Last week, Belinda wrote a lovely post on who and where she'll be in five years; one of her points was that she imagines she'll still identify as an expat. I wrote her a long comment saying, basically, that I think there's a difference between still considering yourself an expat and still experiencing life as an expat. Honestly, although you never completely get over being homesick or missing the way things are done back home when you live abroad, the feeling of not belonging goes away much faster than most people expect. Yes, it's a total pain that the English don't really believe in tumbledryers and yes, it would be lovely to have air conditioning when the mercury rises. But they don't, and at a certain point, even though you'll never stop being an expat, the differences just become a way of life.
I've loved answering your questions about these diferences, though, and it's tons o' fun to explore them with you. Admittedly, some are easier to navigate than others and we can be lighthearted when talking about things like how surviving winter in England takes mental fortitude that you just don't need in most of the United States regardless of how much colder it actually gets in America. But blogging about other differences requires much more diplomacy and I'm sometimes nervous to share my experiences and observations with you because, no matter how long I have lived or will live in England, I will always be an expat in these instances.
It's tricky to comment on cultural differences of a political nature - remember my post on the gathering of the hunt in Suffolk? And, as you can see from the tweets above, even those of us who should know better (ahem, New York Times!) have trouble with the divisions between the countries that make up Great Britain. So I've been loath to answer the single most common question I get from non-UK readers who are curious about life in England...
Does the class system really still exist?
I've never blogged about this before, so let me answer in a word: yes. Obviously I've never experienced the British class system as a native Briton has, though I did have a horrible anti-immigrant experience while riding a bus through south London back in spring 2012, and so I can't truly understand it. But it absolutely does exist and it's mindblowingly uncomfortable to watch as an outsider because there's really no blueprint for us that explains how to navigate it. Actually, even the British themselves don't quite know what to make of the class system, which is probably why the BBC recently published a series of articles on the results of the Great British Class Survey. If you want to see a stunningly cringe-worthy example of this, watch the below clip - and then, of course, let me know what you think in the comments here!
