All About Americans

We eat too much
We work too hard and too much
We don't exercise enough
We have too many guns
We're too friendly
We're obsessed with capitalism
We're racist
We're ignorant
We love violence

These are all stereotypes of Americans. While some are very true, others are just not. One thing I will say is that us Americans are much more willing to talk to strangers than the British. I tend to use that to my advantage though, and one of my friends, Micky told me to do so. He said, you're really outgoing, use that to your advantage. So I have. I am no longer afraid to talk to strangers in the UK because of this stereotype that Americans are outgoing. I may be using this stereotype as a scapegoat to ask strangers for directions or help finding things in stores, but why not use it to my advantage? Also, what's the worst thing that could happen (besides someone shanking me with a knife for asking directions)? It's hard at first to put yourself out there because when you ask someone for help you're allowing yourself to be vulnerable, but I find it worth it. It also helps that I like interacting with humans. Technically speaking I'm an ambivert, so right in between introvert and extrovert. Ambiverts are flexible, emotionally stable, and intuitive-or they're supposed to be, anyways. Every ambivert is different, but I'd definitely say I'm a flexible and intuitive gal.

Another stereotype that I do agree with is that us Americans work too much. We work and work and forget to really live. I know older generations save and save all their money as if they will be able to use it in the next life. I really think people would be happier if they took more vacation time or extended weekends to be a full 3 days. It makes sense to work to live, not live to work. Also, there's a balance if you truly love your job and your job is your life. I think it's important to take some time to relax if you have a career. Just my opinion. :)

Racism, I find is more prevalent in the US. The UK has little to no racism at all. It's very, very refreshing that racism isn't a huge thing in the UK. Now, that isn't to say that there isn't any racism. There will always be issues with racism in societies. It's hard to describe and this might upset some people, but in the UK I feel like people don't look at other people and think about what color their skin is. That does, indeed happen in the US. When I'm in the UK I actually notice ethnicity less because everyone has the same kind of British accent and you can't tell someone's ethnicity by how they talk. This is where I discuss the elephant in the room. In the US, you can sometimes tell what ethnicity someone is by how they speak, despite being a native born American. For example, one of my roommates in college was Guatemalan, and you could tell she was by the way she spoke. In both England in Wales, (I can't account for Scotland and Northern Ireland because I've never been) everyone that was born or raised there has the normal regional accent for their area. Another example, Sandra from the British TV show GoggleBox that I watch is Jamaican. However she sounds just like any normal English person because her accent was influenced by where she lives, not where she's from.

Violence is also prevalent in American media. There are arguments that it desensitizes us to violence, but there is no research that proves this point. I feel like I see more violence on American TV than English TV (shows). It's funny, in the UK there is swearing on TV after a certain time, but in America there is no swearing on TV-but violence isn't a problem. I'll never forget the first time I heart the f bomb on TV in Wales. I was so surprised and amused. I mean, it's just a damned word. It doesn't hurt anyone, does it? Violence is disturbing, words can hurt, where is the point we say enough? We can't really know because there are so many variables. We can't study the impact of violence and swearing on TV because we can't study humans' effects in their natural habitats. We can't describe violence. There's no one way to describe what violence means. Do you see how I can tear apart so many aspects of things that are subjective?

So what was the point of this blog post? Basically, I can accept that Americans aren't perfect. We have our flaws. The United Kingdom's citizens aren't perfect either. But it doesn't mean that one is necessarily better than the other.


.....who am I joking, America is the best. Sorry, I'm heavily biased ;)

Leah

British Greetings and a Poll

"Are you alright?"
"Alright?"
" Are ya'right?"
"Ya'right?"

"You alright, love?"

