So You Think You Know Britain Part 3

In Britain (and Europe) they use a 24 hour clock. Now that I am used to it I really like telling time this way. It makes it easier with flights and trains because you never have to worry that you missed a flight by 12 hours. Also note the spelling of "jewellery".

They use the metric system to measure height. Typically restaurants have a special price for children of a certain age, rather than height. I think this was unique to this restaurant. 

The concept of a "stone" as a measurement of weight was really strange at first. A stone (abbreviated "st") is 14 pounds and I mostly hear it associated with body weight, like "I lost two stone on this diet" or "I can't believe that woman weighed 46 stone."

Cornish cream tea is when you put your jam on your scone first and then top it with your clotted cream. Devon cream tea is when you put your clotted cream on first and then top it with your jam. When I moved here I had no idea that there was a distinction between these two practices. But now I can say that I prefer Cornish cream tea over Devon.

When you think of London you think of the ubiquitous red phone booth photo. But what you don't know is that in London these phone booths smell of urine and have pornography plastered all over the insides. 

People love HP Sauce (aka Brown Sauce). They eat it on eggs, fries/chips, meat, but especially with a full English breakfast. To me it tastes really tangy, like bad barbecue or A-1 sauce.

Crutches here are not the ones that go under your armpit. Even for a broken leg they use the kind of crutches in the photo below. 

A lot of restaurants have a station for tap water that is self serve. I always forget and try to order a tap water. 

People carry large instruments around on their back and onto public transportation. I'm sure this is a common sighting in large cities in the US but I never saw it in Nebraska. 

Almost every store has an umbrella stand so you don't carry your wet umbrella around while you shop. 

Car seats can be in the front seat. Another thing I never thought about before was that if you don't own a car you don't need to own a car seat for your baby. In the US you can't even leave the hospital without a proper car seat for your newborn. 

In the US they frown on people getting seats before they order because it can really mess up the flow in restaurants where you order at the counter. But in London seating is really limited and you pay more for eating at the restaurant than if you get takeaway. So they often want you to be sure you can get a table so they can charge you the right price. 

When we signed up for internet we found that you must get a landline in order to get internet. This seemed so ridiculous but I guess it is really common here. A lot of people have the landline number but never get a phone for their landline.

It is also really common to wait several weeks (or over a month in our case) to get your internet hooked up after ordering it. This made for a very miserable first few months since we weren't able to order our internet until we had a bank account which also took some time to set up.