Some more krazy komparisons between The Land of the Free and this wet rock that God forsook in the middle of the cold ocean.



Food

British food gets a hard time from American comedians, and rightly so. It's not like you can't get good food at a restaurant, but don't forget that this is a place where the equivalent of PB&J is beans on toast. They put beans on goddamn near everything here. The other day in the dining hall, they had some sort of bean pie, which the serving lady referred to as "vegetarian." I don't mean that she said it was a vegetarian dish. I mean that when I asked what it was, she said, "Vegetarian."

"Yes, but what precisely is it?"

"It's vegetarian!"

For all I knew, that could have meant that they baked up a vegetarian in a pie. They put meat in their pies all the time, the filthy savages. How was I supposed to know?

Speaking of vegetarians, we Stanford kids were warned that vegetarianism was basically a stylish American fad, and that the serious folk over in Britain would laugh at us if we tried to pull that sort of shit. This has proven to be most untrue. In fact, when I go grocery shopping, everything has a vegetarian marking on its wrapper (unless, of course, it contains meat, but I don't really buy things that contain meat, so I haven't really run across that).


My organic apple juice is blurrily vegetarian and vegan.



My digestive biscuits are vegetarian.
The fact that they used the gastrointestinally evocative phrase "digestive biscuits" for delicious chocolate cookies is a whole 'nother issue.


Sexism

You know I could go on about this one for days, so I'll try to keep it shortish. Basically, I am willing to stand up and say that the UK is loads more sexist than America. I guess I wasn't exactly expecting this, maybe because we have a stereotype in America of British men as effeminate, which simultaneously made me loathe American stereotypes that use femininity as an insult and think of Britain as a more feminine and therefore less sexist place.

WRONG.

I spend a lot of time every day reading feminist blogs, one of which - The F-Word - is British. That particular blog spends a lot of time railing against catcalls. I always thought they were overreacting, that the issues behind catcalls were a legitimate problem, but that catcalls themselves aren't that common or troublesome. Turns out that in England, they fuckin' are. On a five-minute walk to a kebab van, a friend and I were catcalled by men in cars no less than three times. One honked, one yelled out his window, and one honked, yelled out his window, and stopped his car up ahead of us to wait for us to walk by him. I don't mind the occasional wolf-whistle back home because I like feeling that members of the opposite sex are noticing me, but here it's threatening as all hell. These dudes are not just letting you know they like the way you look; they are letting you know that they consider you public property with which they will do as they please.

Not to mention shit like this:


Kleenex for your penis.


Gimme a break, Britain. Gimme a sodding break.