The first time a stranger asked me "are you alright?" it was the first day I was in the UK. I was in Birmingham, England with Ollie. I had arrived around dinner time and we decided to stay at a Holiday Inn Express rather than take the 3.5 hour train that same night. It was 4 am England time, 11 pm Detroit time and I was very jet lagged. I was headed to the lobby to ask if the hotel restaurant had any coffee I could drink and before I could say anything he asked me "are you alright?" I had heard Ollie ask his previous housemates this question before. I knew how to answer. However in that moment the appropriate reaction escaped me and it left me staring at him like a deer in headlights, stuck in my tracks. Eventually I just ignored the question, and enquired about the coffee.

It became more and more frequent, this greeting. It's a very informal way of British people saying "what's up?" The are a couple ways to respond to this. I usually stick with "yeah, you?" Sometimes instead some people will respond with "alright." In American English?
Are you alright? = Sup
Yeah, you? = hey man, what's up

Because if you think about it, a lot of times someone will come up to you and say what's up? and then one of the responses is "sup" which is also slang for what's up. I love these cultural differences!

Oh, and in the UK it's completely normal for (well, normal for them at least) men to call other men, women and children "love." The first time I was in the UK I watched a 14 year old girl at a chip shop say "thanks, love" to the 50+ aged store owner after handing her a fork like it was perfectly normal. I never experienced that until I started going to my university's cafe for coffee on Thursdays and this guy with a really London-y accent who works at the coffee bar looked at me and said "good morning, love, you a'right?" Then I saw him again and he called me love after asking me "what can I get you?" Hearing it hasn't become commonplace, but I may get used to it. I just think it's weird to call people you don't know terms of endearment.

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, I've been quite busy. Today I took grandpa to two doctors appointments and to the bank. He was very grateful We got to go to my favorite Grosse Pointe restaurant, Side Street Diner. While there we got to see Stacey, who was our regular waitress back when I lived in GP. She's very sweet and isn't afraid to sass grandpa back when he's a grump. However I've noticed that since my grandpa's heart attack he seems a lot less grumpy and more easy going. He's always been a sweetheart to me though.

My dad and Wendy come home tomorrow and I will no longer be having sleepover parties with Sailor. However I will get to see my dad and Wendy and it's always fun hanging out with all three of them.

I wanted to try something new this time; a poll. I just want to start out with something random.

POLL, clicky

Results :)

Thanks for reading <3

Plasters, failures and funny grandpa

Let us begin with the Leah fail of the day and that way it's less painful. Like pulling a band-aid off real fast. They call band-aids "plasters" in the UK. Fun fact. Anyways, tonight my cousin and I ordered pizza and we were going to bring it to my sister's new home. She's a new home owner! (Applaud here for successful adult) Anyways. So I go downstairs and realize that I left my car keys in my moms car. No big deal. Oh wait. Shit. My mom was currently on an airplane. Which means...her car is at the airport. So basically what's happening is I'm using my grandma's mini van (Rest in peace, grandma Lorraine) ps, isn't that a pretty name? So tomorrow when I drop Meghan off at the airport I have to locate my mother's car some how and get my keys out. Luckily she left her spare keys at home. 

Here's a photo of Carter because he's cute and you could use some cute in your day. We all could. 

So eventually Andi scooped us and then we still had to pick up the pizza and we were really late for it. Like 30 minutes late. We get there and it's closed. However there are still people inside and we get our pizzas even though they are kind of cold. Here's a photo of the "Detroiter" pizza. 

Hot dogs, mustard and chili. Diabetes? You bet. Never again. 

Tomorrow I have a million things to do. I'm a bit stressed because this week is packed with tons of doctors appointments and half of them are actually grandpa's that I am taking him to since after his recent heart attack he refuses to drive. He also refuses to do his laundry or his bills and makes my mother and sister do it. Poor guy. He's a lot happier now that he's living in a senior home. It's really cool, it specializes in caring for senior citizens that are veterans, so my grandpa fits in really well. Here's a photo of him from this weekend. 

What a guy. This was him laughing at me. Well folks, I'm off to see the wizard. And by that I mean have tea. See you soon. 

