Advice for Immigrants
Gracious Rebel
Shipmate
in Purgatory
(not sure if this is purgatorial or heavenly topic, please move if appropriate)
So what advice would you want to give somebody moving to your country from elsewhere. What would you warn them about, or would enthuse about?
This was prompted by reading an article on Quora written by an American woman who moved to Britain
(full article here https://rb.gy/ljmznf)
This particular individual focussed on smaller houses, higher cost of living, wonderful free NHS, and .... poor laundry facilities.
The first three I would expect, but is it really such a big deal that we don't all use energy hungry tumble driers...?
So what advice would you want to give somebody moving to your country from elsewhere. What would you warn them about, or would enthuse about?
This was prompted by reading an article on Quora written by an American woman who moved to Britain
It is a very demanding move to make. Just because people speak English, do not be deceived. It is an utterly alien place from America culturally and I found (and still find) the adjustments frustrating and still can get furious by the difficulties.
(full article here https://rb.gy/ljmznf)
This particular individual focussed on smaller houses, higher cost of living, wonderful free NHS, and .... poor laundry facilities.
The first three I would expect, but is it really such a big deal that we don't all use energy hungry tumble driers...?
Comments
Yes, I briefly worked in Brecon alongside a guy who had moved from London. He described the cost of living in Brecon as 'basically free'. To me it seemed comparable to, if not slightly more expensive than, Liverpool.
Incidentally, I don't have a tumble dryer - never have. I have room to have one, (it would surely take less space than the clothes horse in my living room!), but I've just never wanted one. I guess it's easier because I live alone (similarly I don't have a dishwasher) - I don't have a lot of laundry and can just hang it up on a clothes horse and use a dehumidifier to make it dry quickly. But far more often I hang it outside in my garden - even in winter, if there is a dry sunny day, I hang it outside, because I love the smell of fresh air on my clothes.
Having made the same move in the opposite direction (and now being the frequent operator of an "energy hungry" gas-powered tumble drier), it depends how much laundry you do. If you have a big family, and are used to wearing a garment once, then throwing it in the wash, then you do laundry more than once every day. If you discard shirts and underwear after a single day, but wear outer clothes for longer between washes, you generate much less washing.
The tumble drier is significantly less effort, though - it's easy to dump the contents of the washing machine in the drier, and very much more effort to peg it out on the line / hang it on radiators, airing racks etc.
The thing that really surprised me about moving to the US was the tendency of US homes not to have ceiling lights. It's pretty common round here to have a light switch by the door that operates not a ceiling light, but one or more electric outlets in the room - the idea being that you can plug a lamp in to that outlet.
Other really surprising thing - arriving in the US, showing up for my first day of work, and being handed a large book containing names and addresses of doctors, and being told to pick one.
Doesn't this come to much the same thing and same cost - using a (electric) dehumidifier to 'dry' the room instead of a tumble dryer to dry the clothes?
I don't think so, but I'm prepared to be proved wrong.
This depends a lot on your climate and on how much ventilation your house has. If you live somewhere with an extreme climate, and have an energy efficient home (meaning it is well sealed) then generating humidity indoors could be a problem.
On the other hand, if you dry your clothes on the line outside in the summer, and only dry indoors in the winter, when you want to humidify your air anyway, then a modest amount of laundry might actually be helpful.
You should be offered a job in Calais
I doubt it. They are very inexpensive to use, but then, not having a tumble dryer, I don't know the comparative cost of a tumble drying cycle. But that is irrelevant, as the reason I chose a dehumidifier over a tumble dryer was not about cost, but because a dehumidifier is useful in general, more broadly than just speeding the drying of clothes, plus I dislike the way clothes feel after being in the tumble dryer. And, as I said, I try to dry my clothes outside as much as possible, because I like them to get the smell of fresh air. They won't lose that smell if I finish drying them on a clothes horse with a dehumidifier. They would if I put them into a tumble dryer.
I used to have an American housemate, who lurved the tumble dryer. When she moved out, the electricity bill dropped by 50%.
I think a significant difference is the speed and energy at which it's done. A dehumidifier does it gently, slowly, making a slight hum noise. This results in a lot less energy being used, even if you are comparing several hours with one hour of a tumble dryer (which according to google is 35p, but again I'm sure it will depend). This is the kind I have. You can read the info and maybe this answers your questions.
Varies so much between people. 18-21C is comfortable for me.
We heat to 67 F in the winter, and cool to 78 F in the summer. Most people locally both heat and cool more than we do.
We are very well insulated, and the electricity produced by the roof has, so far, meant the electricity bill being cut by c90% averaged over 8 months.
On the subject of the OP, I'd say that driving, especially on motorways, freaks out people from the US - sheer weight of traffic and speed. One American friend who moved to London took 3 years to pluck up the courage to take driving lessons to learn how to drive a manual car.
My American friends say that they come to realise that we're not unfriendly, just less in-your-face.
Of my 3 American friends who've been here for more than 5 years none is keen to move back stateside.
