8 Surprising Differences Between the UK and USA that AREN'T Obvious!

and nobody had a single clue of what to do with it people just drove straight over the middle thinking that it was kind of just there for fun if you wanted to hey guys welcome back to the girl gun london channel if you're new here my name is kaelyn i'm an american who's lived in england for almost 10 years and today i am going over eight little-known differences between the uk and the us so i've gotten some positive feedback on my other videos about the differences between the uk and the us but a lot of the things that people often talk about are pretty obvious we know that we drive on the different side of the road here and you know some basic language that people might use here that we've heard in the us in terms of like british movies and tv shows but i really enjoy talking about the little nuanced nuanced things that you might not have realized are different so if you are interested in more uk verse u.s information or information about living abroad in the uk from somewhere else in the world definitely make sure to subscribe that's how you'll get new videos and know that i've posted more so the first difference between the uk and the us that people often don't talk about is that the keyboards are actually different so the uk keyboard doesn't ha it has the letter keys in the same exact places but the uk keyboard is going to add in a pound sign which we don't have in the us funnily enough my uk keyboards do actually have a dollar sign as well and there are also a couple of other things that are in different places depending on the keyboard like the at key is sometimes in a different place and like the quotes key i had no idea that they were different in this sense when i first moved to the uk and i remember being in the computer lab in the university i was studying at and it was so frustrating because every time i would go to type a particular key or symbol it was always the wrong one so that is the first difference that people might not mention if you buy a laptop in the uk or a keyboard in the uk some of the symbols are in different places okay the next difference has to do with eggs so let's first talk about the fact that in the us we are most used to seeing white shelled eggs in the uk you're mostly going to find brown ones now the other thing that kind of goes along with this is in the u.s we store eggs in home in homes and in the grocery stores or supermarkets in the refrigerated section in the uk you will not find the eggs in grocery stores in the refrigerated section this is something that completely throws you off guard when you first move here and don't know to expect it because you go up and down the aisles of the refrigerated section looking for eggs and wondering like why this supermarket doesn't have eggs and then you find them like normally next to the bread in some of the supermarkets i've been into there's also other places depends on the store but i was so shocked the first time i found the eggs unrefrigerated next to the bread and the reason for this is there are different processing techniques from the farm to the grocery store depending on the country and they leave on the protective layers here in the uk that basically means that there is little chance of the bacteria or something going wrong with the egg not being refrigerated in the u.s there's a really intense um like washing system that actually strips the eggs of this protective coating which means that it then is safer to leave them in the fridge i'm not completely up to date on different food processing techniques and so i'm not saying one is better than the other but the countries do it differently and because they do it differently it means that the eggs can be stored or have to be stored in different ways we actually store some of our eggs like on the counter and some of our eggs in the fridge which i don't really know why we do that um here in our house but if you go into a british grocery store do not look for the eggs in the refrigerated section the next difference has to do with couponing culture so if you've lived in the us or you know about the us or you've seen the show on tlc like extreme couponers you might know that in the us we are a very coupon driven society when it comes to consumerism so in we just always like a coupon uh we always like getting a deal and it's not just like at the grocery store when something is naturally on sale but we clip coupons so different brands send out coupons so you might get like two dollars off a certain brand at any store that you go to and so a lot of people in the us are used to like bringing their coupons to the checkout counter and getting deals people get like their entire grocery shopping cart for very little money this is a whole thing that people spend their time on doing and just as a society we are used to the idea of coupons here in the uk really not the case there are deals on things you might go into the grocery store and something is marked down or there's like a clearance sticker on it or there's just like a natural promotion that the store is running but the idea of like a coupon book definitely is not in the uk you wouldn't really clip coupons like i'm trying to think of instances where i've had to present anything to get a deal like there might be but in general the couponing culture of the us is not replicated in the uk and the idea of like buying a book specifically full of coupons to use at various places 100 not a uk sensibility another difference are the places that people travel to so it goes without being said different countries are going to be closer or further to different destinations obviously in the us i think we mostly travel within the country and when we do travel outside of the country popular destinations would be canada mexico and western europe so coming to the uk in the uk people do travel to the states also european travel is popular but there are places that a lot of people have traveled here that i have never met anybody who had been there before in the us places like thailand it's really popular here to travel to thailand it's a beautiful country really cheap and if you take a survey of kind of your neighbors or your friends here in the uk somebody is gonna know somebody who's been to thailand who's gone to thailand or who has a trip planned in the u.s this is definitely not a destination that's really on our cultural radar in terms of you know being able to take a poll and easily finding someone who has gone to thailand there are other countries like that i think i've met more people in the uk who have gone on vacation or holiday to india than in the us and um just some other like asian destinations as well and again this is down to differences in geography and how close or far things are as well as just the fact that again a lot of americans if they're going to travel abroad they're coming here to the uk or somewhere in western europe here in the uk they're going elsewhere so that was another difference i noticed in terms of being able to chat to people about their vacations and where they had been on the topic of vacations let's talk about travel insurance because this is another difference and a lot of people that i've talked to in the uk don't