To ask overseas folk what British quirks they think are weird/funny? Thread 2!

[Burntmybiscuits]

First thread is now full: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3874603-To-ask-overseas-folk-what-British-quirks-they-think-are-weird-funny

But I've had some requests for a 2nd one. Here it is!

Glad everyone enjoyed the first thread so much - I've had a ball reading it and being educated!

Thank you! It just blocked me from answering and I hoped you will start a second one! Great thread. Much fun!

Where were we. Washing!
There is just no "lugging heavy washing through the house". I have 10kg capacity washer and have no issue taking washing out. It's not that heavy.
I do like how there is the "but it's logical!" explanation from Brits for many of the points (not a sarcasm!). And often there really is a good logic behind it.

Wedding evening guests! All my friends not from the UK are shocked at this. Although, TBH, I am British and find it incredibly rude as well. Just throw the party you can afford for all the guests you want to be there, even if it means scaled down. Trust me, no wedding is good enough to be a B-list invite.

You would never throw a dinner party and invite some people to come just for dessert.

Saying' please ' and ' thank you 'all the time! The Spanish find this amusing. Just ask for your coffee, full stop.

I'm in Spain, lived in many flats, all but one had the washing machine in the kitchen.

Many of my students (I teach adults) have asked why Brits drink so much and go "balconing" I just shrug. And they ask why we allow ourselves to get do sunburnt - and our kids! Again, I just shrug.

I was in Atlanta in 2005 chatting to a door security man, laughing over how we still needed id even though I was 30 and someone in our party was 50. Anyway, nice chatty guy, called a colleague over to chat. We were talking about how the US thought the UK was so small that everyone knew everyone. Then the conversation moved on to German police driving Mercedes and one of the doormen said he'd been in a very small town Peterborough-way (I forget why!) and he'd been do surprised to see, in this very small place, a Rolls Royce dealership. I piped up with "oh yeah, my grandma lives there!"

I am as British as they come (almost literally - did one of those ancestry dna thingies and am 95% from the British Isles!) and I am also totally boggled by the different tiers of wedding guests! I would venture to suggest that it is not a British thing given that I have been to tons of weddings in my time and not one had this split up of guest lists. I think it is a reflection on the insane expense of weddings these days (and sometimes spoilt couples wanting more than they can afford).

From my relatives' observations/things they always comment on during visits:

1. Paracetamol as a cure for Everything
2. Vinegar on chips.
3. Prawn crisps and other assorted weird foods
4. The sheer amount of food the British consume.
5. The architecture - red brick everywhere, houses often damp and mouldy, obsession with having a tiny house over a large spacious flat (we house hunted during the visits and visited a LOT of houses)
6. Outdoor shoes indoors - just... why?!
7. Obsession with owning a house.

Well the flat thing obvious. Imagine no garden

Oh and

1. MILK IN TEA!

I’m British (East Yorkshire) and the one thing I love when visiting other parts of the uk is the different names for breadcakes when I want a sandwich 🤣 Baps brings out my juvenile side! Rolls, cobs, barms etc
Also, patties from the chippy (drools)

When I lived in California you were not allowed to hang your washing out of doors, you were not even allowed to hang your washing in your garage - such an environmentally aware state . In an ordinary town, not Beverley Hills.

Also:

Showering in the morning and then NOT showering again at night. Ie, bringing the whole day's dirt and sweat into bed. (I find many of these British customs quirky and odd, but this one is frankly revolting)

Separate hot and cold taps

School uniform. Baffles me to this day, and I spent 5 years in one myself.

The showering in the morning and not night is normal for other nationalities too, my non British DP always showers before going to work, as have all my previous non Brit bfs. None of us have manual labour jobs though. We only shower in the evening again if there is 40° heat and we’ve been sweating all day.

The non rinsing of dishes was more of a thing in the 70s, buoyed by the Fairy ads with hands that do dishes being as soft as your face and zooming in on crockery with huge suds sliding off.

Please, when you answer on this thread, tell us a) where you are from and b) exactly what you find strange.

There are people saying things like “Food portions!” but what do you mean? Too big? Too small?

