England-the NHS, public trasportation and being here for 4 months.

I've been here for 18 Weeks, a little over 4 months. Wow. I still love every minute of it, even when nothing exciting is happening, when I'm just going to class, and band, and grocery shopping, and discussing homework problems with people, I love it.

Public transportation is amazing! its nice to not have to worry about parking a car, and how long its been parked, and if your going to get a parking ticket, you just get on a bus and go wherever your going. It is a pain to carry groceries back on the bus, but once you get used to it, its not too bad. Being able to hop on a train and get anywhere I need to go is pretty fantastic too!

I've been to see an NHS doctor 3 times now, and that is always an adventure, the second time I went was good (I may have just told the doctor what tests to do, but he listened) the third time was very different then it would have been in the US. I went to have blood drawn, in the US they send you to a hospital, where there are these fancy chairs with arm rests, here I had a pillow under my arm and the nurse kneeling on the floor (not too big of a deal, NHS is poor, no fancy chairs, whatever). In the US they clean the skin twice with alcohol and wear gloves. Here they don't sterilise the skin and they don't wear gloves. It's fascinating, all the precautions we take in the States that no other country takes. I was shocked at first when she didn't use alcohol swabs, or wear gloves, I grew up in a society where they are overly clean all the time, I took a phlebotomy class, that taught me why we use alcohol and wear gloves, and stand to draw blood, and now I'm over here and they don't have the same rules. And probably the most shocking of all is that they don't do any of that, and everyone over here is still alive...

When I think of England, I've always thought of it as a place that mostly had the same standards as the US, I've quickly found out that that isn't true. Everything here is different, it truly is a different culture then the US. The standereds here are not higher or lower then the US, just different.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, is made with 'high fructose corn syrup', what you may ask could they possibly use instead? They use sugar, imagine that a non-man made substance in food. I couldn't believe it myself, but they do. look at the ingredients in your Coke, or your cranberry sauce at thanksgiving, check M&M's and maybe even ketchup....high fructose corn syrup in all of it, not here, here they use sugar. There are less preservatives, less added colours, and less sugar in almost everything.

England is a fascinating place to me still, because it so similart to the US and yet so different at the same time.