realize the lack of travel insurance knowledge or culture in the us not that travel insurance is like a culture but as a culture we don't really get travel insurance um a lot of people haven't even heard of travel insurance i am pretty sure i had not heard of travel insurance before i move to the uk here in the uk and i think in a lot of europe it's like you go on a trip and you get yourself some travel insurance um it's just considered a standard part of going on vacation or going on holiday as they say in the uk that is definitely not a thing for americans and i was looking at some articles about this and some hypothesis about why this could be certain things of americans are so optimistic so we think that nothing is going to go wrong even when we should plan for it things like again a lot of americans are only taking trips domestically so even though it does make sense something could still go wrong from your trip to texas to montana we don't really think of it in terms of a risk obviously people do think of it more when they travel abroad so in the uk and in europe when it is much more popular to leave your country then that kind of comes into play more and it's just something that in the states we really people do get it i'm not saying that it's not a thing i'm just saying that it is definitely not as popular or considered a necessity in the way it is in the uk the next difference has to do with banking and i talked about banking in another video but i want to talk about these card readers so this is a device from barclays which is a personal card reader so if i were to log into my barclays account which i actually don't have anymore this is an old one but i think you can use them across banks anyway um but it basically can help you log into your account a lot of accounts nowadays will require a multitude of options but one of them will be you can log in by putting in some details and using your card in the card reader you click identify you press your pin into this personal card reader it says yes that's correct and it gives you a code that you then put in your online account to let you in we don't have these in the us we obviously have card readers when it comes to stores having a card reader for someone to pay but the idea of having a personal card reader is 100 a difference between the countries when i go to log in to my us bank accounts there is no card reader involved it is not an option it's not a thing that we are used to in the us now i said i wasn't going to talk about driving on different sides of the road which i'm not but i am going to mention another difference between the uk and the us which is the use of roundabouts so in the us i think we call them like travel traffic circles in some places but basically instead of having traffic lights and four-way stops here all of the junctions or what we would call intersections in the us are basically run by roundabouts and that means that there is a pretty steady constant flow of traffic it's obviously not always going to be your turn but if the traffic is clear you go as opposed to the us where you can all be sitting at like four traffic lights and they're all red and you're like what is going when am i going to get to go that wouldn't happen here in the uk and a lot of people do think roundabouts are a superior traffic solution however i feel like they only make sense in a country that understands what to do with them there was a really small traffic circle or roundabout that i remember from growing up that was like outside of a target near my house and nobody had a single clue of what to do with it people just drove straight over the middle thinking that it was kind of just there for fun if you wanted to so if roundabouts and i do know that there are places in the u.s with roundabouts but if they were to become more a part of a country's traffic patterns we definitely have to do some education for the americans because we are just not used to that kind of traffic system i also feel like roundabouts really make sense in a country where you don't have a gridded system the roads are just all over the place weaving in and out and so putting in a roundabout i think is probably a little bit easier than dealing with in the us especially where i'm from maybe not so much in the northeast but in a lot of places in the west and in the south we have just straight gridded lines that intersect each other and so we kind of think of the four-way traffic light system making more sense and the last difference i have to talk about is the difference between american and british sensibilities about plants and garden centers so hear me out so here in the uk they have what they call garden centers and this is basically a place that you can buy plants like garden decor or gardening supplies but also there tend to be other things sold there so having a gardening center they usually have like a cafe that serves lunch and snacks and tea there can also be other things sold within the garden center um that aren't even related like clothes or something like that and there is a cultural fascination with garden centers when we were in lockdown in the beginning of this whole situation that was one of the things that were first to open before everything else obviously people could only do stuff outside and they wanted to garden and stuff that i just thought that was so funny there is such a cultural love especially in certain areas and among certain age groups for garden centers now when you compare that to the us and the reason i bring this up is the difference is obviously you can buy plants in the u.s we would call it a nursery and not for children for plants here in the uk nurseries for children but we would call it a nursery and that would be to go and buy plants but that would pretty much be the only thing you do there and it's more of a get in and get out situation obviously you might explore kind of walk around a little but there's usually not going to be anything else to do it's a place to buy plants and it's not there's no sort of cultural love for nurseries they're just places to buy plants we also have you know home improvement stores so our version would be like lowes or home depot but they also have those in the uk um it's called like b and q is an example of one so that also isn't really comparable to a garden center even though they might have a garden section there's still not a place that you would go and you could actually meet somebody for coffee mostly kind of older people though no shade to you if you are a younger person who loves garden centers it's just more of a cultural love and fascination here with garden centers that we don't have in the u.s okay so i hope you enjoyed this video on these kind of smaller nuanced differences between the uk and the us that you might not not necessarily know on first glance again leave your comments below on what you thought on other differences you've noticed and i hope you enjoyed the video and i'll see you guys next time

Channel: Girl Gone London

Views: 96,566

Keywords: american in the uk, american in england, american expat in england, british life, american across the pond, american expat

Id: D7VSeiPqoUg

Length: 15min 10sec (910 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021