In fact, my husband wore one the other day to the beach and said that someone
actually made fun of him, which I was like, "It's 2021.
You can wear a baseball hat if you want to in whatever country you're in."
Hey, guys, welcome back to the Girl Gone London channel. If you're new here,
my name is Kalyn.
I'm an American who's lived in the UK for almost 10 years.
And today we are doing another differences between the UK and the US video.
Now, in this video, I am going to cover some differences
that you might not have heard between the UK and the US.
So no matter how many times as an American you feel like you've watched Harry Potter,
you definitely probably haven't heard of most of these things.
And similarly to our British friends, these are things that you might have taken
for granted about life in the UK that you might not realize is different in the US.
OK, so we're just going to jump right in.
And I'm going to start with something
where I want you to comment below and let me know what you use.
But I'm going to talk about the difference between some mnemonic devices.
I can never say that word, but I'm glad I got it out.
Mnemonic devices between the UK and the US, which,
if you're unfamiliar, is basically how we are taught to remember certain things.
So, for instance, my research for this was
asking my husband, who was born and raised in England.
So he said that in order to remember
north, south, east and west, he was taught never eat shredded wheat.
Shredded wheat isn't a common saying or
phrase in the UK, in the US, and we really like our waffles.
So our north, south,
east and west mnemonic device was never eat soggy waffles.
And so I thought that was a very
American versus British difference there on how we remembered those things.
Now, the other thing I find fascinating is
how we are taught to remember the colors of the rainbow.
So this is about to get a little controversial because I asked my husband,
I said, did you how are you taught to remember the colors of the rainbow?
Because I wanted to see if in the UK they
use the same thing that we did, which was called basically a man named Roy G.
Biv.
And each letter stands for the correct color that goes down a rainbow.
So red, orange, yellow for Roy G for green.
And then Bev was blue, indigo and violet.
And I asked this to him and he said he had
never heard of Roy Biv, but they had been taught a song which was
something like is called I Can Sing a Rainbow.
And it starts out with the colors of the Rainbow.
And he started singing it and it said red and yellow and then pink and green.
And it goes on.
And he said that it wasn't until later on that he actually realized that these
weren't the real colors of the rainbow as actually exists in nature.
So I would love for British people to comment below and let me know how you
were taught to remember the rainbow colors.
Do you know the song I Can Sing a Rainbow.
Do any teachers out there? Do you teach?
I can sing a rainbow, but it's like the wrong colors.
But do you tell them it's the wrong colors or is it just like a song for fun?
I definitely need some answers on this one because we were always taught Roy GBIF
simply because if you actually look at a rainbow in nature, in nature,
that is the way the colors line up and the British one seems very out
of whack and not actually colors that are included in the rainbow.
So that is definitely something I need you guys to clear up for me.
Have you heard of Roy GBIF?
Do you have other ways that you were taught to remember things?
I also asked him about the planets.
So when I was growing up when Pluto was a planet rest in Peace, Pluto planet,
we were taught something like my very my very important no, it doesn't make sense.
It does mine very something mother, my very eager mother served us nine pizzas.
It was something to do with pizza.
It was something to do with our mom serving as pizzas, which again is the most
American way you can possibly think to remember anything.
He didn't remember a way that they were taught to think about the planets.
So maybe they just had to learn them.
But again, comical.
Oh, and let me know if you were taught
something in either country to remember the planets.
OK, the next difference I wrote down was tap water.
And this is specifically talking about my experience in Florida.
I am not going to knock the tap water in any other state, but I 100 percent will
say that I grew up not ever wanting to drink water out of the tap.
Florida tap water tastes like rotten eggs.
It is disgusting.
And for that reason,
the vast majority of Florida families will buy water bottles or some sort
of filtration system like we just won't even touch the water.
It's not that it's necessarily like harmful.
It's just it tastes disgusting.
Here in the UK, particularly in the south east of England.
I have never had a problem with the tap water.
It tastes good, it tastes fresh.
And I have never purchased a bottle
of water in England unless maybe I was like out and about somewhere.
But at home, definitely we do not have water bottles.
We drink straight out of the sink and it taste.
Really good, it tastes fresh, and so when we go back to Florida,
it's always a reverse culture shock to not necessarily want to drink the water
coming out of the sink and have to find alternate sources, which my husband found
very strange when he first visited Florida.
The idea that you could drink out of the tap, but we didn't because it was gross.
The next cultural difference I wrote down
has to do with the use of what I'm going to call a robe.
No British people,
please feel free to jump in time and let me know your thoughts on this.
From my perspective, growing up,
if you think of a robe or a bathrobe, which is what I would call it,
but I feel like here in the UK that's a dressing gown.
But maybe you have a separate bathrobe here.
But I've never seen anyone do that.
It's just like a dressing gown, is what they call it.
But my what I've kind of gathered and again, this is coming from Florida,
so we don't necessarily have a need to bundle up.
But in Florida, you would only wear a robe when you got out of the bath.
Maybe I wore one as a kid you would like it's popular for kids to have them when
you get out of the bath as an adult, I never that's not a thing.
Like my parents did not walk around
in robes or anything like that, but it was simply just something
in between getting dressed and getting out of the bath or shower.
Here in the U.K., it is damper.
It is colder than that.
Cold can really go like straight to your core.
And so people wear what I view as robes,
but they call dressing gowns basically whenever they want to.
So they would wear it over their clothes, around the house.
You would have clothes under it as well. So that's the difference.
Maybe between the use of the robe and a dressing gown is a dressing gown.
Tends to, from what I have seen, be worn over your clothes.
My husband will wear one like in the mornings
and in the evenings and you can kind of just like put it on whenever you want.
I haven't really gotten into this again, being from Florida.
