Hello world! Welcome to England!

Welcome to my first post! After not meeting any other American expats during the first 5 months of living in England, I felt like I had no one to turn to to answer many of my questions about life in the UK. From the simple, mundane questions (“Can I drive here with my US drivers license?”, or “Will I be able to find my favorite Pantene hair mousse?”) to the frustrating, complex questions (“What’s the best way to try and work while living in the UK?”), I kept wishing I had a general resource with all the answers–someone to turn to who’d been through it all already, so I decided to write a blog about life in England from an American woman’s perspective, which will include as much useful information as I can think of, as well as my ongoing thoughts about life here.

Although many things about life in England are comfortingly similar to the United States thanks to our common language and common heritage, there are differences that crop up every week, some of which are quite humorous, and others which are honestly frustrating. For example, today I went into town to return a pair of earrings that I had ordered from a national retail chain online, and I discovered that English retail stores are prohibited from accepting returns on earrings sales due to sanitary concerns.

This makes sense on many levels, since earrings that may have been pushed through an earlobe by the buyer are potentially carrying some new germs, but I’d never heard anyone discuss this fact before, and the store’s website did not indicate that earring returns would not be accepted (either on the earrings description page, on my ’shopping cart’ page, or on the checkout page). Also, similarly to America, there don’t appear to be any restrictions on customers trying on earrings in the store before purchasing them, so the argument about protecting the cleanliness of the earrings for the ultimate consumer seems a bit weak. If I’d bought the same pair of earrings in the shop instead of online, chances are they’d already be more contaminated than the pair I received direct from the warehouse and tried on once. Luckily for me they were inexpensive earrings, and I did not have to learn this lesson on an ‘investment’ piece, but I still balked at the policy in front of the store clerks and felt embarrassed for not having this knowledge already.

Right now I’m currently struggling with some visa issues, as well as where to find some Thanksgiving food staples in England, so I’ll probably be back online later with more on those topics.

Let me know if you have an suggestions for topics or questions you’d like answered. I’m a big researcher so I’ll go digging around if I don’t have the answer.

Cheers!