Anglosphere

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England - of the two hundred and eighty destinations across the world that the Rough Guide Books cover, there is none so astonishingly fascinating, so spectacularly beautiful, so adorably quirky and eccentric, so hectically frenetic but also wonderfully peaceful and serene, so full of unexpected charms as well as unexpected surprises, so welcoming, so quaintly and historically picturesque and yet so modernistically up-beat and vigorous, and so culturally diverse, yet none quite as insular, self-important, irritating, puzzling, off-hand, dispassionate, confusing, inexplicably contradictory, unpredictably frustrating as England.

England has this intensely annoying effect on most of its first time visitors from other countries which makes them either decide once there to stay longer than intended or vow to return at some future date, an enigma indeed.

England: ugly food, ugly weather,boring landscapes with few forests, cold people with unpleasant teeth, they still have a Queen... I don't recommend England as touristic destination. If the English explored many parts of the world it was due to the fact that they themselves could not stand their own isle and wanted to escape from there at any cost. Those who still remain in England must have a recent genetic mutation that enables them to stand such living conditions .

What are you talking about? The weather's great there! At least in London. It is very similar to here, except they have even precipitation year round, rather than very dry summers, and very wet winters. Temperature wise it's almost identical. And the summers there are only slightly more humid than here. It's so much better than the east coast or midwest of the US, where it's bitterly cold in the winter, and hotter than blazes with humidity in the summer, and thunderstorms during the year. As fdor the food, they have everything you could ever want--it is a modern place. So why complain about the food? The landscapes are wonderful. The Queen is very nice. And all the ceremonies are interesting to watch.

Eeeeee, I like my dry weather --only really rains here in the summer. In fact it's rained a couple of times already this month. (I could live without the heat, though!) On the other hand, it rained every single day I was in England. I think if I lived there I would worry about mold. And I would have to grow my bangs out -- the humidity doesn't agree with my hair at all!

But other than the weather, which obviously a matter of personal preference, I found England pretty and pleasant, with lots of nice scenery, both natural and architectural. I would definitely recommend it as a tourist destination. Even better with a local as a guide. My half sister spent some time in Scotland a few years ago with a friend of her dad's who had a daughter the same age, and they had a blast together.

And speaking of the rest of the Anglosphere, she has just returned from six months in New Zealand, where she backpacked around with a number of people, and again stayed a few weeks with a local acquaintance of her dad's over Christmas. She absolutely loved it, and sent back lots of online pictures and postcards to the rest of us back home. I wouldn't say NZ looked much like the part of England I saw (East Anglia and London), but it was certainly inviting. Sadly I never could find the opportunity to drop in for a visit while she was there......

>> Eeeeee, I like my dry weather --only really rains here in the summer. <<

Yeah, New Mexico is so weird. Rainy summers and dry winters. That must be hard to get used to.

>>2. As a direct result of point #1, German-Americans are less likely to be purebreds, and more likely to share that ancestry with six other competing ethnicities. There are some areas where you see a lot of German ancestry that may still have fairly pure bloodlines, like Travis's region, but for the rest of the bunch scattered across the country, forget it.<<

At least here, such is far more likely to be "pure" in the percentage-of-whatever sense, with it being very common for people of my generation to be approximately "half German" and of my parents' generation to be approximately just "German". However, though, the thing that a lot of people forget about people in the US who are "German" is that being German is in many ways primarily a matter of what language one spoke when one got off the boat - and then such really encompassed a wide range of dialects including not just High German dialects but also Low Saxon and East Low German dialects. Furthermore, especially before WW1, speakers of Low and High German dialects and people who identified as "German" in one fashion or another were found over a very wide area of Europe far larger than present-day Germany itself and much larger than even present-day Germany, Austria, and Switzerland combined, ranging from southern Denmark in the northwest to Switzerland in the southwest, extending westwards into Alsace, and extending from Estonia in the northeast to Romania in the southeast. Furthermore, said population was not actually purely "German" in the purist ethnic nationalist sense, despite how the Nazis regarded the Volksdeutsche during WW2, but also included large numbers of Germanized Slavs, Balts, Hungarians, and Danes.