Leah

January 10th

This afternoon I was backing out of the driveway at my mom's house (with my cousin Meghan in the passenger's seat) and my mirror collided with the gate we used to use for the dog. The whole thing just crashed into the gate and suddenly the mirror was hanging on by a thread. Well, technically by a wire. Meghan thought it was hilarious, but it scared the hell out of me. I'm supposed to be driving a lot of places while I'm home and within the first minute I get into my car I've already been into a minor accident. My dad is unaware of this accident, and it should remain so until he gets back from his trip in California. For anyone wondering why, my parents bought me the car and it kills them everytime I damage it.. two summers ago I backed into another gate. When I was in highschool someone in the parking lot smashed into my car and didn't even leave a note. My poor car has been through a lot. Oh and that's without mentioning that the brake pads have been replaced because they stopped working and the battery has died 4 times. My car is a total lemon. Oh, and I forgot to mention-my parents bought me the car for my 16th birthday and it was new. We bought a new lemon. Although it doesn't help that I am great at running my car into stationary objects.

I got my haircut after the car debacle. I cut off 6 inches, it's a lot shorter. Ollie doesn't really like short hair but he said I look beautiful. I was worried he would say it was too short, but he loves it! After that I tried to fix my phone but it still won't work. For some reason I can't text or use the internet. Basically the 3G isn't working. Which is really frustrating when you're temporarily out of town from your partner. I'm off to the Sprint store tomorrow.

We went to grandpa's for dinner tonight to celebrate his 83rd birthday. It's on Wednesday, but since Meghan is in town this weekend we celebrated early. We did his laundry, ate Chinese food, and had celebratory apple pie. We all ate too much. Also, having pie after Chinese was a horrible idea. After dinner I accidentally knocked over my plate with leftover food an a cup of cranberry juice. Right on the carpet. Grandpa saw the whole thing in slow motion and after it all fell he said "I told you that table was going to fall!" Then he and I both watched as Andi, Meghan and my mom scrambled to clean it all up before I even registered how badly I screwed up.

Tomorrow I'm having a lazy day. Breakfast with the family-and we're drinking mimosas. My family is always drinking wine, but I don't drink wine. Oh, unless it's with orange juice! Of course, sparkling wine. I wouldn't put Merlot in with orange juice. I'm looking forward to Monday. The day I pick up Sailor!

It was a long, crazy day

Where do I begin?!

5:15 am: train to Shrewsbury, England

7:15 am: taxi to Birmingham International

9:25 am: flight to Amsterdam

1:30 pm (delayed): 9 hour flight to Detroit.

There was no in flight entertainment because the little media players that you get to use on international flights that I've come to rely on were broken. So I essentially sat and did nothing for 9 hours and thought it would never end. It didn't help that in my state of exhaustion within the first flight I sat on the toilet in a puddle of urine. As some of you know I'm a total germaphobe and that set the tone for the rest of the flight.

At one point an immigration officer began grilling the man next to me. We were stood in a crowd of people, irritated that the luggage was taking longer than an hour to come out. He asked the man where he had traveled from. He replied with "Africa" and slowly about 10 people turned around to stare in horror. One man grabbed his kids and hid them behind him. Even I was scared. The immigration officer even got the hell away from him! However he was in Somalia which isn't anywhere near the places in Africa effected by the outbreak.

I think I'm over exhausted because when I got home and took a shower I was convinced either my cousin (who's in town) or my sister came upstairs and purposely scared me. I jumped and said "oh my god you scared me!" Then when I came downstairs I found out that nobody had attempted to scare me while I was in the shower and I must have imagined it. I'm officially going nuts. Maybe I should get some sleep soon, my brain thinks it's 2 am.

Carter (my sister's dog) just bent down to sit in his bed and I was convinced he was pooping in the house and I yelled out "he's pooping!!" and my family just said Leah your traveling hallucinations are getting worse, go to bed!!!! He wasn't pooping at all.

