How I See the UK as an American Abroad [CULTURE SHOCK]

I've been here in the UK for about a month now and since I made a video about why I left the us to come here I wanted to share with you what my experience has been like so far being here as a foreigner and especially as a solo female traveler and at the end of this video I'll tell you why it's made me sad actually and that's something that I definitely didn't expect oh [Music] the first thing I noticed when I got here was the weather and it's either been really good like today or really bad like cold gray rainy and being from Florida that's been something that's been pretty hard to adjust to it's something I was expecting for sure but uh definitely the first month I was here was basically cold and rainy and so Manchester was really living up to the weather hype but I'm really happy that we're going into summer and right now it's sunny in like 65 degrees Fahrenheit so it feels just like winter in Miami where I was living before so I'm really happy about that I've just been definitely using my heating a lot which I'm hoping isn't going to be too expensive and I've also been using my fireplace which is actually quite cozy but some of the locals were joking with me that they're like if you need the fire now in the springtime then you're gonna be literally in the fire when winter comes and it's getting dark at 4 P.M so I'm really enjoying these nice sunny days until 10 p.m supposed to be sunny here all week so really happy about that but it's definitely been an adjustment when I first got here the next thing I noticed is how genuinely nice everyone is and so friendly and welcoming you can basically just go up and talk to strangers and they will talk back to you it doesn't matter if you're in a grocery store or in a taxi or talking to somebody who's sitting on a park bench everyone is just really happy to have a chat and it's something that sadly caught me off guard at first but uh people are just having a normal pace of Life they're not in a hurry and you know the guy who delivers your food or I had a handyman over at my house and he was talking to me about his daughter and his side hustle as a wedding photographer and it's just been really refreshing to just be able to talk to people and they always say see you later like you'll instead of buy it's like see you later it's kind of like in Spanish how they say hasta luego like they never say goodbye and it's like even if you'll never see that person again they're like see you later and so now I started saying it too because I really like it and another thing that they do is call you love so I noticed this when I went to buy a bike and the lady was like texting me oh hello love like yeah sure come on over love and now I've like noticed it everywhere like I hear people saying it in the convenience store and just on the sidewalk and I think that's really friendly and cute to just call people love or in the coffee shop or something I've also noticed this with dating which is something that I think merits its own separate video but my experience so far has been quite positive and a breath of fresh air I've noticed that guys here seem genuinely interested in getting to know me and talking to me and like asking you questions versus my experiences a lot in the US consists of like just kind of not very engaged text messages or the pressure to move things along very fast or basically just a hookup culture and although I'm sure that that exists here as well I haven't experienced it yet it's been quite the opposite I've had guys send me like five minute long voice memos asking me questions about just all sorts of things and so I I feel like the friendliness of the people has extended from just acquaintances and chit chat into dating and relationships something that caught me really off guard is actually how much it feels like a community here there are people who've been living here their entire lives and many of them in the same neighborhood not even moving to a different side of town and if there's people that went away for school most of them came back or at least the people that I've spoken with here and I've actually been embarrassed a couple times by asking people like oh where are you from and they're like well what do you mean like what side of town am I from because everyone's from here and where are you from originally and so Adam's from here originally yeah and I'm from a little town called Saint Helens near Liverpool and I think that's a good sign that people really like living here and also it's a sign of a strong community and a healthy community and I just feel kind of like a weirdo because I'm from a place that's so transient from Florida and from South Florida and many of the people around it's like you ask them where they're from as part of small talk and getting to know someone because there's so many tourists there's so many people from different countries and there's so many people that weren't born there but they moved there later in life so that's been something that really surprised me but it was a pleasant surprise so it seems like everyone is friends here unless you're rooting for the wrong football team though and I haven't really taken sides yet so I'm gonna try to remain neutral but another thing I've noticed that you can actually see behind me here I'm walking in front of the BBC buildings