Scattered Strawberry Summer

A list of things British do that I find weird, unusual or just funny:

• Put milk in their tea.
• Carpet their bathrooms.
• Hot & cold taps.
• Having a bag of crisps with lunch.
• The authentic British way to prepare vegetables is to immerse them in boiling water for a fortnight.
• Temperature is in celcius, speed and signs in miles, food  in grams and kilograms. Makes perfect sense.
• They don't rinse the dishes with water after using washing up liquid.
• They talk about weather. All the time.
• "Alright? Yeah, you?"
• Public schools are actually private schools.
• National panic over 1 inch of snow.
• Talk about Europe as if they’re not in it.

I do like to share my observations about life in UK, since I often go to Germany I thought I'd share some of my observations 

• Germans do not queue. I know most of European countries are like that, but Germans as well? It took me by surprise, perfect queuing would go so well with other characteristics of a stereotypical German.  
• They love their meat and they don't seem to label vegetarian food. It would be hard for me to live there.
• Germans don’t jay-walk. Ever. 
• they have one of the highest recycling rates. 
• It does help that for all the plastic bottles you have to pay  a deposit upfront which you get then you return it to the shop. It's not uncommon to see people collecting the bottles from the bins and public spaces. 
• They love their bank holidays and they take them seriously. Pretty much everything is closed unlike in UK or Lithuania. Couple this with Sundays when everything is closed, you could be without food for days. 
• They enjoy their shows and films dubbed. Imagine never hearing real voice of Benedict Cumberbatch. I prefer the Scandinavian way of subtitling all the foreign films.
• No one does a compound word like the Germans

It seems that I have hardly been home this week. Most of the days after work I went out with my friends. How much I enjoy our chats about cultural differences, how you don't even notice  that you have changed, until you go home. For instance, my friend  embarrassed herself  by saying thank you to the bus driver. Everyone were like "why the hell you say thank you to the bus driver, you paid for the ticket, didn't you?". Oh and I had an awkward moment when my friend met her Spanish friend when we were leaving a pub and he wanted to greet me in a typical Spanish way which  you can imagine is not the way I am used to be greeted and I pretty much stood back. obviously she started laughing and said:  "no, no she's a foreigner". The situation became even more awkward when he just shook my hand instead.

Oh just can't wait for the reverse culture shock I'm going to experience when I finally visit my home country after probably two years,  I don't even remember how long it's been. A lot of people don't think you can actually experience culture shock when you go back to your home country. I have been told,  common, it's were you were born and bred, how can you experience culture shock when you come back? Well, these people probably haven't been away from their home country very long or haven't read my essay on reverse culture shock in the repatriation process, OK I don't consider myself a specialist, but I have first-hand experience and you know I researched the topic for my essay. Oh the good old uni days. Anyway, research shows the more you adapted to the country you migrated to, the harder it is when (if) you come back home.