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A short disclaimer: I have not lived everywhere possible in England and I now live in San Diego California. Some of the things that I have noticed are no doubt specific to San Diego, specific to California or specific to the West coast of the US. Similarly, I am comparing to my own experiences of living in the UK. Some things you might have picked up from a vacation in the US. However I am sure some of this will be useful even if you've already had a short stay here. DrivingThis is a huge subject and is not in any way limited to driving on the other side of the road. Cars are almost all bigger, both in exterior size and engine capacity. V6 and 8 cylinder engines are much more common than in the UK. This also means that parking spaces are bigger. There are often two sizes of parking space - one is unmarked and fits any size car; the other is marked "compact" and fits your VW Golf and other smaller cars. [Ford Escort counts as a compact]. Of course, it's almost guaranteed that some plonker will have parked their Suburban in the compact space, neatly taking up 50% of the space beside, or if they've done really well, 25% of each space on either side. And don't get me started on cars that are too blinking small and hide inside a regular space so when you swing round into the 'empty' you realise that in fact it is inhabited but only just. Handy hint guys - don't pull all the way in. Now that was easy, wasn't it. Running red lights is almost endemic in San Diego. It is illegal of course and there really aren't any excuses if you get caught by a cop or a red light camera. The only time when you can go through a red light is turning right. You can do this on any junction where it is not specifically disallowed and you must stop before the line, look then proceed if safe. America is covered in STOP signs. Get used to it! You are supposed to come to a complete halt before continuing. Not doing so is technically an offence called a "rolling stop". At a junction where every entrance has a STOP sign, drivers can move on a first-stop, first-to-go basis. If on entrance to the junction does not have a STOP sign then they can drive straight through and those with STOPs have to wait. Sometimes you will find a "Yield" where you do not have right of way but you don't have to stop if the road is clear. Roundabouts are almost non-existant. I know of one in San Diego county. Don't even get me started on the Freeway signs (motorways). In England, the motorway signs follow a simple rule. If something is signed, it will be signed directly above the lane that it applies to. This is simply not the case with the Freeway signs. You need to get used to counting lanes. Quick, which lane are you in - third from the right or fourth from the right? Gotcha! ParkingI actually saw somebody back into a parking space today. I noticed it because it's so unusual. Most car parks ("parking lots") are arranged in a kind of herringbone pattern with one-way routes back and for through the lot and the spaces pointed such that you can drive straight into the space at an angle. This layout is designed around driving into the spaces forwards - in fact it makes it virtually impossible to back into the spaces. Smaller car parks may be arranged differently - and the spaces may be perpendicular to the access lanes. LanguageDon't be fooled - American English is not the same language as British English. Yes, you probably already know a few American words courtesy of Hollywood (I did). Trust me, you will learn a lot more. Word usage as well. Say "I'll meet you at half-three" to a Californian and you'll get a blank look. Say "three-thrirty" and you'll be fine. They don't seem to use quarter-to the hour either. It took me a couple of months to realise that they also say numbers differently. Realising and using this can make a huge difference in mutual understanding. For example, a Brit might call 4800 "Four-thousand-eight-hundred". A Californian will probably say "Fourty-eight hundred". There are two crucial aspects to this - group the numbers in pairs and use hundreds instead of thousands. Also, when reading phone numbers, don't group same digits with "double" (eg double-9 for "99") or treble (eg "999") - you won't be understood. ShoppingIt can be very disorientating shopping in another country. Now this doesn't matter so much when you are only going to be there for a couple of weeks and you can survive by eating at restaurants and the only deadline you have is making sure you get back to the airport for your flight home. It's a very different matter when you know that you are going to have to find everything you need in stores whose names you don't know with nothing but brands and names that you don't recognise. OK, for starters, you won't find a single store that you recognise. You will learn where to go but in the interim, find a friend (make one if you don't have one!!) and ask the kind of question like "I need this, where's the best place to go?" The next two things are brands and names of products. It is difficult when you know you want a particular quality of item and you are faced with a choice of five brands. Unfortunately, you have no US brand awareness because you didn't grow up here, haven't seen all their adverts, haven't tried their other products, didn't see your mum judging the cost/quality ratio etc etc. Obviously, better brands tend to be more expensive but how do you know it's a good price? Unfortunately, the best advice I can give here is that you will learn after a few months and there will be very little that stumps you. There is some pain associated with this learning curve. We used brand X (unnamed for legal reasons) washing powder for a while before we learnt that brand X wasn't actually the way to go for all those wonderful post-wash experiences promised on the TV ads. The other problem is in some cases, you just simply don't know what stuff is called. Oranges are oranges but as I found out Hazelnuts are not Hazelnuts. I had some and the checkout operator didn't recognise them and asked me. I said "Hazelnuts" for I knew them to be such. She said "No they aren't" and asked a colleague. There was me know that they were and being told that they weren't. Anyway, the colleague said that they were "Filberts". Up came "Filberts" on the till and she continued on. This was my education on what Hazelnuts are called. To save you the same pain, here is a short list of some essentials and non-essentials:
Supermarkets are much the same - grab a trolley ("cart")... to be continued...
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