Uriel: "Eeeeee, I like my dry weather --only really rains here in the summer. In fact it's rained a couple of times already this month. "

I have to agree, Uriel, being a desert rat myself.

We have beautiful, edenic days every single month of the year, and during the summertime, it cools down at night to 50-60degrees. Moreover, we have no insect problem, (not even houseflies), which means you can actually enjoy the weather and not get eaten up by bugs.

Sometimes I do wish we'd get more rain, though.

The issue of blood has been brought up many times in this thread, and I must say I find the discussion of it quite bewildering. As an American who has no British ancestry, and whose ancestors all originate from Southern and Eastern Europe, I still feel infinitely closer to Britain than to any of the nations from which my forebears come because of the cultural and linguistic connections.

We still get mosquitoes, unfortunately, Jasper.

Actually, the raining in the summer thing is quite easy to get used to -- and be thankful for-- because it cools the place down. On sunny summer days the temperature is in the 90's or 100's, and the sun beats down on you relentlessly. But on overcast days, the temperature is much cooler. It doesn't always rain when it's overcast, but at least it blocks the sun!

I can't say that blood factors much into my identifying with one country or another either, æing. I would be lost in Portugal or Brazil or Scotland or Germany myself, despite my ancestry. Speaking the same language as other people does make you sort of pseudo-cousins, regardless of blood, which is why members of the Anglosphere all feel somewhat related, no matter where history has taken us.

Uriel, that's funny. Mosquitoes here in Reno are very rare indeed—you'd have to live right next to a wetland to get bitten by one. Blind, hard rains (like we used to get in Tennessee) are very rare, here; we might get one or two in a year.

But I live in the high desert, and you live in a low desert, don't you?

BTW, I remember in another thread I informed Damian that we get 28-30 days a month of sun in the summertime; I am not sure if he believed me. Does this mirror your low-desert experience?

To the other posters: sorry if I got too far off topic.

>> Speaking the same language as other people does make you sort of pseudo-cousins, regardless of blood, which is why members of the Anglosphere all feel somewhat related, no matter where history has taken us <<

More than than in my opinion. Most of us do have American/Canadian/British, etc. "blood", unless our parents were both immigrants. If you could call someone whose parents were originally from Poland, but then moved to Germany "German-Americans", then why do people not recognize American-Americans, for instance. If an American moved to France, wouldn't they be considered American-French, rather than Hungarian-French (because their great-great-great grandparents were Hungarian)?

I suppose it's mainly the common Language of English after all which brings about this "special bond" felt, if not always expressed, between many (but not all I would imagine) British and American people - leave out all Commonwealth nationals here who are in a different category where the UK is concerned in this regard. All this is regardless of actual ancestry - the English Language itself is the main factor in this feeling of "kinship".

This may be illustrated by something I witnessed the last time I was working down here in London...at that time I could still use my student railcard which granted me a discount of 33% on all train travel within the UK and also on the Continent (sadly it was valid only until an individual's 26th birthday - 07/04/08 in my case). A friend and I decided one Sunday to use the train using our cards and going out of London and down to the coast - to Dover, literally called the Gateway to England as it faces right across to France 21 miles away across the Channel. It's only a 70 minute journey from Charing Cross train station in London to Dover and we mucked about Dover itself, and then went up onto the cliffs, just below Dover Castle, looing across at France in good clear visibilty and watched all the comings and goings at the massive ferry terminals below us.

Once on the train back up to London, waitingto pull out of Dover Priory train station a group of Americans trooped into our carriage into the seats close to where we were sitting - mixed, and generally about our own age group, and laden down with masses of luggage, and once they had settled into their seats one of the guys said, with a sort of sigh of relief: "It's good to be back in England again!" and another guy replied something on the lines of: "Yeah, everything seems just so familiar here!" I'm not sure what he meant actually, but it was clear they had just come over on a ferry from Calais and had been travelling on the Continent. Maybe my mate and I could have engaged them in conversation but they just seemed so wrapped up together in their own highly voluble, highly animated chatter so we didn't feel like jumping in "uninvited" so to speak.

