I always wonder what day to day life is like in other countries. Maybe some of you wonder what day to day life is like here. How is it different from the US? What things are the same? What do the electric plugs look like? Are the cars the same? Over the next few blogs I'll be putting up pictures of various things which are either the same or different, so you can get a glimpse into what daily life is like here. Ah the benefits of a crazy tricked out cell phone! :)
For starters, although houses aren't too different here, household management can be, let's say interesting. :) Certainly not as interesting as living in a frontier village, or in a village in a 3rd world country. But there are some differences.
For instance, although most (I think just about all) households have a washer, many people here don't have a tumble dryer. Most people around us hang their clothes to dry. Which isn't too big of a deal, if it isn't raining. Or in my case if the landlord doesn't turn on her sprinkler causing water to shoot over the garden wall. :) We're only 2 people, so our laundry is maneagable to hang dry. But at least one American family that we are friends with has 4 kids, plus the 2 of them, and they went out specifically to try to locate a tumble dryer to make the wife's life much easier. Here is a picture of our washer- the washers here are very small, but ironically this washer is the most tricked out washer I've ever seen. It has an LCD display, and although it isn't a touch screen it's pretty close. The options are overwhelming and sometimes not understandable. It does not talk to you, although it seems like it should. :)
Most people here have a dishwasher. Our dishwasher has been around the block a few times, and I think the heater element is broken because although it purports to "wash" the dishes, after the whole cycle is done, I open the dishwasher and not only are some of the dishes not clean, they are all sopping wet, and some of the plates have mold growing on them! The cycle is only an hour long! That's some very fast growing mold.
I don't think people here have garbage disposals. At least not in Cambridge- it just doesn't seem to be as common as it was in Ann Arbor. Maybe in London more people have them- I don't know. We take our compostable stuff out to the compost pile which our landlords have.
We do have a trash collection service here in Swavesey, although the northeast villages (of which Swavesey is one) are generally considered to be the least desirable to live in because their "services" aren't as good. And people here would rather live in brand new built homes for some reason. Anyway our trash pick up is every other week- black bins for normal trash one week, green bins for paper and organics the other week. We don't put out the green bin often since we don't have a whole lot of paper to go in it, and our other compostables go on the pile. We share our trash bins with 3b, the Indian couple who lives next door. It can be quite annoying if you forget to put the bins out, because you have to wait a whole 2 weeks, and with 2 households they can fill up. Plus the day to put it out isn't always consistent. :) The garbage trucks here are cute and small compared to ones in the US. That isn't because people here have less trash- in fact the packaging here is even worse than the US if you can believe it. Everything has at least 3 layers of plastic on it. It's ridiculous.
The electric plugs here, as most of you know, are 220V instead of 110. They also have a different plug type, as you can see. They are obsessive about grounding all plugs. Nothing here comes without a ground. Also, all the wall plugs have 2 little switches, which you use to turn off the electricity (which they call the Mains) before you unplug the device. I don't always do that. :) But the plugs are designed so that there is definitely no yanking on the plug to pull it out- you need an adult sized hand and adult strength fingers to pull that thing out. If you look at the open plug on the right you can see that it looks like the 2 bottom holes are not completely open. This is a slightly older plug- newer ones are shut like that, and you have to push very hard to get the plug to go in. Some are set so that the ground has to go in slightly first or else the plug simply won't go in. Did I mention that the government is very serious about regulating everyone's safety here? :)
Wondering what this crazy devise is? That huge box is the phone jack. Instead of being recessed into the walls, they stick out like this. The phone plug itself is different from the US ones, and this little box makes it very difficult to push the plug in, because it has a spring loaded piece to prevent anything from being pushed into the phone box. Including phone cords. :) The dangling thing is our router "dongle" which lets us plug the router and DSL in to the BT line. Oh, also this little box is not near the floor, where you'd expect to find a phone box...it's 3 feet off the ground, in a very prominent place in the living room. I don't know why. :)
Here is a picture of our refridgerator. It looks like a dorm room fridge doesn't it? Well, it's basically that size. Actually less wide, although a little taller. Fridges here are notoriously small, which means that many items sold in the supermarket are sized for these teeny fridges. Our at least has 2 drawers for veggies at the bottom, but a cucumber won't fit in there. Asparagus is about the largest thing you can put in a drawer. Below the fridge is the freezer:
The interesting thing about our freezer is that there's a guide on the door (which you can't see) telling you what foods to put in which drawer! Very interesting. We don't have much to freeze, so it mostly just sits there empty.
I think that's it for the appliances and jacks and things. :) Next up- interesting foods and their equally interesting (and ambiguous) labels. :)
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