...Its such a shame you didnt get to try fish and chips! Maybe next time though. They dont usually fry the chips in the same oil as the fish, so I think you will be fine! ...In Mcdonalds, they are marketed as fries but everyone in the UK calls them chips. Of course in WDW when we asked for chips without realizing, the servers were confused, and thought we wanted crisps! (I believe you call them potato chips?) So we learnt to start using American terms for things.
... I dont think cheddar cheese is the same in America though. I tried some and it was plainer and plastic flavoured. The cheddar we eat is quite rich. ...
Essex is pretty- but I take it for granted. I guess thats what Im used to- the same scenery and all. I have always thought though that Americans would really enjoy looking around here. Everyone says that there is not nearly so much history in the US, whereas the UK goes back thousands of years.
...Rory loves learning about his six wives...Goodness- I certainly need to scratch up on my knowledge of history!
Thomas Jefferson sounds like a very interesting person to learn about. I have heard of the Declaration of Independence, but I havent a clue what it is! Isnt it something to do with the British and freedom? I also hadnt had any idea that he was such a good inventor- and I looked up that clock you mentioned. If I have found the right one, it looks pretty impressive!
Really- you home school your kids? ...but you do GCSEs here for the last two years of compulsory education. If you get good enough results, you can go onto sixth form, for two years, and complete youre a-levels. And if you get good enough a-levels, then you go to university/ college.
I dont really like the atmosphere of school at all and would far prefer to be homeschooled. School is a very controlled environment, and they dont trust you much. In fact
at my school, (sorry if this sounds ridiculous!) they treat you like tramps. I dont deal with the pressures too well either! I wish I was working. (I know
I know
dont wish your childhood away!)
...You are lucky in the US- you have lots of holidays. 4th July sounds wonderful to me. And America has such pride in its country. We noticed that in Florida- driving from Miami to WDW- American flags popped up everywhere! That doesnt happen here much. Theres a lot of political correctness involved. But still- it seems that most Americans are proud to be Americans which I love. I wish our country had more pride- like it used to.
I have no idea what Thanksgiving and Mardi Gras are, but I know that Thanksgiving is very big in America. Is it being thankful for food or something? And then you have days like Labor Day, Memorial Day
you have loads of public holidays! :worship...
An American girl started at my school today. Shes really nice, but she misses Montana a lot. We spent lunchtime yesterday bent over an atlas, and she was telling me all about her home and her pets. She lived really close to Canada and the Rocky Mountains. Shes having a hard time settling in here, sadly. Ironically, one of the things she misses most is the food from the US! She told me you can get dough in a can?! And some sort of instant cinnamon rolls?! I have to say, American supermarkets are rather different, regarding some of the products they sell. I came across something like Pizza with Wyngz?! I had no idea what they were but it was certainly interesting!
Now that I know I'll certainly try the chips. I like vinegar. I know what you mean about the different lingo. I knew before visiting England just a few words would be different, but I was surprised by how many. About the cheddar cheese, it would be fair to say that we have a lot of "cheese" here that is not like it should be. I put it in quotes because a good bit of it isn't even really cheese and is pretty yucky by taste and texture besides reading on the label as something strange like "processed cheese food product". We like real cheddar and my husband especially likes really sharp ones. I'm a label reader so I avoid most of the "cheese" in the grocery store but I know where to buy the good stuff.
Hehe, good for Rory. The stories of the six wives are kind of fascinating aren't they? I'm a history lover. My husband used to want to become a history teacher until he realized he was already making more money in computers over the summer during his college years than he could make as a teacher and that if he ended up teaching high school rather than teaching at the college level he'd have to deal with the behavior of kids and the crowd control issues that he saw with his little sister and her friends, who were all pretty wild at the time when he made that decision.
But anyway, while I've been chatting with him as he drives and working offline on correspondence I mentioned our conversation and Jefferson and the Declaration... he started telling me about how there are a good many people who think all of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence are imitations from other thinkers such as Locke and Hobbes and Montesquieu, but that while many of our founding fathers were influenced by those same men there are some crucial differences and the Declaration of Independence is truly unique
and pivotal in world history. And he gave me an interesting little refresher on the comparative philosophies of Jefferson and the three others I just mentioned.