I'm not going to bed yet. I'm enjoying hanging out with my family and sitting in front of the fire. Until tomorrow, readers.
Leah

My mom took a photo of me arriving :)

Black Mirror

I just saw the best commercial! For reference, SpecSavers is a store to buy glasses.
Watch it on YouTube here.

I wanted to talk about Black Mirror, the best TV series I've seen yet. This is a huge deal for me to name something the best I've seen. I love a lot of TV series. I mean, a lot. However this one exceeds anything I've seen before. It reminds me of The Twilight Zone in terms of genre, because all of the episodes (which don't correlate with each other so you can watch in any order) take place in the future. The brilliant Charlie Brooker is the creator of the series, which has a recurring theme of that hi-lights the downsides of future technology. In my favorite episode thus far, The Entire History of You, a new fad that quickly turns Facebook-like because everyone has one, everyone has a memory chip installed in the side of their head, recording everything they see and keeping it to replay it whenever they want. When they replay the memories they call it a re-do, which is creepy, yet genius at the same time. For example, one couple had one installed into their toddler, so after the nanny left, they were able to review what the nanny did while the parents were out with friends, a sort of nanny cam that is eerily built into a human. Without giving the entire plot away, it follows a couple that both have the memory chips built into their heads and how the pros and cons of recording everything can effect relationships.

Tomorrow is my last day in Wales and the next morning I'm en route to the US. I wish I had a direct flight, but unless I fly from London Heathrow that's impossible. Considering I don't want to take a train 6 hours and then a plane for 8.5, I'll have to just stick with the 3 hour train ride to the 1 hour plane ride, one hour layover and finally an 8 hour flight. I'm going to be exhausted on Friday!

I've packed my bag and it's all ready to go. I have Jaffa Cakes for my mom, StarBars for Brit and another candy that I will not name for Andi because I want it to be a surprise. My stomach is unfortunately in knots because I hate being away from Ollie- he's my best friend and it's hard being away from him. I was very glad when we ended our long distance because missing your partner is not fun at all. I feel bad because I will be going home while he has exams and I feel I should be there for him, but he will be studying all day and I'd have nothing to do but sit home and watch TV. However I'm looking forward to seeing my family and their puppies. Ooh I miss Carter and Sailor so much! I will post some photos of them on my facebook page while I'm home. If you're wondering the page is right here. Carter was rescued in Oakland, California. He's a Bichon Frise mix. My sister and her husband were riding their bikes and they found him on a busy road eating cheese off a cheeseburger wrapper. He was covered in fleas and was very skinny. They scooped him up, took him to the vet for a check up and shots and then took him home to give him a bath with shampoo to get rid of those pesky fleas! He's been apart of our family ever since. He's a very sweet boy, and when he first joined the family he would howl when my sister left the house and I was babysitting him. He does a dance when her or her husband get home, which I've named "the monkey dance." He gets up on his hind legs and he throws his front paws up, jumping up and down and wagging his tail. It's very cute. Oh here, I've found a picture I took of him doing it when she got home!

Then there's miss Sailor, who's just a baby! My dad and Wendy, his wife got her in late July this past summer. She's a Goldendoodle, which is a Poodle and Golden Retriever mix. Her and I are best buds because I took care of her over the summer when my dad and Wendy were at work. She's very sweet and outgoing and loves to run around! Here she is:

And finally, here's a photo of both of them together with my brother in law, Ouz

Well readers, I'm off to have dinner and watch another episode of Black Mirror. Until tomorrow!

Leah

Coffee refills and double deckers

500 more words and then I'm free.

Instead of having exams for my Film Studies classes, I have papers and presentations. I finished the presentations during the semester, well I should say I gave the presentations. One was on the depiction of women in Indian Cinema and the other was on cultural and audience perspectives. After finishing the presentations I had 5 papers, each at 3000 words. I've finished all of them except this last one, my research proposal for my dissertation. It's technically not due until the 20th of January, but I'm going home to the US this weekend for a couple weeks and don't want to have to deal with it then. Plus, I need to take my laptop into the Apple store-I've got a "service battery" warning. Don't worry, it's covered under Apple care.

