England VS Canada

Since I'm returning to Canada for a visit in a mere two weeks I thought I might share a few of my random culture clash experiences since my relocation to the European side of the pond.

Food/Restaurants/Booze/Fattys

One of the first things that I found odd was that at almost all pubs, which constitute a great number of the places to eat in Buckingham and in most towns, you order food from the bar. When you pick a table you have to remember your table number when ordering or it gets confusing. And they really don't tip at all. Not bartenders or the servers that bring you your food after you've ordered from the bar. All of us Canadians find this quite disconcerting at first! But it is nice to be able to just pay what you see on the menu. However, since they aren't driven by tips, service can be SO SLOW! Especially at clubs when they're busy, ugh unbearable at times. Now we do tip at 'normal' table service restaurants, but they still don't tip as much as we would.

Indian Food

Some of the food experiences have been admittedly disappointing. The only sushi I've had has been pale in comparison to what we have back home, even in Belleville! But that is nothing when compared to how sad I was when I discovered they don't have buttered popcorn at the movies ('cinema where we watch films' haha), or popcorn flavour!! They only have salt or sweet flavour. SWEET?! I mean what the hell is that about. Now I am aware how silly this is, but I love movie popcorn some ridiculous amount, and without butter and flavour, my movie going experience is rather diminished... One thing that has been awesome, has been the Indian food. Apparently England's national dish is curry, so it makes sense. I am IN LOVE with Indian food. It's amazing and made for sharing. Still haven't convinced my friend Caitlin to give it a full try, but my roommate, mom and I are all lovers. 

Booze is super accessible here. It's in all the grocery stores and corner stores. The drinking age is 18, so people do start drinking younger, but that does nothing to curb the binge drinking at all. The government is considering the binge drinking of young people to be some kind of epidemic haha and I can somewhat understand their concern but it's not much worse then what happens in Canada. I would say that they do drink on average more after work etc since 'going to the pub' is a big part of the culture here.

Some lookers at a local bar

I think they may be getting into trouble obesity wise like the US and to a lesser extent Canada. I mean I don't mean to sound rude, but most women over 25 here seem to be overweight. There isn't a lot of obesity, but I think they're getting there! I recently heard on the radio about a study that said the average waist circumference of children has gone up a lot. I can imagine this is putting a massive strain on their health care system...

'Ice' Hockey

Division 1 Champs!

I have finally gotten used to putting 'ice' in front of hockey when explaining to people what I'm getting up to. In my travels with my team I have seen some interesting arenas. I've seen a couple that don't have glass, only netting. In Bristol the rink was made in a converted garage, and we got changed in a bar that overlooked the ice pad. There are a couple of lingo things that we had to get over when I first started playing. They call their equipment their 'kit' and so all your kit goes in the kit bag and you "kit up." Still makes me giggle a bit. They also didn't know what I meant when I said "fanned" on a shot, or said someone has sick hands... That does look funny when written down, but makes perfect sense to me haha. Only me and one other girl on my team shoot left which I find odd., I feel like it has to do with golf, or field hockey... Women's hockey and hockey in general is coming along quite well here. I saw the top two women's teams in all of England play this past weekend and they would probably be a on par with Senior A back home, so not too shabby. My team won playoffs for our league (there's only Premier and Division 1, we won all England Division 1) so we move up to Premier next year and may have to play those teams and we will probably get killed. Oh well! I was pretty happy with the season. I played 14 games and scored 32 goals, so no complaints! 

Fashion/Shopping

There is a decent sized mall about 20 mins from my place which has been awesome. It has a TopShop, H & M and many MANY other stores. Almost all of my wardrobe is now compiled of those two stores though now. Oh, but if you call it a mall, you get funny looks. It's a shopping center. I would love to go shopping in London, and what not, but I just don't have the money as I'm a poor student :( They are a lot more daring with fashion here and I love it! I mean socks with sandal high heels?! Why not. Tons and tons of harem pants, crop tops, over the top jewelry, messy hair... I look forward to coming home and seeing how differently people are dressing. I wish I was more adventurous in my style, maybe one day! 

Education


I have my final exams coming up which is sure to be an adventure. Luckily I only have 3, but they are all 100% finals. Eeeeek. Almost all schooling here, high school and post secondary has 100% finals. Scary stuff. So I won't be doing anything except studying for the next two weeks. Wish me luck, I may need it!

Things I'm looking forward to having at home...