Is Brits are too ingrained in our strangeness to understand!

• DollyDoneMore

Please, when you answer on this thread, tell us a) where you are from and b) exactly what you find strange.

There are people saying things like “Food portions!” but what do you mean? Too big? Too small?*

L
From the US, live in England and have for about eight years.

Food takeaway portions I mentioned in the last thread are bigger and cheaper compared to the ones in the States. I don’t know about NI, but in England and Scotland they are big. It was surprising to say the least. Even kids meal portions are big, especially when it comes to fish and chips.

The obsession with sticking to Best before/sell by/use by dates!
I have never encountered this where i am from (czech). Smell, look, taste🤷🏻
I had this conversation with few people from abroad and they said the same.

@Omg

I forgot about that! My husband was tossing food out because of this. I had to point out that the food doesn’t know when it’s expired, environment it’s in, supermarket selling rules, etc to get him out of the habit.

Restaurant and fast food portions are way, waaaaaaay bigger in the US than the UK. America is absolutely famous for it.

@MrsT1405

Agree: I'm British but live in France... I got told off by a waiter once for saying "Thank You" every time he did something for us - brought water, topped up wine glass, etc. His point was that this is his job, he's not doing me a favour, he doesn't need (or want) to be thanked for just doing his job well - it should be expected of a professional. I don't over-thank any more!

DH used to work in Switzerland. He's quite a smiley person... eventually his boss turned to him one day and said "Why are you always smiling at me? Do you think I'm funny? Are you laughing at me all the time? Don't you take me seriously ?" . DH is still too smiley but he managed to rein it in after that, for that job anyway.

The fact that you can't buy anything medically meaningful without prescription at a pharmacy. But at the same time, as the previous poster said, why would you need to, since paracetamol cures anything. The amount of plastic spoons and syringes from in my friends' drawers from all the bottles of Calpol they went through when their children were little is terrifying.
I was amazed that some just routinely give paracetamol syrup to their babies/toddlers so they sleep better, kind of just in case.
None of them seemed to care to do any research on the long term side effects...(maybe it's just my DH's friends).

My DH owned a washing up bowl which I hated because it was in the way and got rid of promptly, but he hotly disputed that ANY British people don't rinse and that it was all my imagination. Until we went camping with his friends and when our bowl ended up in his friends tent in the end, the friend walked in saying he washed it for us, he walked in carrying what looked like a small cloud of foam, and passed it to me. Inside the cloud was the bowl.
To be fair I think it's dying out.

Next is not a quirk, but my DD introduced all her friends to cheese slicers (mentioned previously) and also nose unblocking sprays, their minds were blown 😁
Obviously either is widely available, so you'd think everyone knows about them, but to her friends (East Midlands) both items were a complete revelation.
They slept through their childhoods breathing through the mouth when their noses were blocked...And now they could cut really thin slices of cheese effortlessly :)

Wedding evening guests! All my friends not from the UK are shocked at this. Although, TBH, I am British and find it incredibly rude as well. Just throw the party you can afford for all the guests you want to be there, even if it means scaled down. Trust me, no wedding is good enough to be a B-list invite.

I remember being invited to work colleagues’ evening wedding parties, and also hen dos, in the 80s. I wasn’t offended, I would never have expected to be invited to the actual wedding. The evening do was seen as a separate event and often took place in a different venue to the wedding reception.

OmgThereAreNoPlanesAboveMeNow

I'm British, and grew up before 'use by' and 'best before' dates. We just did the same as you - used common sense as to when food needed to be binned. Dh and I still do this and we haven't made ourselves ill yet.

Restaurant and fast food portions are way, waaaaaaay bigger in the US than the UK. America is absolutely famous for it.

Just because we’re famous for it doesn’t make it true for the whole country. Yes, there are tv shows where it shows challenges when it comes to portion sizes, those are dares, not what people actually eat. Majority of chain fast food portions though in the various States I’ve visited are still smaller than your average kebab or order of small chips from anywhere. Plus, we have more buffets than the U.K. so people can choose how big a portion they want.

We also don’t have fish that is as big as the ones here like I’ve constantly seen here for fish and chips.