I made a list of things I wanted to talk about here today. I didn't make a post yesterday because I didn't do anything "blogworthy". I like that term, blogworthy. It may be made up, but it's still awesome. First on my list is the word "fine." In the US, fine has a negative connotation. Fine, for women, is the calm before the storm. If you're in a relationship and you ask your partner if she's okay and she retorts with "fine" you'd better buckle up, because it's going to be a rough one. For women, fine means I'm not good, and I won't be until you figure out why I'm mad at you. Well, at least in what I've observed. We seem to think our partner is responsible to figure out why we're mad and then when they can't figure out if they've done anything wrong, we say we're fine. But really, we aren't. We're mad!

In The UK, from what I've gathered, there are two terms used here that are seen as good, but Americans only use to describe themselves as bad. Here, if someone in the UK says they're "not bad" after asking how they are, it really means they're great! If asked how someone likes food you've just cooked and they reply with not bad it is a positive. However, in the US that would be an insult because not bad really means there's a lot of room for improvement. It's the same with the word fine. In the UK fine is good. I remember going to a restaurant here and I was telling the waitress what I wanted and this is how it went:
Me: Can I have the chicken club without the onions?
Waitress: fine
You can imagine my deer in the headlights look when I got sass from a waitress about the removal of mere onions on my sandwich!!! However, lots of waiters and waitresses say fine. It's like saying okay. However if a waiter or waitress said that in the US, there would be no tips for them! Ah, but that leads me to another cultural difference. See, in the US, waiters and waitresses rely on tips for their salary, whereas in the UK they get paid an hourly. You can imagine the difference in customer service! However, UK vs US customer service is a discussion for another day, since I have a lot to say about it.

Okay, *one* story, but that's it. It was the first time Ollie ever came to the US-actually the first time he ever went on an airplane was when he came to meet me in person for the first time. By the time we were hungry for dinner it was 11:30 pm at night and the only thing open was a Ram's Horn, which is a chain of restaurants in the US that are open 24 hours and have typical American food that is very affordable. Ollie ordered a coffee because he was exhausted from flying 8.5 hours and understandably needed the caffeine. He had finished off most of the coffee-about 1/4 of it was gone and all of the sudden he is looking at me with a big smile, and begins applauding because the waitress had refilled his cup without a word. To him, it was magical. It was so novel to Ollie that every few minutes she would come around to make sure everyone had their coffee filled up. This sort of thing doesn't happen over in the UK. Refills of anything but water are not a thing. What a funny story and reaction!

I got to ride on my first double decker bus today. Okay, well I've been on a few but never went on the second level before. Ollie told me it was like riding a tame roller coaster. I have to disagree. When I worked at Cedar Point I got to ride roller coasters all the time, either on my midday breaks or for test rides as part of my job. I do miss the thrill of a good roller coaster. It's been almost 5 years since I've been on one. Anyways, there is a significant difference that I've found in UK busses and the only other public transit system I've used (with busses). In San Francisco, if you want to get off the bus at a certain stop, you have to push the button and wait by the door and when it stops you jump out. Otherwise, if you're in the back of the bus or not anywhere near a door and the stop arrives, you're screwed. No getting off for you! However here people don't arrange themselves according to bus stop. The bus gets to the stop and you could be behind a herd of people and the bus driver still waits as you take your sweet time getting off the bus. It actually drives me insane. Because with that way, you collide into the people getting onto the bus since I've yet to see a bus with a back door. In San Francisco the front door is mainly for people who want to get on that need to buy a bus transfer and the back door is for getting on with a bus pass or getting off. I prefer the SF method, personally. I get anxious here in the UK thinking the bus is going to drive off if I take my time. Old habits die hard, I guess.

Thanks for tuning in,
Leah