I'll kick off my responses here with one of the facets of the English character Mr/Miss/Mrs/Ms A Dane highlighted above....as taken from the Rough Guide to England book (I saw an article in a UK national newspaper about the article concerning England (as opposed to Britain) as published in the latest RG to Eng. travel book. "Self important?" What do they mean exactly? I wish I could work that one out as I have loads of really great English friends (I speak as a Scot here!) and now know very many English people - hardly surpising as I am currently working and living with so many of the boogers (meant entirely in the nicest possible way!!!!) and went to an English uni and not one single one is or was what I would imagine "self important" to mean! Surely everyone of us is "self important" in that we consider ourselves important enough to prevent ourselves walking in front of a No 22 bus or something equally daft - a self preservation instinct or something.

If it was meant to imply that English people consider themselves to be of more worth and status than they really are in global terms or similar, then I really don't think they are like that at all, any more than we Scots do. In fact the English media in particular seem obsessed with under-selling themselves in so many ways, and concenttrating far more on the negatives of life in Britain generally and virtually ignoring all the many positives. I could list many details here but I won't as it would be time to get up to go to work again in the morning before I finish.

As for being insular - well, the English, just like us - the Scots, and the Welsh of course, are insular in the sense that we actually do live on an island! So we are insular in that way, but how can we be when we are now one of the most multi cultural of countries in Europe and have been exposed to so many other cultures from all over the world, through immigration and tourism. I think it's fair to say that England (OK - Britain) is an extremely tolerant and accommodating country, many people believe too much so now in view of certain events over the past few years, and feee speech has always been taken for granted here for centuries now - for goodness sake, Magna Carta was written in 1215!

Maybe many people from abroad think the English are "irritating" - well, we Scots do - many times! They think likewise about us so who cares anyway? Puzzling, confusing, contradictory, frustrating? Well, nobody's perfect! ;-) It's the "dispassionate" thing which really got me though! What the hell is wrong with being "dispassionate" anyway? Surely that's the best way to be in any kind of crisis, surely? Now that really has been borne out very many times in England during moments of deepest crisis over very many years - at times of high drama and danger and dire emergency. The English are not really too much inclined to panic anyway, and it's a well known fact abroad that the English like to form orderly queues for just about everything (hells bells, have you seen the way they do things over on the Continent? - mad scrambles are the order of the day for just about anything) - but the English (ok - the Brits) simply form a queue - or a line, if you prefer). It's been the same during the various terrorist attacks in London, in particular, in recent years. The police and emergency services guys were dispassionate and so were the people forming orderly queues of evacuation from any danger, or possible danger, spots, be it a tube station, or a bus stop, or wherever. Well, such emergencies , or infinitely worse, are hardly new experiences in England (OK - Britain) are they?

Anyway, people coming to visit us from abroad really have to take the rough with the smooth while they are here amongst us, I'm afraid. Anyway, if so very many of them are reported to be wishing they could stay longer while they are here, or vow to return here again at future times, then we really can't be all that 'orrible and nasty - can we? ;-) There's obviously something they like about England/Britain.

Lonely Planet must have been reading "Myths about England/Britain!"

Ugly food? You have to be joking - you can eat just as well here as you can anywhere else on the planet - the one you are obviously not living on. As Washingtonian so rightly says, we can get anything we want, and over the past 20 years or so the quality of restaurant and food outlets, plus the variety and choice and range of foodstuffs, has improved beyond measure, and practically every single city, town and village pub offers good quality food with a wide choice of selection. The TV channels are groaning with all kinds of cookery programs (we have even exported the "nasty" Gordon Ramsay and the not so nasty Jamie Oliver to do their stuff in other countries, just to name two).

