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Bins and Basements
Yesterday I met with my prayer squad: three British friends, me, and Jackie, a fellow American and native Wisconsinite. Somehow, Jackie and I got to talking about how moving to London forced us to sort and purge possessions and decide what should be stored in bins in our respective parents’ basements. “Different kind of bin,” I remembered to clarify. In the UK trash/garbage cans are bins. The ones inside the house are bins, the ones outside are wheelie bins, because they have wheels. Here, Bin it means toss it. Not store it. “What’s a bin then?” one British friend asked. “A box. A plastic box to store stuff in.”…
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Learning London
I never expected to mourn the loss of a three-ring-binder, but I have. Thinking I was smart to save on room/weight when we moved overseas, and assuming I could easily buy a three ring binder once in London, I packed my plastic sleeve encased recipes without the binder, only to find that three ring binders don’t exist here in the UK, only two ring binders. A two ring binders seems close to a three ring binder, but it doesn’t work with my recipes. Close, but functionally different. The US and the UK may seem culturally similar, and in some ways we are, but our (mostly) common language can blind us…