So, as a first topic about UK I decided to write about small minor things that makes UK different from the rest of Europe. The list I developed looks like that:
1. Wheel in the cars is on the other side.
Probably everyone knows this before arriving to UK, but it is still quite difficult to adjust to this when crossing the street and to know to which side to look. Consequently, I am looking to both sides before crossing the street. Actually closer to University they have it written with big letters on the street "Look to the left" or "Look to the right" and this really helps.
2. Socket
The fact that sockets (plug ins) in UK are different I also knew. So, I prepared for and bought an adapter. But I was not prepared for another minor detail - Sockets here have On/Off buttons and when I arrived in my room all of them were turned off. So, for a while I totally panicked and thought that all sockets in my room are broken. Thankfully, closer analysis of the socket made me to question what does the button on it do and so I discovered that I can turn on and off the socket when I want. Interesting, maybe this helps to save some electricity?
3. Switches
Another small detail that is quite weird. In Lithuania all the switches for light that I experienced were turned on/off oppositely than here. For example to turn on here I need to press the lower part of switch and to turn off to press the upper part. For light switches this is not such a big deal cause I can clearly see if light is on or off. However, for other situations like socket or ventilation in the kitchen I always had to think when I pressed the button: "Ok, I pressed the lower part, so this means that the ventilation now is.....hm......oh, yes its off".
4. Sizes & Measurements
All the sizes I encountered here are different except they still measure temperature in Celsius. Converting kilometres to miles proved to be easy but for not so common measures it again posed a challenge. For example, I went ice skating and the guy who is renting skates asked for my shoe size. Without a lot of thought I said 44. The guy looked at me weirdly and said he thinks my feet can't be that big. So it took me a while to work out that my shoe size in UK is 9,5.
5. Cheque books
This was actually the first time in my life I saw cheque books. You don't know what it is? If you remember TV show "Friends" there they used to write cheques for each other. That was in 1990s!. Yet, apparently I can pay with cheque book for everything here in UK. I can go to a supermarket and instead of card or cash I can write a cheque. I haven't tried it yet, but looks like fun so probably I will try to do it sooner or later cause my bank gave me a few cheque books.
6. Smoke alarms
According to the amount of smoke alarms here one can think that this country is constantly on fire. Each and single room has a device like in the picture below on the ceiling. If it's not bad enough that it is annoyingly blinking all the time right above my bed it actually is detecting smoke and then making an alarm. As you can understand the alarm is never because of a fire but because of normal everyday issues - like cooking food, taking a hot shower, smoking inside the room and etc. Thankfully in my place we managed to keep these alarms silent but in dormitories they are quite a problem. Because if one alarm starts ringing even in the middle of the night - it is obligatory for everybody to leave the building immediately until someone responsible detects that there is no fire. Once this alarm even went off in library, a huge 5 storey building was evacuated, closed for 15 minutes and then opened again cause obviously there was no fire.
7. Two taps
I know that they used to have two taps because earlier it was considered that hot and cold water is not of the same level in hygiene. But...times are changing and still in brand new buildings it is still two taps. Well, the hot water tap is anyway too hot to use, so I always end up using the cold water tap. This would not be such a big problem, but it is winter outside and temperatures below zero, so it would nice to at least wash hands in warm water.
So , this is the small list of small unexpected things one should be prepared to encounter in UK, more to come soon!
p.s. Happy happy Christmas, its almost here!!
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