I tell them that the Australian dream is for the first generation to work hard in low paying jobs and put everything into building a home for their kids. The kids grow up [insert ethnicity] Australian, get educated and in the process live in two worlds, an Australian public world and an [insert ethnicity] private world. By the third generation, that public and private world has blurred.
Then I tell them that this is my fantasy, my ideal of Australia as an immigrant, multicultural nation.
At this point the casual worker usually asks me if there is anything I would like them to do. Laundry? Dishes? Mop the floor? Anything?
To Americans moving to the UK, I would say when you visit someone and they offer you tea or coffee, you have to accept. It's part of the routine. When they offer you a second one, though, that's probably time to leave.
Of course, if you're genuinely in a hurry and have to refuse, the laws of Britishness say that the person offering is the one making the faux pas, ultimately derived from the failure of their psychic powers.
What is "skipsplaining", please? Couldn't find it online at all.
Thx.
If you're an American moving to the UK, it's fine to have weird herbal teas, but if you offer someone a cup of tea, they say "yes please" and then you ask them "chamomile or rose hip?", you're doing it wrong.
This made me think of things that have puzzled me as a visitor to Britain, not just etiquette norms but codes and (sometimes endearing) assumptions shared by certain groups. For some years I went over to London in May each year to attend the Chelsea Flower Show (as a plant-lover and garden writer). Friends in London would swoon with envy and say how magical the spring flowers are at Chelsea, tell me to wear light cotton tops and sandals, have a hat to ward off the sun since I'd be outdoors all day.
May isn't the wettest month in the UK -- that is October -- but it usually rains four and a half out of the five days of the show. I had to buy wellington boots and a hooded raincoat. The most popular thing to do at Chelsea is to queue in the pouring rain to look at show gardens along the Embankment. Many have water features, ornamental pools, waterfalls and mountain streams that look surreal in the rain. One of the most popular gardens one year was a recreation of cacti in the Mojave desert which was almost washed away. If you ask about a small sodden muddy patch of plant matter, people will tell you it is a glorious wild buttercup meadow in the Yorkshire Dales and raise an eyebrow at you for not seeing what was intended to be there. Everyone talks about the rain as if it is a surprising anomalous event, shouting, "Wet enough for you?" and "Should clear up by lunchtime!"
The next most popular thing to do at Chelsea Flower Show is to join another long queue in the freezing rain to get Pimm's, and dollops of ice cream in perishable cones.
Of course after three days, I found I also forgot all about the rain and could spend hours staring at rain-sodden irises and dark-blue water rills in a recreated Moroccan courtyard. This year I see the Chelsea Flower Show has been postponed to September and I hope it doesn't have to go virtual again, it is pure magic once you get used to the weather.
Sorry GK. It's a term I made up. A Skip is what Greek and Italian kids ("wogs") called kids from a British or Irish background. Skip is a reference to Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. Please note that the ethnic categories are very loosely drawn, in common with all racist stuff.
Yes it says September 2018 .... but does that make it less valid?
1. pavements and people walking to go on a small errand -e.g. to buy a newspaper, or milk.
2. hanging washing out in the back garden.
3. no guns
4. Different words. Our neighbour came to the door once to ask "what is this, and where do I buy it?" I told her it was embroidery cotton and sold in John Lewis haberdashery department. Apparently she'd spent the day in town trying to track down "floss" and had been pointed towards toothpaste several times.
I remember how much offence I caused as a student in Ireland when I paid for my own drink and did not buy rounds.
Oh yeah! When we bought out house in the US, I spent years going up to the helpful older gentlemen in Ace Hardware saying things like ""I need a thing that does this. It works like this. In the UK, we call it X", and then the helpful old guy would tell me what the thing was called in the US.
I've wondered, who all would you be buying rounds for? The group you came in with, the friends you made while in the bar, or the whole bar?
This sounds remarkably like St. Louis when we first arrived in 1988, and everyone told us we just HAD to go see the Jewelbox. We got there and it was a rather attractive Victorian greenhouse absolutely filled with poinsettias, all of the same sort, all massed together, all of the same size and color and so forth. Nice to look at for approximately 30 seconds. That was it. That was all there was.
Nobody told us to go to the Missouri Botanical Gardens, which is a world-class scientific outfit, besides being the most gorgeous thing I have ever seen, with acres and acres of every conceivable kind of garden, on a level with the Huntington in California. Nobody. "Oh, you mean Shaw's garden?" they said when I brought it up. "Yes, very nice." Uh yeah. Rather nice. As in, National Geographic wrote a freaking major article about it, showcasing its beauty, which is unfortunately not online.
https://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/
I mean, WTF?
ETA: Shaw's been dead for a hundred years. They speak of him as of a neighbor.
When I've heard this about the UK, it's generally sounded like maybe it's among working-class folk. (Don't know the class terms over there.) But working-class Americans aren't likely to be able to buy a round for their friends (or more) on a regular basis.