A Trip down Memory Lane

I’ve been away from blogland for a couple of weeks in the UK, checking on relatives, family and friends in England and Wales.

So apologies for the lack of writing, but I’m back and ready to blog again!  I did take my handy dandy notebook with me just to jot down ideas for my blog which should have been much more forthcoming than they were, given that I write about what to expect when you relocate to Silicon Valley from abroad.  Maybe it was because of the lack of time I had, dashing from home to home along the motorways (freeways in American) and country roads - I get very car sick if I even look down for a second - and how rude would it have been to take out my notebook just as Great Aunt Ursula wanted to tell me again about her last visit to the doctor.

Anyway, I did come up with a few things which I remembered were distinctly English and not Californian which I don’t think I’d blogged about before :

Ice : copious quantities fill the American glass, while 2 or 3 are dropped into the English one.  I noticed straight away on British Airways that a few cubes of ice were floating on the surface of my Diet Coke, just how I like it - enough to keep it cold but not too much that it totally outweighs the amount of drink!

Glass, not plastic : while waiting at Heathrow Airport to take my connection to Leeds, I had time to grab a drink - yet another Diet Coke……OK I like the stuff - and was surprised to find that I was handed a glass, not a plastic container which I what I have been used to at cafes in California - with the prerequisite three cubes of ice.

Watercress fields - I’d forgotten that the village where I used to live has watercress fields and I was sure I hadn’t come across any in my travels around the States.  I could be wrong, but I imagine this is an indiginous UK plant.

History - So much of my trip took me round stone villages, narrow roads, gorgeous old pubs with low beams where you had to duck to walk around, hilly streets running through ancient towns, stone walls separating small fields - I couldn’t help but notice the general “smallness” of everything compared to Silicon Valley.  History is truly what you don’t find here in California, be wary you don’t take that for granted; it is something I sorely miss over here.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to be back - the sun is shining and the sky is blue - but there will always be a space for good old England in my heart.