Some Random Observations

• Surprisingly, the British speak in terms of miles instead of kilometers.
• Bathroom linens rarely include washcloths -- just hand towels and bath towels.
• Football is the term used by the British to mean soccer, and by the Australians to mean rugby.
• The fields and pastures are primarily "fenced" in with stone walls -- some of which have mortar and others that are called dry stone walls where the stones have been piled so skillfully that they've survived for hundreds of years.
• I haven't been anywhere where the drinking water has been bad (unlike traveling around the U.S.)
• Contrary to what I had been told, those red telephone booths are everywhere over here.  I had been led to believe that they had been replaced with more modern ones.
• The makes of cars here are not familiar.  There is the occasional Toyota or Nissan, but the vast majority are Renault, Vauxhall, and Peugeot.
• Drinking tea here is done by adding milk, which reminds me of Grandma Henline who always added a large quantity of milk to her tea.
• I'm staying down the road from The Old Gray Mare pub.  I could hear Daddy singing in my head every time I walked by it today.
• I caught an episode of Law & Order:SVU last night and I was startled to see that the opening is entirely different.  It doesn't have that "ching ching" noise, and the music is not the same theme song at all.
• Public transportation here is really excellent:  buses, subways, trains.  Even though there are definitely a lot of cars on the road (driving on the wrong side, of course), the public transit system is also packed.  Riding bicycles is also very popular and, as a matter of fact, people take their bikes right on the train and, then, ride from there.
• While I was in London, I didn't really meet too many British people.  There are more immigrants in London than there are in the U.S., I think.  Upon leaving London, though, and traveling throughout the country, I've had the opportunity to meet a lot of really nice English people.  At the Old Rectory where I spent the one night, the lady that owns the place looks just like you'd expect an English country woman to look -- and it turns out that she's passionate about fox hunting.  Brilliant!  And she's in her 60's.
• There is a distinctly different accent depending on where you're from in England.  The people in Yorkshire definitely have more of a Scottish sound, which makes sense since it's so far north.  There are also a lot of red-haired people in York!