Stuff You Might Find Surprising About England (If You're Also a Yank)
To start, although England is much farther north than the US, because of the Gulf Stream coming up from the Caribbean (which may only last a couple more decades…), the weather here is really mild. So mild, that palm trees grow all over the place. According to the Plant Hardiness Zones, Newcastle, England is in the same zone as New Orleans, Louisiana, where we used to live.
A plus is that in the entire summer, we never got above the upper 70s (Fahrenheit!) So, it's a narrow band of vaguely 30-80, quite a difference from our last place in Vermont, where the variation was from -30 to the mid 90s!
You'll also see other things I associate with warmer climates, such as Spanish tile roofs, which last much, much longer (and are cheaper) than the standard kind of roofs in the US.
There are really a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle differences in the language here, which we expected, but here are a few details we didn't:
We used to think that they call french fries “chips” here, but that's not exactly true. They do have french fries (and call them that), but chips are more common and are thicker. A lot of the food does have different names though, such as courgettes (zucchini) and aubergines (eggplants) from French, or the odd pawpaw (no, not your grandfather from Arkansas), which is papaya.
Expressions that aren't used in the US can be a stumbling block, because my brain always wants to “round the words off” to something more American sounding that I'm used to. “To Let” is a sign you see everywhere here, and it means “For Rent”. But since “To Let” doesn't mean anything in the US, I see it as “Toilet”, but missing the “i”. There's even a space for it.
Along the same lines, there are these self-checkout machines in our town's co-op that speak to you in a lady's voice with some kind of a formal-sounding English accent. At the end of a transaction, I heard her say “Please take your receipt and shove it." Then I looked at the screen and saw, “Please take your receipt and shopping.” Because the word “shopping” would never be used in the US as a noun to refer to the items you just bought, I rounded the phrase off to something I’ve heard many times that also started with “sh". “Take your receipt and shove it!” sounds like the end of a transaction at a NJ DMV.
Everything works here somewhat differently, but it's quite functional, and both the weather and people are generally less extreme! All the craziness of the US election takes up more time on the news here… than news from the UK does. Good luck, America!