Unpleasant teeth? Oh God - not that one again! That the average Brit has grim gnashers really is a complete fib! You may well find some people with crooked teeth, rotten teeth or even teeth missing altogether (just watch some of the dreich specimens on Jeremy Kyle's precious stage, for instance) but among all of my friends and acquaintances, as well as people I come into contact with at work, the dental hygiene is generally very presentable, and for me personally the £17.25 I pay to Denplan every single month guarantees the excellent condition of every single one of my own white and crisp and even teeth.

Few foprests? Good Lord - where do we begin here? Oh why go on - this person has obviously never been to the UK, so we'll leave that one here.

Boring landscape? Hmmmm....definitely, absolutely, poisitively NEVER set foot on our soil! Next.......

Cold people?......same again....needs to take a hike to Murrayfield, or Twickenham, to any sporting event in the UK - to any pop Festival - Glastonbury is coming to an end very soon but there's always the Big Chill at Eastnor Castle, in Herefordshire, coming up next month....to any social gathering really.....Heaven nightclub down Villiers Street......I could go on all bloody night...but I won't...this is just to stupid, really. I've said before that the present generations of Brits are the most up-front and approachable there has ever been in these islands, so lay of on that one, pal.

Ugly weather...well, now you're talking. The weather...another bit of a conundrum, really. OK - the weather here is often cloudy, often a bit drizzly and cheerless, those Jerusalem hills and mills are sometimes quite dark and satanic, mists and fogs come and go (but all these sort of conditions occur over on the nearby Continent of North West Europe as well! It rains and sometimes it snows (the whole of London was brought to a standstill by a snowfall of a mere 25cm of snow last February - and made us in the UK a wee bit of a laughing stock in much of the world, but there you go!)

We can't help our geographical position at the NE edge of the great Atlantic Ocean, meeting head on all the SW winds bringing in to us a much milder climate than we really should have given our very northerly latitude - it is broad daylight at 04:00hrs at this time of the year, and dark at 15:00hrs in N Scotland in December. We only get really, really cold when the Russians decide to send their winds over in our direction now and again in winter.

Very, very rarely is the UK weather anything like as extreme as it is in many other parts of the world, be it hot or cold. Even the nearby Continent experiences more extreme condition.....that is because of our maritime situation. Here the climate is more of a "nuisance" than anything else - like most things in Britain, the by-word is "moderate". Even by nature we are "moderate" - well, discounting binge drinking nights out, it seems - I think we're pretty good at that really...."modetate" flies out the police cell window for too many, perhaps! ;-)

London has less than half the annual average rainfall of New York City, and a third of what many cities in the South Eastern States of the USA get, and probably Seattle as well. London has roughly the same annual average rainfall as does San Francisco, but in London lighter amounts of rain (often the drizzly, mizzly kind of stuff) falls on a higher number of days over the year. Some areas of South East England and East Anglia receive somewhat less rainfall than London, in fact. In the whole of one year the seaside town of Margate, in Kent, received only 242mm (9.56 inches) of rain throughout - London saw just 309mm (12.16 inches) during the same year.

It is very warm and humid and thundery in much of the UK at the present time, and this coming week we have been told to expect temperatures of up to 32C and even higher for the entire week, especially in London and the South East. Right now it feels very hot and quite uncomfortable in London, and it's gone midnight.

Apparently Summers in the UK are set to get considerably hotter and drier during this coming century, especially down here in London, the South East and East Anglia.

London, the South East and East Anglia are especially prone to severe thunderstorms, and we certainly had these on both Friday night and last night, Saturday. I went to a dinner party in Totteridge, up in North London N20, late yesterday afternoon, and everything was laid out in the garden at the back of the friends' home....we planned to have dinner out there (barecue and all that stuff) then to a club in Central London later. It had been beautifully hot and sunny all day, but no sooner had we started to eat and sup that thunder started to rumble and grumble and it got cloudier and darker and lightning started to flash more or less continously, and when we saw bolts of lightning streaking even closer we decided to get as much of the stuff indoors before the storm really set in big time and the claps of thunder sounded like the Western Front in action, with hailstones the size of marbles.

