- The beer is affordable, readily available, and delicious. Yeay for pubs.
- It's a scandalous place. Despite the fact that the country as a whole seems calm and well-behaved, the media are engaged in an intense daily battle to create, inflame, and propagate scandals of all types. The menu from my stay, which rotated daily, included budget cuts to child welfare, celebrity phone hacking, limitations on the number of trash ('rubbish') loads per family per year, sexist comments by football (soccer) broadcasters about a female referee, leaked Palestinian negotiation memos, and a healthy mix of celebrity he-said she-said. All of these, and more, printed in big, bold black ink on the front of newspapers and in the daily news. And I was only there for a week!
- They like their rules and regulations. I witnessed a cop pulling over a dumptruck and lecturing him for close to an hour in London traffic. He even called for backup. The offense? One bald tire. I was assured by Rhodri that this made perfect sense, and that it was a threat to public safety if the tire tread was less than 3 millimeters thick. My wife informs me that they have such rules in Canada as well. But it seemed to be pretty paternalistic and unnecessary: wouldn't the risk of having a flat and being stuck somewhere waiting for a tow truck be sufficient to get people to change their tires? Apparently not in the Commonwealth.
- The weather actually IS miserable. We've all heard about the endless rain. It actually rained very little while I was there, and to look at the mercury, 50 degrees F isn't too bad of a temperature for January in the Northern Hemisphere. So I naively packed lightish, and was punished by the damp drafty wetness of the place. As soon as you stop moving, the chill is on. And don't seek refuge inside, because all of the quaint 100-year old houses are built to use roaring fires to heat tweed-wearing pipe-smoking gentlemen perched on animal rugs. But roaring fires are in limited supply these days, because they chopped down all the trees on the island (see 5). So I did pushups pretty much nonstop.
- Where are the trees? One of the things that struck me as I watched the countryside unroll between Belfast in London is that there are almost no trees. The patchwork, hedged and stonewalled quilt of subdivided farms is unrelenting, even far from urban centers. While this probably made sense in the middle ages when everybody farmed to eat, these days the plots are too small to be farmed economically and it seemed a lot of them were not in production. It surprised me that folks with rather keep a horse on a miserable half-acre than plant some trees. But that's what they do. Google Earth it and see for yourself.
- Their version of cops is really boring (see number 2). I watched an episode one night in Belfast. The fast-paced show switched between a high-speed chase and a missing person. The high speed chase was actually a guy on a motorcycle who was doing maybe 80, but passed in the middle instead of outside lane (they called it 'undertaking', which I also thought was funny). They pulled him over and cited him for inconsiderate and presumptuous driving, or some similar sounding name. The missing person was an old guy that wondered off to fishing. Within 3 hours they had called in the K-9 units and scrambled an RAF helicopter from a nearby base. Slow day at the office for those guys, I guess. I didn't see the end of it, but they didn't play the ominous music, so I guessed that the guy had fallen asleep or gone to the pub or something.
- Tradition survives. I knew this going in, but was still surprised to see men in hunting jackets and ties at the local pub after a partridge shoot. It gave the place a very insular feel.
On to the events: I visited Brighton, went out to eat at few pubs, spent a day in London, and got a sightseeing tour of the conflict area in Belfast (not in that order). I also got to see cousin Annie who is studying in London. And, of course, I was able to spend a bit of time with the niece and nephew, who are getting more talkative (and more cheeky) by the day. It was a lot of fun.
The separation barrier (Catholics over here, Protestants over there) in Belfast
