Rebekah's Insights

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There are so many new customs, ideas, and things in England that you would never really pick up on if you were only a tourist, just check out the vast language differences. For example, Christmas parties and get togethers are a lot more prevalent here than in the states. (Probably due to the lack of Thanksgiving. Everyone needs to have a barrage of holidays at once:)) A fun and different tradition here are
Crackers. Now, before you go looking for the number of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, Crackers are little Christmas presents that contain surprises inside.

Now again, there are some differences that end up costing you. In moving to the UK it seemed that everyone was trying to temper your expectations, from shopping to environmental factors. A big item spoke of was that people in Brittan like to keep there house cooler and have a different tolerance for environment comforts. In fact, our land lords only recently had "central heating" put into their house. Before that there were two solid burning stoves to warm up the house for a bit.

Since we moved in, our house has always been around the upper 60's, but lacking decently hot water. I have been playing with the heating system for months trying to figure out the right combination of variables in order to give us hot water AND decent heat. There are 5 different thermostats and timers that need to be set in order to heat one room. Its an engineering pain in the toe for debugging.

After all of my trying I found out the cold hard truth of my labor. No really, it was fridged cold in here:) I could not get the house above 62F. I came to find out that our boiler had not worked since we moved in. How where we getting heat at all you ask? We have an immersion heater that warms the water enough to heat some, but not enough do the job completely. It was enough to cause really high electric bills (again, we were told the bills would be higher here), but not too high to cause a great deal of alarm.

At the end of the day, some differences are really cool to discover and others just cost you a lot of cold hard cash.

Cheers!