Mind the gap

Life and Society

I mean the cultural one. I moved to the UK two years ago, I've got a really good command of (British) English and I'm pretty knowledgable about history, geography, literature and even politics around here. I can actually understand (and appreciate) a fair part of Private Eye. Though I don't know, or rather I don't want to know, much about football,cricket, fashion in cloths and plastic music, soap operas, reality shows and celebrities. (These topics, with the sole exception of cricket , would act as social filters in my homeland as well. )

However there seems to be a sizable cultural gap between me and British women. And now it seems to me that the better my English becomes, the more I learn about the above or things like the English art of smalltalk, understatements, puns and alike, the wider this gap becomes. Say, some British women can be explicite to a shocking extent. It actually happened to me that (half drunken) women proposed to go to bed with me. This just simply wouldn't happen in the country I was born in (unless they are prostitutes, of course.)
On the other hand, what I would consider a flirty remark can be taken something like a [censored] offense if you are not careful or you're just unlucky.

The bottom line is cross-cultural relationships have even less chance to work out "once and for all". So much for re-inventing the wheel tonight.

P.S.: "Mind the gap" was the most memorable English phrase I remembered back home after I visited London (and the UK) for the first time. Then there was a gap ... of almost twenty years in hearing this ... but the accent and the intonation revived in my ears immediately.

Dec. 08, 2009 (00:13)

Tags: uk

Comments for Mind the gap

( Add Comment )

hun67 Blog This member uses the web version of DateTheUK 04.01.2010, 21:48

Reply to evilferret132

In general I do agree to your remark.

Perhaps I come not from Earth. A world-famous physicist said we're from Mars. (That's a clue.)