I kind of am just looking at it like,
why are you wearing a bathrobe at like 3:00 p.m.?
And
it just it hasn't really caught on with me.
But it's definitely a difference that I have noticed in between what I experienced
growing up in the States and what happens here.
So, again, I would love to hear wherever
you're from the world, do you wear a bathrobe?
Do you wear a dressing gown?
Do you think there's a difference?
Let's definitely get a conversation going on that
the next difference I wrote down, see, with some flavors that are popular
in the UK that we're really not popular in the US.
And I don't mean flavors of ice cream
because that pretty much is standard across the board.
I am talking about flavors or ingredients like rhubarb.
I had never, ever, ever had anything.
I didn't even know what rhubarb was when I moved to the UK.
Let's start there.
So I had never had a dessert like
a rhubarb crumble or anything like that again crumbles.
We don't necessarily call them not in the US either.
There's so many differences.
It's like layers and layers and layers
and layers of differences that we could get into.
But let's just stick to the the flavor of rhubarb.
Rhubarb is popular here in desserts in US flavoring.
Another thing I thought was something like
black currant, which is not at all something that we
would even know what it tastes like in the US.
If you just said blackcurrant.
Most of us, it's not a flavor that I grew up having.
It was not an option like of juices,
whereas here blackcurrant is a popular flavor of like squash.
I'm not sure if I've done a video about this.
I think I have. But basically squash is like
a diluted, concentrated juice and you then add water and squash again.
This is a liquid, not the actual vegetable squash you would add.
Then you would add squash into your water to turn it a certain flavor and color.
So blackcurrant is really popular squash flavor.
But again, being from the US, I had no idea what this was.
I had never heard of it and was only exposed to it when I moved to the UK.
OK, so the next difference I have to talk about is about cats.
Yes, cats are the same creatures in both
countries, but where we think they live is different.
So in the US we kind of have a culture of mostly indoor cats.
Sometimes it can be indoor outdoors and we do have outdoor cat.
So it's not to say that every single cat is fully indoors.
Mine was he was allowed to go like
in the out outside enclosed pool area because it had doors.
But we just in the US kind of think
of cats as like a snuggly indoor pet here in the UK.
I have found it extremely uncommon to come
across a family who has a fully indoor cat, the Dunns.
Here, it seems like 99 percent of the time is you have a cat,
you have a cat flap and the cat roams freely whenever and wherever.
So at any given point,
I can look out my window and see like three or four neighborhood cats.
I'm not kidding. This is a cat heavy neighborhood.
They come in our backyard, they sleep on our deck.
They sleep up on the brick walls.
I've looked out and seen them, you know,
climbing up a tree, which I thought only happened in children's books.
But come to find out, it definitely happens in real life.
So the British idea is that a cat should not be confined to the home.
Now, as a cat lover myself, though, I'm highly allergic, so I don't have one.
I definitely would fear for my cat the entire time it was out of the house.
So I'm not sure if I got a cat here, what I would do again, I wouldn't get a cat.
But hypothetically, I just, you know,
there are a lot more like cat injuries and cat fights and cats getting into it
with wild animals and unfortunately, cats and cars not mixing LOL.
So that is definitely more of a thing I hear here than in America,
where a lot of our cats are just kept indoors and not because we're trying
to stop them from living their best life or anything.
It's just culturally we kind of think of a cat as an indoor pet.
OK, so the next difference I have to talk about has to do with baseball bats.
So baseball hats are incredibly common in the US.
I feel like this is a stereotype of Americans.
If you think of an American,
you might think of him wearing a baseball hat or baseball cap.
As some people would say, these this is too big for my head.
This is my husband's hat.
But
they're not common in the UK.
In fact, my husband wore one the other day to the beach and said that someone
actually made fun of him, which I was like twenty, twenty one.
You can wear a baseball hat if you want to in whatever country you're in,
but apparently in the UK, not very common to wear a baseball hat.
I'm trying to think of what hats they would wear.
I'm not entirely sure I do like a baseball hat.
I didn't used to wear them.
We wore them as kids, but I wasn't going to go to my high school wearing one.
But now I would wear one on a sunny day,
keep the sun out of your eyes, or you can do like
the backwards baseball hats.
You look like you're straight out of the nose.
But yes, if you come to the UK wearing
your baseball hat just now, you are not necessarily going to be
surrounded by loads of other people doing the same.
But I see you be you wear your baseball hat in the UK if you want.
And if you're a Brit coming to the U.S.,
this is your chance to wear a baseball hat and get away with it.
OK, now the last thing I wrote down,
the difference between the UK, the US and this is a small one,
but in the UK they seem to use the word tummy in a medical sense to mean stomach.
They know what a stomach is.
They might say stomach occasionally.
But if you go on the NHS website, it will talk about tummy pain, tummy problems.
If you go to the doctor and complain
of stomach issues, they will likely refer to it as your tummy.
Now, this is only weird for an American
because tummy in the US is a word that you would use with a toddler.
It is a baby medical word.
It is not something that you would ever go to your doctor and say, I have tummy pain.
It it's using a kid word in the US here.
Tummy doesn't seem to be a kid word.
It seems to be a word that everyone uses to mean stomach that in the US as adults
we would say, I have stomach pain, I have stomach issues.
And on a medical website it would not refer to your tummy.
That would be how you teach a kid about parts of its body.
And so that always jars me when I see medical documents in the UK
referring to tummy, because culturally to me it just sounds a bit funny.
OK, so you've made it to the end of the video.
Sometimes I like to say comment below if you made it all the way to the end,
because you are definitely my favorite people.
Thank you guys so much for being here, as always.
Comments, suggestions.
Leave them down below. I hope you enjoy it.
And I'll see you next time.