A couple of miles or so away is Kingsbury, NW9 - and this was a suburban street there after the same storm had passed last evening:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u0eJlb0p-4&feature=related

Some people class themselves as Storm Watchers:

http://theweatheroutlook.com/twocommunity/forums/p/27056/767440.aspx

Glastonbury Pop Festival auromatically attracts thunderstorms like a magnet

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Showbiz-News/Glastonbury-Fans-Brace-For-Thunderstorms-But-Sun-Expected-For-Bruce-Springsteen-And-Dizzee-Rascal/Article/200906415320327?lpos=Showbiz_News_Article_Related_Content_Region_2&lid=ARTICLE_15320327_Glastonbury_Fans_Brace_For_Thunderstorms_But_Sun_Expected_For_Bruce_Springsteen_And_Dizzee_Rascal

So Uriel has been to East Anglia and London! Well, all I can say is this - our Uriel has not really "seen England" - only a tiny wee bit of it! East Anglia is mostly flat, mostly agricultural, has gazillions of Eastern Europeans all over the show, they grow tulips, they have loads of airfields and American air bases, they have windmills and fens and loads of dykes (hey, I mean canal type things!!) and they all "speak funny". Poor wee Uriel hasn't really seen England at all, and even worse - nothiung of Scotand at all! Shame beyond shame! She should follow her half sister's example and visit us in Scotland ASAP - blast provision is what we Scots specialise in!

I plan to spend the next weekend back home in Edinburgh, all being well, and again all being well, may be back home for good sometime in October - not that I am not having a great time here in London - I truly am, if only it was';t so bloody expensive! - and so HOT! ;-)

32C for a whole week - maybe even higher - and with THIS level of humidity? And not below 20C at night in Central London.?...too, too much for a fair skinned, blue eyed Scot born of the northern climes!

Jasper - I DID believe you - I really did!

>> So we are insular in that way, but how can we be when we are now one of the most multi cultural of countries n Europe and have been exposed to so many other cultures from all over the world, through immigration and tourism <<

Same for here. We have the tourism and the immigration, etc. but it still seems very insular in some ways, in my opinion.

>> the whole of London was brought to a standstill by a snowfall of a mere 25cm of snow last February - and made us in the UK a wee bit of a laughing stock in much of the world, bu there you go!<<

It took a whole 25cm, eh? Here, much less than that is enough to grind everything to a halt.

>> Apparently Summers in the UK are set to get considerably hotter and drier during this coming century <<

Luckily it's supposed to get colder and wetter here.

>> It is very warm and humid and thundery in much of the UK at the present time, and this coming week we have been told to expect temperatures of up to 32C and even higher for the entire week <<

Here it was rather cold today. I wore a hat, and jacket. The wind seems to make it feel much colder than it is, even though it was supposed to get up to 69F/20.5C. Can't wait for July and August when it'll get into the upper 70s, and where we become one of the driest places in the country. Of course that'll go away come September.

>> 32C for a whole week - maybe even higher - and with THIS leve of humidity <<

I'm glad that here the humidity decreases as the temperature increases, so it's never uncomfortable outside no matter what the temperature is. I've never, ever felt too hot here in all the years I've lived here--and I've gone jogging at noon on the hottest days of the year.

>> So we are insular in that way, but how can we be when we are now one of the most multi cultural of countries n Europe and have been exposed to so many other cultures from all over the world, through immigration and tourism <<

Too much immigration can encourage insularity as much as too little immigration. It can cause the locals to feel threatened and take on an 'under seige' attitude.

<<the whole of London was brought to a standstill by a snowfall of a mere 25cm of snow last February >>

25cm of snow is nothing to sneeze at. 10-inch+ snowfalls are rare around here -- perhaps only once or twice during a typical winter.

Around here, 10 inches of snow would cause considerable disruption, especially if it all fell in just a few hours. Secondary roads would be impassible for quite a while, until they got plowed. Main roads would probably be messy while the snow was still falling heavily, although things would improve rapidly as the snowfall tapered off.

With the much anticipated global warming looming on the horizon, such snows should soon be a thing of the past around here.

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