The Declaration of Independence was essentially the result of the political problems that were going on in the American colonies just before the revolutionary war. It was the culmination of the landed men of the colonies having been discussing the seriousness they saw in those issues and debating between loyalty to the crown and the need to stand up for their rights as British citizens which they saw as being trampled. As the political tide turned and more and more decided the King would not reverse course but would oppress them and misuse them Thomas Jefferson was asked to draft this document which proclaimed to the King that they now saw themselves as independent of him and why.
Oh and DH says to say that while many schools dumb it down to the point of saying the whole thing was over the issue of "taxation without representation" that was actually number 14 on the list of reasons given on the document itself.
56 men signed the Declaration between August 2, 1776 and January 22, 1777, including two future presidents, three vice presidents, and ten members of the United States Congress.
There had been plenty of letters to the King before that time anyway, but obviously this one was different.
When he got this news he didn't exactly like it.
A fair percentage of the signers of the Declaration ended up dead for having signed, some penniless, some with their families dead. But they are true American heroes, they and their sacrifices are the foundations of our country. We have one famous "founding father" who is mostly only famous to most people as a name, because his is the most prominent signature that can be read on the document. And his name has become synonymous with the word "signature". So sometimes when people here want you to sign something like perhaps your loan papers when you are buying a house or a car, they will say, "put your John Hancock right there".
The schools in our district our somewhere between average and very good, not the tops in the state but not at all bad by public school standards. My oldest child, my son, had a lot of learning challenges and he was basically "falling through the cracks". So I had to do something to help him. I pulled him out of school when he was mid-way through the fourth grade, but was two years behind in math, struggling with reading and having enormous social problems with kids and teachers too. I didn't know it yet at the time, but it turned out that he had Asperger's Syndrome. It was truly a hard job teaching him and I could see why the schools would have a hard time being equipped to handle every special need they run into. But without going into the rest of the story of his education before and after that point, that was how we found homeschooling. We just found it to be a really lovely lifestyle for our family and to have tons of amazing benefits. We love it. My daughters have never been to a school.
One of the strengths of homeschooling is the ability to individualize the education to the child completely. However that can also be seen as a drawback to homeschooling; any area where a child has a weakness becomes an area where you have to work harder, be diligent, find a way for them to succeed or even pull ahead in that subject. My kids are all great readers and the older two were both reading on a college level by the time they were twelve. (and that was after the public schools couldn't teach my son to read until I did it for them when he was the seven and eight years old.) I am weak in math and none of them seem to like math so that is where we have to have the most self-discipline and really work to make it happen.
But here is the great thing: It is all about letting your child (or helping them to) learn how to learn, to love to learn, to respect education and to be self-disciplined and independent. And while homeschooling as a movement or a personal choice is wonderful and I'd highly recommend it to just about anyone, it isn't really just about those can do it the way we do it. One of my favorite home school moms who lectures to other moms and sells a curriculum she wrote herself, is a woman who has her children in public schools and does what she calls "after-schooling" with them. She is supplementing their eduction essentially. Another person, a father, who I have bought curriculum from is a man whose wife had put together the materials to be used and had been homeschooling their children and then passed away suddenly. As a widower, he actually kept on homeschooling his kids right through until they all got accepted at excellent colleges and universities, even though he worked full time and they had to work mostly independently. Not to mention American History is full of amazing figures who were taught at home or were self-taught---world history for that matter. If you bone up on your history, you'll be doing the same wonderful thing!
We do not have an equivalent of the GCSEs, or I should say the GCSE test here. Our schools all have compulsory schooling right up to what we call twelfth grade. I think by design, our eleventh and twelfth grade are meant to be at the same level as your two years that you call second form. I remember back a million years ago when I was a teen participating in some and listening to a good deal of debate about whether the British system or the American system was superior as to that particular difference. If I got to decide I'm sure I'd switch us over to the British system. But many Americans tend to think that if everyone is not University-bound they have been wronged, where I think that to assign people privileges without equivalent responsibility is to do them wrong, and is quite probably a part of the reason for the continued decline in educational excellence that we have been experiencing here since before I was born. I've been aware of some of the facts about that situation in the past but I was recently horrified to learn that even the SATs and a huge percentage of college courses have been dumbed down since I took the SATs back in the 1980s.