and it looks like a yellow honeycomb and this is one of the things that I have learned while being here is that like their mascot here in Manchester is the bee like a worker bee and from what people have told me it became a symbol of unity after the bombings here a few years ago and so you'll see like these everywhere you'll see a the statue you'll see bees on straws for your drinks you'll see these on signs v-shaped sponges at the store in the cleaning aisle like there's bees everywhere and I feel like every city should have a mascot one thing that I've really liked is being in a foreign country where English is the first language because I always feel a little bit guilty if I don't know the language I don't know maybe you feel the same way I do speak Spanish fortunately and so whenever I travel to Spanish-speaking countries that makes it a lot easier but there's quite a few countries where I don't speak the language and so it's been really nice to be somewhere where everyone speaks English and I don't feel bad asking for things in English although the accents have been a bit difficult in some cases I I would say I mean I understand a lot of people but now and then there's some slang that I don't know or there's someone with a much thicker accent and it can be hard for me to understand but the good news is that people seem to like American accents and I really like British accents so it works out pretty well but one day I was actually outside on the sidewalk picking up some trash and one of my neighbors walked by and he asked what was I doing and I couldn't understand what he was saying but he was basically asking me if I was trying to feed the horse that lives across the street and he kept saying like house or Haas or I could not tell what he was saying he had to say it like seven times before I was like oh horse and so there's been a few miscommunications that way but I have noticed quite a variety of accents around here and so it seems like different neighborhoods and different towns and Villages and other nearby cities people will have a different accent so that's been pretty interesting but I'm still happy that we're all speaking English there's also quite a bit of slang here which I have been Googling and I learned that grafting means working hard and Matt has a bunch of frogs means funny so if you know any other slang words from northern England then let us know in the comments below it's also been really nice to live in an actual neighborhood and not in a touristy area or some kind of tourist hot spot and that's something that I was specifically looking for when I came here but when I actually got here and started feeling settled I realized like how often I've been in touristy areas whether it was in Portugal or Croatia or Greece and it really hit me when I wanted to send a postcard to my mom for Mother's Day and I couldn't find postcards anywhere I was like oh my God I'm in a place with no postcards and was kind of trying to remember the last time that happened if ever when I was traveling and I asked this guy that was working in a mall and he's like nope I haven't seen a postcard around here ever not at the post office not at card stores and so I think that's a real clue that you're just in a regular local area also when you get a reaction from people about like whoa American accents because they're so rare and I literally haven't heard another person speaking with like a U.S accent since I've gotten here so it has been nice to be in just a normal area and be able to observe and and participate in the daily normal life in a foreign country and I'm really enjoying that you also get a sense of what the city is actually like and not the whitewashed version of it like there's some areas that are really nice and that have been gentrified and then there are some areas that aren't and they're full of trash on the ground or they're just kind of not the best parts of town and a lot of times in tourist areas you only see the nice parts so it has been really refreshing to just be in like a very diverse City with lots of diverse neighborhoods and and in the suburbs where yeah it's just life as usual and they're not like putting on a front or trying to create this little like Disney World Paradise for the tourists I've also found myself adopting more British Customs which I find kind of funny and endearing like I've been drinking more tea lately but that's also because I don't have a freezer in my house I only have a refrigerator which is something that I never thought to ask about you know like you might ask oh is there a washer and dryer is there a dishwasher but you wouldn't be like is there a freezer and I know Europeans don't like ice that much but come on so yeah no no more iced coffee for me it's too cold and I don't have a freezer so I have been drinking more tea I've also become addicted to crumpets I don't even really know what a crumpet is it kind of looks like an English muffin but it has a different texture I've been eating like one or two crumpets a day or scones or something like that speaking of washers and dryers I don't have a dryer and I do really miss that there is a wash dry fold place near my house so I'll take the towels and sheets there but in general just been hanging stuff out to dry the old-fashioned way something that I thought was going to be worse than it is is the drinking culture