| Another Transplant
I was browsing the Sun blog posts today, when I came across What me Panic? This blogger appears to be a transplant from the UK who landed in Boston. I was very amused to read about how she misses the banks in the UK and can't stand the speeding 18-wheelers. What I found so amusing is that the last time I was in the US, I thought the same thing.
Speaking of British transplants, the manager who hired me at Sun, Ben Hall, is an American exexpatriot. He moved to the UK in his youth and lived there for quite a while. Not long before hiring me, he moved back to the US, bringing along a British accent and a library of Cockney rhyming slang.
One of my favourite UK-meets-the-US stories is from his move. When he moved to the US, Ben moved to Atlanta. More specifically he moved to Alpharetta. Alpharetta was not the most, um, metropolitan of places. The movers who unloaded the Ben's container had thick southern accents. As they were unloading, Ben's cat was wandering around the house. At some point, one of the movers pointed to the cat and told Ben, "You shewr got a purdy cat." Ben was completely confused. He explained to the mover, much to his confusion, that the cat was indeed not a Persian. The mover explained that he meant that the cat was "purdy." [Translation assistance: "purdy" is southern for "pretty"] I suspect they both left the conversation thinking, 'stupid foreigners.'
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