THREE WEEKS IN ENGLAND BLOG: Things I Don’t Want to Forget

ByErin Chase

We’re settled back into life at home: school is starting, back to work, back to doing all that normal stuff you do by rote. That’s what I love about traveling: Everything is new and different, and one can be so aware and awake, rather than stumbling unawares through one’s normal routine.

There are a few things I’d like to remember about the trip that weren’t captured in other stories or in photos. Here goes:

  • The price of petrol! Oh my god!!! We put 70 liters in the car to fill it up, and the price came to 99 pounds. We had to triple check our conversions there, but that seems to be $8.64 per gallon. Yikes! Makes what we spent on trains and buses seem much cheaper all of a sudden.

  • Brown sauce: the British love their sauces — maybe that’s where they think the flavor is?? Repeatedly we were asked if we would like “brown sauce” with that: with pasties, sausages, breakfast sandwiches. Finally, at one place, I said they could throw in a couple “brown sauce” packets — they were like the little ketchup packets that come with fast food, but they just said “brown sauce.” Alex and I tasted it later, a little fingertip-worth, and I swear I thought it tasted like “brown.” If brown had a flavor, that would be it. But a Google search revealed that it’s just steak sauce, like A-1. A-1 Steak Sauce is “brown sauce.” (Seriously: taste some A-1 and tell me it doesn’t taste “brown.”)

  • My favorite television commercial: A commercial for Soda-Stream, that do-it-yourself sparkling water system. A little boy’s voice comes on, in a thick British accent, and says: “We’ve only got one bottle of fizz at home, with 32 flavors!!!” I couldn’t help it: that one bottle of fizz made me laugh every time.

  • Hanging our laundry to dry: Apparently this is a custom in Britain. Even if they have a dryer, the Brits hang their laundry out to dry. The flat where we stayed had one of those tiny front-loading washing machines that was under the counter in the kitchen. But it also doubled as a dryer if you were in a pinch. But everyone in the complex of flats, and in the town in general, and in the country in general, hung their laundry out to dry. At first I thought I was being so ecological. But do you know how much work it is to hang the laundry for a family of four??? Especially if you can only hang it on a small drying rack on a small balcony. And what if you want to wash and dry towels and sheets? I am happy to have my dryer back.

  • The scale of things: everything is just on a smaller scale in Britain. The cars are small, the roads are small, homes are small, the refridgerator is small, so all the food packaging is small (forget about getting a gallon of milk, or even a half gallon! We once even got a four-egg carton of eggs). We were quite cramped in that 2-bedroom flat, but I’m not sure a house would have felt that much bigger.

It was a really great trip. We had such a good time, we are already thinking about where to go next: Italy? Spain? Ahhh, the possibilities….