I'm sure you could guess popcorn and sushi, also chicken wings (not a vegetarian anymore obviously), poutine, pitas, Taco Bell, Crystal light, white russians, Caesars, Coors Light, Timmy Ho's, oh and the list goes on... I am aware that these are all food/drink related, but that's really the only things that are missing from my life; other than my friends and family of course! 

See you in 2 weeks Canada!!!! Oh and GO CANUCKS GO!!! Stanley Cup Finals baby!! I'll be up late watching those games FOR SURE :)

Ashley    

Meat, Weddings and Potter! Oh my!

Woohooo my month as a vegan is over! It wasn’t too bad except for eating at restaurants. Basically I ate a lot of fries since we go to pubs a lot and they don’t have salads. Luckily I managed not to put on any weight! And after careful consideration and a lot of cravings I decided to eat meat today! I didn’t start slowly either! Hahaha I had a huge burger for lunch and then Indian food for dinner where I had some of dishes with chicken and lamb. I enjoyed being a vegetarian (veganism is too hard) but ultimately the craving for a burger took over. I’ll probably just keep a normal diet, but not too much meat as my knowledge of how terrible the meat industry is on the environment still matters to me, but if I want to have a burger, I will!

Group out for a friend's Bday in MK

Things are pretty much back to normal at Bucks, just going to classes and playing hockey on the weekends. We had some absolutely gorgeous days here and I even got some tanning in! It was hard to get any work done on those days so we spent them drinking beer on patios like normal uni students. It was awesome. The weekend of the 16-17^th was my friend Caitlin’s birthday so we bought a BBQ for the occasion and had ourselves a legit backyard BBQ followed by a messy night at the local bar. Just a lovely freaking day.

Good Friday was a girl on my hockey team’s 18^th birthday (the drinking age here) and also the 23^rd of another girl.  So we went out to the local gay bar! Not because anyone is gay, but because it was where that’s where they wanted to go! It was my first experience at a gay bar and it was a blast! We just danced and got nice and hammered! The next day my riding lesson was exhausting since I was basically still drunk and it was by far the hottest day we’ve had.

Caitlin and I enjoying the beautiful weather!

The week leading up to the Royal Wedding was a write off, I literally went to like 3 classes all week. Just couldn’t be bothered haha Oh well. Two of my Canadian friends at school actually went down and camped out over night at the Abbey to see the happy couple coming and going. She got some awesome pictures FO SHO. I was content to watch it on TV with the Chapmans who were visiting from Canada; we drank Mimosas and watched it from the comfort of the living room.  Man there were some funny hats! Definitely fun to watch. I can’t imagine how much of a zoo London was.

Nat, Emma (18th Bday girl!) and I post jaeger bombs

Saturday (30^th) I drove the Chapmans to Oxford, home of the University and Christ Church aka where the Great Hall scenes in Harry Potter are filmed! Oxford was extremely busy but it is an awesome city. Such old beautiful buildings and great atmosphere. The dining hall at Christ Church is where the great hall scenes were filmed and we got to go in there, which was so awesome. It is much smaller than it looks in the movies, but recognizable. There were also some staircase scenes filmed there and we saw those stairs too. Very cool.

 Hockey is almost over for the season, just two games and a final tournament left. We’ve played all the teams and beaten them that had any chance of challenging us for league champs so the last two games don’t really matter. Then on the weekend of May 28-29^th the top two teams from our Division (South) and two from the North play off for something… haha Not sure exactly what, but we’re spending the weekend in Sheffield! I am really pleased with the skill of the players over here. It was some decent hockey. During my last game I actually skated so hard I was sick… Yep was epically disgusting. We won 2-1. The division of skills in our league is ridiculous. We had games that close and ones we won 20-0. I can proudly say I scored a goal every game (and 6 in the 20-0 game hahaha). It’s been great.

Harry Potter Dining Hall!!!

That’s about all that’s been going on! Nothing exciting on the boy front to report. Thought I might have had a potential romance but he turned out to be a douche. I had friends make a point to warn me about him and luckily all that happened was we hung out a couple times then I just never heard from him again. This is in all likelihood because I didn’t sleep with him. Haha Sucks though because he had the broody good looks and was just generally sexy. But ohhhh well.

Got my exam timetable and I’m done on June 13^th so I’ll be home for a visit from June 14^th to July 9^th!! Sooooo excited!! Can’t wait to see you all! Hope the weather in Canada is improving! See you in 43 days!






xoxoxo


Ashley