Our SATs are tests that many students who want to go on to college or university have to take depending on which schools they are applying to. There are other similar tests that some schools ask for. The acronym stands for Scholastic Aptitude Test. And people also sometimes refer to them as "the college boards". Here if a student wants to go on to college after twelfth grade, they have to contact the schools they are considering attending and find out about the requirements for admission. Then if they still want to try to get in, they fill out an application and send it in along with all other requirements, such as official scores from the SAT or some other test. Then they wait to hear if they get accepted. Some schools will take nearly anyone no matter how poor of a student and some are extremely tough to gain entrance to.
I know what you mean about the environment in the schools, that certainly had an influence on me during my schooling and in my future ideas about schools in general.
I love the 4th of July. It is a fun holiday for sure. Unfortunately we do have plenty of people here who are into "political correctness" and don't seem to be aware of the problems associated with it or who let it inform their opinions way more than they should. But at least we also still have the other.
Mardi Gras is a holiday associated with the practice of lent, I believe. It seems like most people only celebrate it as a giant wild party or don't celebrate it at all; but I believe it started out as and may still be to some people a thing where they "party hard" before going on a fast or giving something up for lent. I'm not a catholic so those particular religious traditions could probably get a much better explanation from someone else.
Thanksgiving is a national Holiday now and has its roots back in the colonial era when the pilgrims of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had a several days long feast and celebration where they thanked God for the harvest. Although for the first hundred years or more after that there were different times and places that the same thing happened without uniformity, it is now always at the end of November (a good bit after the harvest for some of the states) and is generally celebrated with a feast and Thanks given to God for the food and for good things in life.
About the girl from Montana, maybe next month her family will at least be able to get a turkey and have a regular Thanksgiving the way they would have back home. I wonder if they could mail order just a few items that aren't available in the UK? I know the shipping is outrageous but you can often mail order foreign specialty foods here.
Haha, pizza and wings are a restaurant fad of the last ten or so years here. The "wings" are chicken wings with a spicy sauce on them. In restaurants part of the process of making them includes deep frying, but then that isn't the end of it. I can't imagine that getting them in the grocery store would be the same, but then again how many grocery store convenience foods are ever the same as what they mimic?
They are often called Buffalo wings because of a restaurant in Buffalo, New York that made them. And for some strange reason lots of restaurants offer special deals for ordering pizza and wings at the same time. Well, I guess they are both the kinds of foods that people like for having a movie night or for having friends over to watch sports on the television. I like both things, but I've never actually had them in the same meal.
Now that you see how badly I can go on and on about history and then get told to put more in by DH, you'll be afraid to ask anything about it.
But it is just a great subject to us. I'm glad you see the good in people liking their own country. I think the reasons that people decide we are all supposed to be ashamed of ourselves because of the past are rarely very well thought out and the emotionalism involved certainly prevents people developing a proper understanding of their own history and therefore ironically makes it all the more likely that if they get there way they are dooming the future to repetitions of those same past mistakes they are so upset about. Plus as with many other countries, Britain and America both have a lot of good things to be happy about in their histories along with the rotten things. Plus the British flag is great. I think that would be awesome if it was out in front of people's houses all over your beautiful country. And all the more so if I got to come and see it happen. Patriotism and TRAVEL. How could that be wrong?
I live in a tiny village, which looks typically English. I hear lots of Americans in London though. In WDW, I had quite a few Americans come up to me and say 'I love your accent!'. I felt like saying 'I love yours too!' 
Right now I'm feeling especially lucky because we have a vacation starting in a few days,,, going to Virginia, which is the state I lived in from the time I was born up until I was twelve to share some of the sights there with my daughters. It's an amazingly beautiful state, imo. AND I am planning a trip with my girls and a friend to Prince Edward Island in Canada for next summer.
That's what it's like where I live. We have a lot of houses... Noticably Tudor and Victorian. I love living in such a pretty part of England, considering a lot of cities and towns here are rather ugly. 
Oh and great that your hubby is really enjoying the trip too! Sounds like prospects for a Disney trip are looking more likely! 
I actually ordered the Army man costume from America and had to pay a fortune for postage to the UK. 
Being a bit cheeky though!
