To ask overseas folk what British quirks they think are weird/funny?

[Burntmybiscuits]

Us Brits are always on our high horse, making light humour over the habits of other countries (particularly the U.S!), so I thought it would be funny to see what people overseas find 'unique' about us!

Fruitcake as wedding cake - a massive disappointment every time. Who wants a mound of raisins and stringy dried peel to celebrate a happy occasion?! It’s like eating pot pourri. Yuk.

I think a few people have mentioned adverts - I remember an American cousin back in the 90s saying how he was amazed British adverts featured ordinary-looking people, but clearly nothing's changed in 30 years!

My cousin’s boyfriend is Spanish and he’s always laughing at our obsession with tea. He was also baffled by the fact that we don’t give money to the bride and groom at weddings. We were joking that he had fully assimilated recently when we had a bereavement and he spent the whole morning making rounds of tea for everyone without being asked 😂

This just about sums it up.

Deaths are different in England (I don't know about Wales, Scotland, or N.I.) A long time waiting for the funeral and burial, and no one goes to see the bereaved family unless you're very very close friends.

Funniest thing to introduce Brits to foreigners 😂
The very British Problems
www.verybritishproblems.com/

Jelly is the thing that any student I've had stay found hilarious. Why would you want food that wobbles??

@Durgasarrow
I don't know if you realised but the jelly you buy in a packet is concentrated so you melt it and then reset it to make it the jelly you eat. Although it's now more and more common to have jelly in granule form.

The weather/heating obsession is because the weather is so changeable! If you've not lived in Britain for a significant time you wouldn't realise that it's completely normal to have cold foggy, damp, bright sunshine, then rain, maybe a bit of hail, then sun again before lunch! You can't just have a set time for heating and expect it to be ok.

@mous Haha close enough. I am Icelandic but live in England

I've not read every page so not sure if this has been asked and answered but are christmas crackers and easter eggs not a global thing? (In countries that celebrate christmas and easter I mean)

I didnt know they were an english thing!?

No crackers and eggs aren't seen everywhere, they're starting to have crackers a bit more in the states now though but not eggs.

The first time dh was in the UK for Easter he walked in to Waitrose and couldn't believe how many eggs there were.

I think weddings that ended late afternoon were always posh weddings. We always had a drunken evening do, where more friends and distant family were invited. If you don’t have an evening do, presumably you don’t get the drunken fight?

Following

Quarantino we’re in the UK, but DS3 wakes up around 8am, naps for three hours between 2-5, and goes to bed at 9pm (bath at 7:30, then a lot of messing about, playing and stories).

We could drop the nap and put him to bed at 6pm, but then I would never see him - I usually get home around 7-8pm.

They have Easter eggs in the States. Not as many as there are in the UK but they still exist.

We have REAL eggs for easter

10-14 degrees is warm.

10–14 degrees is not remotely warm. If I made you have a bath in 10–14 degree water you wouldn't like it.

• Double taps in bathrooms (including public ones), one ice cold and the other one boiling hot
• Carpet in bathrooms (seems to be dying out thankfully)
• Basing the value of a property largely on the number of bedrooms, even when they are tiny
• Meals with a double load of carbs (bread and chips, pasta and bread)
• Chicken and meat on pizza
• University tuition fees

Jings we can’t get them in Canada.

We have creme eggs and mini eggs here, we can get Lindt bunnies and everything like that, and we have amazing chips ahoy creme eggs that you can’t get in the UK. But there are no proper big Easter eggs that come with a couple of bars of chocolate.

Yep, never saw big Easter eggs in the US. What they call easter eggs are creme eggs etc. (This was approx 10 years ago though!)
No Christmas crackers either.
Meat pies (like a steak pie) aren't really a thing - although they have empanadas etc. 'pie' is generally fruit pie.

As a Brit living here in Britain, I have really enjoyed reading about what is perfectly normal to us (although there is nothing normal about carpeted bathrooms), is really weird for others!

Kids needing grass lawns in gardens to play in

Sitcoms and stand up comedy

Soaps at prime time rather than daytime and being gritty rather than glamorous

Kids starting school so young but not having full time nursery/ kindergarten before that.

Lack of bank holidays

Contraception being free on the nhs

DIY and gardening being typical hobbies

@burntmybuiscuits my house is how you've described, separate toilet room and bathroom next to it and not big enough to fit a sink, I hate it but can't afford to change it, I have a bottle of anti bac in there and you use that then go into the bathroom to wash your hands.
I read somewhere that Americans think boiled eggs are weird and they don't eat them boiled!

Lots of Easter eggs here (Scandi), we used to paint real egg as well and colour them by boiling them with the outer layer of onions. Some still do as an activity for dc.

No Christmas crackers.

British chocolate Easter eggs are on steroids!! Lol!! Fun for the kids though. Cadbury (and a few knock offs) makes little ones in the US the size of a real egg but there are just a few flavors typically: crepe, carmel, and peanut butter. If anything the chocolate bunny is the star of the show in our baskets.