like people told me I would just see drunk people everywhere and see people throwing up on the sidewalks and stuff and I haven't seen that at all people have been very very friendly at the bars and clubs and restaurants and I haven't noticed anyone drunker than in other parts of the world so yeah that's been totally fine as I expected the cost of living is definitely lower than it is in the U.S now London of course is going to be more expensive and Mainland Europe is definitely less expensive than here but in general like my food Bill cell phone internet things like that are a lot cheaper I've noticed that something that might cost seven or eight dollars in the US or even nine dollars is like one or two pounds here so if you get a salad at a grocery store that's like nine dollars or eight dollars it would be like two pounds here maybe three pounds a bag of tangerines or oranges that would be seven dollars cost one pound here um Serrano ham that costs seven or eight dollars cost one or two pounds here so you're really saving a lot of money on groceries and eating out and stuff but the internet has surprised me because it's really slow in some places but then it's like fiber optic fast internet in other areas like when I first moved into my house the internet was like five megabits per second which I haven't seen in at least 10 years or more and I didn't even know they had internet that was that slow anymore they called it Broadband but I was able to get a contract with Virgin Media where I now have 500 gigabits per second but it is pretty expensive it's about 50 pounds per month and the minimum contract you can get here is 18 months like maybe 12 and if you cancel it you do have to pay this like big cancellation fee but in the US like you can even if you have a contract you can pretty much get out of it I feel like so the internet has been more than I expected we'll have to see how much the utilities are with all that heating but at least I don't need air conditioning in the summer so that will be good as I mentioned at the beginning of this video though there is something about being here that has made me feel quite sad and it took me a couple weeks before I could really put my finger on it and I think it's a combination of things like I think it's the friendliness of the people I think it's the very healthy pace of life and the community aspect that when it all combines together I've realized that it makes me feel very nostalgic and like sentimental about my childhood oddly enough like it feels like being here feels like what the US was like 20 or 30 years ago and I don't know if it's because like I've gotten older and so as an adult you perceive the world differently but I do feel like the US was different especially before the internet and before the toxic media culture that we have today and what makes me sad is that even though there's debates here and there's politics and there's debates over the economy and different points of view and different religions here in the UK I I feel like it's just a healthier place to live in general and that the narrative is not as damaging or divisive as it is in the U.S and so even though they have technology here they have internet they have tabloids they have like all of those same things there's something that's more civil about being here and it makes me wonder if we'll ever see that again in the U.S it's like kind of going back to what it felt like growing up in the U.S in the 80s and 90s when things felt more Community oriented the pace of life felt slower like even though I'm sure there was a rat race mentality in the 80s it was like in the town where I grew up in Florida it was like a small town and yeah things were just more relaxed you knew your neighbors you had more connections with the community and it seems like now maybe it's like that in some of the smaller towns and cities in the U.S but especially in the bigger cities and places where there's big Tech hubs or big tourism hubs it feels like it's very hard to really connect with the community people are always coming and going and then there's this kind of underlying tension about the political situation that is just kind of this hanging over the country and so I guess that's why I've been feeling a bit sad here like almost jealous of what people have here and and I don't know if they would see it that way like I don't know if the locals would see things the same way but I just feel like I wish that we had more of this feeling that I get here in the US but I am really glad that I came here and I'm looking forward to sharing with you more of my discoveries as I travel around England and Scotland this summer so make sure those notification bells are on and if you're curious about what my first month was like in Portugal compared to the UK then you can check out that video next all right

Channel: Traveling with Kristin

Views: 276,747

Keywords: how i see the uk, american in uk, living in uk, living in england, living abroad, american abroad, moving abroad, becoming an expat, expat life, cost of living in uk, life in america vs uk, cultural differences, culture shock, culture shock in england, england travel, uk travel, travel, traveling with kristin, kristin wilson, digital nomad, cost of living abroad

Id: qaZmoCPLCs8

Length: 17min 43sec (1063 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 04 2023