Not shock, and it's not the culture-
It's the bathroom fixtures.
My little mini culture shock when coming back to the UK, my adopted country. It's not the accents, or the architecture, or the TV shows that unnerve me. It's little insiginificant seeming things like the locks on the bathroom stall doors and the light switches.
I mean, who notices light switches? But I do, and I can't help it. And the smell of the particular cleaners and disinfectants. There must be two or three manufacturers of bathroom fixtures in the UK, maybe five in the US, and why should these things be imported or exported? So they're not. So you look down when you're washing your hands and become familiar with Armitage Shanks. You've never met Armitgae Shanks before but now he shares your intimate bathroom moments every single day.
It's like bizarro land. These tiny little things that no one even thinks to mention are consistently different. No one thinks about the light switches until there are no "normal" shaped light switches to be found.
We will not even go into the issue of plumbing, because I could go all day, and I'm not trying to diss the UK, which is in many ways a lovely and respectable country and far superior to America in things like concern for global warming and the abundance of freely roaming sheep.
But those are big things and can be ignored or appreciated as "cultural". There's no escaping the mundane strangeness of foreign bathroom fixtures.
My little mini culture shock when coming back to the UK, my adopted country. It's not the accents, or the architecture, or the TV shows that unnerve me. It's little insiginificant seeming things like the locks on the bathroom stall doors and the light switches.
I mean, who notices light switches? But I do, and I can't help it. And the smell of the particular cleaners and disinfectants. There must be two or three manufacturers of bathroom fixtures in the UK, maybe five in the US, and why should these things be imported or exported? So they're not. So you look down when you're washing your hands and become familiar with Armitage Shanks. You've never met Armitgae Shanks before but now he shares your intimate bathroom moments every single day.
It's like bizarro land. These tiny little things that no one even thinks to mention are consistently different. No one thinks about the light switches until there are no "normal" shaped light switches to be found.
We will not even go into the issue of plumbing, because I could go all day, and I'm not trying to diss the UK, which is in many ways a lovely and respectable country and far superior to America in things like concern for global warming and the abundance of freely roaming sheep.
But those are big things and can be ignored or appreciated as "cultural". There's no escaping the mundane strangeness of foreign bathroom fixtures.
posted by Joolya at
6:02 AM
1 Comments:
Actually, plumbing in the UK simply sucks. How hard can it be to fit toilets that can flush without using 12 gallons of water (and most of these use that much and STILL don't flush effectively!)? And how hard can it be to fit mixing taps, for pete's sake? It's not like they have to invent a whole new technology!
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