it's the little things

it's always the little things that stand out most and that you end up missing most. For instance warm water. the sinks in the UK have the hot and cold tabs separate from each other which makes washing your hands or freshening you face with warm water extremely difficult; the water is either scalding hot or freezing cold depending which faucet you use. I guess you could plug the sink (providing it has a stopper which a lot don't) and mix your own pool of warm water..but in a public sink or shared hostel bathroom this never really seems to be an option. Or a cloths dryer. Most Brits have a washing machine but no dryer. They hang their cloths out to dry instead. This would make perfect sense and be a sound ecological alternative to the energy sucking cloths dryers that we use in the US, except of course it rains every other day in England, so about half the time you cloths get rained on when you are trying to dry them. A real PITA. What else? oh, the traffic on the left..not really a problem since we were taking public transport or Steve was driving, but try crossing the road...odds are you'll look the wrong way. I actually had several close calls stepping into the road in front of traffic. The offset of course is that the cars are never really moving that fast due to congestion in the cities. It's the little things. Shops close at 6pm sharp and nothing is open on Sunday. Only 4 channels in TV. The slow dribble of the electric showers, awful instant coffee, etc. I think we're a bit spoiled in SoCal, but this is ok with me.