English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.
(E. B. White)
… and for getting across the street on a busy Coventry afternoon you sometimes need quite a large amount of sheer luck, I might add, especially if you're used to cars driving on the right side of the street.
Compared to the prospect of being run over by a lorry driver while looking in the wrong direction, the prospect of having to use a language different from my mother tongue for one year seems to be a rather small threat to my well-being.
However, language has always been my prime interest – I study literature and work as a journalist – and what I am missing now is especiallly the playful use of language. Even if my English is not that bad, my conversations during the last two weeks were still mostly limited to the hello-where-are-you-from-oh-interesting kind. Surprisingly enough, during international orientation, I sometimes found myself on the other side of the language barrier, speaking an English that was too complicated for some of the others to understand. At the other end of the scale there were some Scandinavian students who were so fluent in English, that I felt like an absolute beginner.
I basically set up this blog as a sort of playground, not for discussing my life, but only the matters of language and cultural difference I will encounter during my stay in Britain. It is, of course, also a writing exercise.
Considering cultural difference, the most obvious point so far is the British's obsession with safety and security. Not only does my neighbour have a (probably fake) CCTV camera, I also have a burglar alarm in my house, and, for the first time in my life, more than one lock (four, to be precise) on the front door. When walking through the city I saw so many posters with the slogan "help us make Coventry a safer place" that I inevitably asked myself how unsafe a place it is now….
While I understand that crime, especially burglary, is much more of a problem in Coventry, than where I come from, I still find people's reaction to the problem a little paranoid. And, after having a look at the crime statistics, I wonder why violent crime is so much higher in Coventry (and in Britain as a whole) than in comparable cities on the continent.
Most of the other aspects of British culture have been quite pleasant so far. People are so friendly, polite and helpful here, whether it is in the supermarket or in university administration. When I had some questions concerning my module selection, everybody was so nice that I really walked out of the university building with a smile on my face – it took me at least twenty minutes to realize, that nobody had answered my questions….
English food has not lived up to its horrid reputation (with the exception of the awful Full Cooked English Breakfast), the tea is really great and the coffee is not nearly as bad as Italian people always tell you. What i really miss is some kind of coffehouse-culture - people spending their saturday afternoons chatting in cafés, reading newspapers, smoking too many cigarettes... But this is the stereotypical complaint of continental people ... campus life, on the other hand, is pretty nice and I have never experienced something like that before - I mean, Soulwax and/= Too Many DJs in the Students' Union? On my birthday? Whoah.
27 Jan 2006 01:06
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Tags: Belle&Sebastian Birmingham
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