Anglo-versary

Today is my two-year Anglo-versary. I know, it's hard to believe, but it's been two years exactly since I arrived in Southampton, only slightly terrified and completely exhausted. Of the last 24 months, I spent approximately 11 and a half living in Southampton, and 12 and a half living in London. Yesterday marked my one-year work-aversary (sadly my planned blog on the occasion never came to fruition as I was stuck in a meeting), so I suppose that means my time so far has been evenly split between being a student and a worker bee. What I perhaps find most bizarre is that of those 24 months, I've been going out with that Mark character now for a little more than 16 of them. That boy deserves a medal!

This milestone provides a nice opportunity to look back and reflect on what I've learned since my arrival. So here we go, some things I've learned:

1. English people are a lot like Americans. Only they use a slightly different set of funny words and drink lots of tea.
2. People from continental Europe really are a different breed. This point was proved most effectively when I watched a stream of people getting of a plane from Milan. Also reinforced by my daily sighting of people wearing strange pants on the tube, often followed by hearing them speak in Romance languages.
3. Listening to English accents constantly over a two-year period only makes you partially immune to their charm and little sayings. Ask Mark, I tend to laugh when ever he proclaims he'd like some water... Oh, and when I hear someone say 'bloody hell' I can't help but giggle a bit on the inside.
4. English people do not lump Americans into one group, and will often generally judgement of you until they've determined your region of origin. Nobody has any beef with people from Oregon or Washington. They are like the Canadian States of America. Oh, and if anyone asks, you didn't vote for any Bush for president, ever.
5. I've developed two distinct forms of dialogue, one for talking to Americans and one for talking to English people. I don't quite understand all of the distinctions between the two, but I'm pretty sure one involves an increased frequency of the word 'dude'. I imagine the English people dialogue has developed as part of my desire to a) fit in a little and b) not be laughed at for over-using American-isms, even if I would over use them normally, like with the word dude. I don't notice the difference, but it seems to sort of freak Mark out a bit. Likewise, he's gotten some crap from people for using occasional American terms (like trash), so I guess it goes both ways.
6. For pretty much everything you give up, there is something here to replace it. For example, I miss peanut butter m&ms, but the presence of Galaxy caramel makes up for this short-coming. Likewise, the lack of happy hour is balanced out by the social acceptability of sitting at a pub for the better part of a Sunday afternoon.
7. Some things are very deeply ingrained. Although I see it everyday, when I try and visualize traffic on a road (which I have to do on a near daily basis for work) I see people driving on the right, and it takes me much longer than it should to figure out how things would work on those roads if people are driving on the left. Additionally, pants are not underwear. Nor will they ever be. Nor should they be.
8. Living far away makes you kind of a bad American. I keep realizing that I know less and less of what is going on (luckily I can watch the Daily Show to keep me somewhat informed), but things that don't make international news generally don't seep into my conscious. This knowledge hole is becoming kind of alarming to me.

So that is just a small snippit of what I've learned in time in the old UK. Oh, and as an end point, I'm still not entirely clear on what exactly is included in the UK and what is in Great Britain. But nobody else seems to know this either, so I seem to have the popular view!