was HOT here yesterday, going to be HOTTER again today and we have black out curtains in our house because of that heat.

Oh and the other day when we were waiting in line at the chemists (aka Walgreens) a woman said I had a "slight British accent", which is great. I hope so! I have picked up a lot from hubby.

Oh and my home is 2285 sq feet - 2 stories tall, pool, 10k sq ft of land - it is landscaped and absolutely gorgeous, and we have a porch with a fence. These homes look larger on the outside than they are on the inside due to the cathedral ceilings in them aka wasted space. We don't have a maid but we have a horticulturalist who takes care of our place (gardener but he's writing a book on the plants in our county and he's a real horticulturalist). We have banana trees that fruit (we're in a microclimate, others tell us that our area is not great for growing them), an orange tree, tangerine,, lemon tree & we just bought a Bearss Lime tree that has already started flowering in spite of the frosty nights.

Our UK family loves to visit us, and we them too. I made enchiladas for them in the UK and they were seriously delighted with it (I'm not Latina, I just like that kind of food).

Cheetos! They're not Cheetos, they're Wotsits!
And it's jam, not jelly, and jelly not jello :happy:

Queues not "lines"

Cost of housing depends on where you live here in the US. Here in the Los Angeles area you might be able to find a small townhouse for $380k. Prices have gone down over the last 5 years, but $380k will still only buy you a cardboard shack in Malibu.

come on now! there is NO way you could get a cardboard shack for $380K in malibu. you can't even buy a parcel of land large enough to turn in a circle on for that price!

you can buy the shack for 380k but you have to move it because the ground it sits on is $1 million

My parents have a 3-bedroom house with a half acre of land and were trying to sell it for $60k. This is in small town NY. Oh, for those who don't know, New York is a State, not just a city! I get that a lot when I travel. I remember in Vienna I had someone say, "Wow! Vienna much be so small to you!" When I responded that I'm from a town of six THOUSAND people, they were speechless, haha, so I found myself explaining that NY is a state, not just one giant city Now when I travel I just say I'm from Niagara Falls, since that's the closest landmark people recogniz(s?)e.

I want to add to the geography point here too. I was born and raised in Buffalo, New York (near Niagara Falls/Canadian Border) and now live in New York City...about an 8 hour drive. Every single time I went on vacation as a kid, no one seemed to remember that New York state, not just the city. Even living here, I need to explain that Buffalo mannerisms are closer to midwest america than New York City. And it's not upstate NY, it's western NY lol.

But I can add that as something we have in common with UK, cause I know different regions have difference dialects and mannerisms too.

I want to add to the geography point here too. I was born and raised in Buffalo, New York (near Niagara Falls/Canadian Border) and now live in New York City...about an 8 hour drive. Every single time I went on vacation as a kid, no one seemed to remember that New York state, not just the city. Even living here, I need to explain that Buffalo mannerisms are closer to midwest america than New York City. And it's not upstate NY, it's western NY lol.

But I can add that as something we have in common with UK, cause I know different regions have difference dialects and mannerisms too.

:flowerforyou: Some of my friends tell me "meh, you're Canadian" hahaha. I'm sure you totally understand that too, eh?

Are you actually from Buffalo? I just say I am, but I'm from that lovely stretch of no-man's land between Buffalo and Rochester. About 15 minutes north of Darien Lake