A Brit Abroad: #3 -- Coming Back Home

You can't really talk about going abroad without referring to coming back home somewhere along the line.  In my experience, there's usually a stage abroad where somebody starts complaining "but it's not like this in [home country]!" and then, when they get back home, it's "but in [visited country], it's so much cooler because they do it like this".

If you're abroad long enough, you get used to the various things of the country you're visiting and they sort of programme themselves into your system.  The usual thing to watch out for is time difference, which can make you seem like an unsociable zombie if you have to go to school or work the day after you get back and you've had to try to factor in a six-hour time difference.  Then there's the food.  And, well, probably the most important one for a British person travelling abroad, the traffic.

In many countries in the world, cars go round on the right side of the road.  In Great Britain, Japan and a few other countries, we like driving on the left.  There's one theory that this is because people on the European continent (and others, although it was also transfer by way of conquest) used to drive on the right because they had teams of horses pulling their carriages around, and since most people were right-handed, it was a lot easier to flick the whip over all the horses from the right side or something like that.  In England, it was more common practice just to have one horse or one pair of horses, so we stuck with the left.  Dunno how this explains the other countries.

Personally, my favourite explanation for this weird quirk in circulation bears no historical sense whatsoever, since Napoleon came long after traffic was established.  Napoleon, being left-handed and of a rather greedy nature when it came to acquiring land, used to ride down the right side of the road so that he could attack people riding in the other direction.  I'm not totally sure how this works since you'd think they'd clash head to head rather than a right-handed person happily switching to his left hand in order to get thrashed (or maybe that's how Napoleon's conquests got so far -- who knows?).  Anyway, of course, the French army and then the conquered peoples began to take after the grand empereur and trot along the right side of the road (the right hand side, not the right side).  This then spread to all the countries involved in European empires and whatnot.  And, of course, the reason the British remain happily on the left side of the road -- or the right side, if you're British, patriotic and biased -- is because Napoleon never conquered us and we felt like being British and not Napoleonic-European and refused to switch.

Of course, this causes probablems for people swapping sides of the Channel.  If you take your car with you and the driver isn't paying attention, your journey might well dissolve into screams of "Dad!  You're on the wrong side of the road!"  If you're just wandering around on foot, think twice before crossing the road.  If you're in Paris, just don't cross the road anyway:  Find a subway if you value your life.  I once nearly got run over by motorbikes jumping the lights from both directions, and I'm not the only one.  (Paris, I love you really.)

Then live abroad for a year and come back to England.  Yes, it's an absolute relief to be home, but I've found it poses two problems:

1) I still expect to speak in French to people in shops and restaurants.  (So embarrassing....)

2) I think my friends have saved my life around twenty times in the space of a couple of days by dragging me off a road because I looked the wrong way and then stepped off the pavement into oncoming traffic.  I've been told I'm not allowed out on my own until I'm cured.  *escapes to Scotland*

The upside of being home is that THIS COUNTRY SELLS FRUIT PASTILLES AND HULA HOOPS.  CONTINENTAL EUROPE, WHY DON'T YOU HAVE THESE THINGS?  Somebody would make a killing out of importing them, I'm sure.

TBG <3

Minor Update

Yeah... I've been AWOL for a while.  Sorry!  Life got busy this summer and I actually spent over a month without internet, so....  My laptop is also on its last legs.  I'm waiting for a new one to arrive, but in the meantime, I don't dare use this one too much.  It has a tendency to freeze the screen, which is extremely frustrating when trying to type something.

That apart, I'm hoping that I'll be blogging on a fairly regular basis throughout September.  Alongside preparing for university, sorting out finances for university, reviewing everything I've done over the past eight years in Latin and Greek, rewriting a book for a competition and getting a TEFL qualification.  (It might all be on my to-do list, but the likelihood of getting all that done is... not great.)  The upside is that I'll at least be home for that, and I'm unlikely to be thinking in French.

I'm currently in Scotland.  The weather is appalling, which is only to be expected, but everybody here is extremely friendly and Hadrian's Wall and a load of old Roman forts aren't all that far off, so there's lots of interesting stuff around.

And just because I'm nice like this and have an obsession with unusual words (and etymology), here's something to add to your vocabulary:

nomophobia

Google chrome is telling me it doesn't recognise this word, which really doesn't surprise me.  If you don't recognise it either, nomophobia is apparently the word for a fear of being separated from your mobile phone (or cell phone, as I believe you Americans say).  "No" -- self explanatory; "mo" -- for "mobile"; "phobia" -- from the Greek word for fear.

I'll try and have something up for next week.  And I'll start working on the grammar part of the blog soon.  It's just rather difficult to do without it turning into a text-book style thing that only academics or grammar Nazis would find interesting to read.

Toodle pip!

(No, we don't normally say that.)