Domestic Bliss

I thought I would lump together some of the observations I had of domestic life in Scotland. Since everyone speaks English and there are so many American fast food places, one could sit in Starbucks and forget you are in a different country completely. The main places to experience culture shock is in the grocery store. How can “real American hot dogs” come in a pickle jar? How in the world do they call it Mexican food or even label something spicy when I can hardly taste any black pepper let alone a chill pepper? These are a few of the surprises.

The main difference I noticed in grocery shopping is that I have to plan on carrying everything home. This limits most everyone to a hand held basket instead of our American sea of buggies or carts. This is also convenient since the isles and the store in general are quite small. This then gets to my next point. The choices of products are very limited. I do not mean that you do not have a choice of brand which is similar to the US, but that if you want pineapple it better be in season. Your choice of meat or produce will change regularly and if you are wanting to make a particular recipe, then it ought to have a limited ingredient list that is not to specialized. In general they have everything you may need if your cooking from scratch, but things like Ranch dressing and slightly unusual spices like lemon pepper seem completely gone. Some items are the same as in the US but just named differently, such as dish soap is called washing up liquid. Somethings are in one grocery store and not in another, such certain brands of potato chips (which they call crisps).

I also experience this sort of variance in shopping for home do-dads. For instance, many store have shelves of kitchen gadgets, but only one had ice trays. The department store where I was told were reasonably price were over ten times as much as the dollar store style stores. There is variance in the US, but not that much! To prove my point, Jenners, a large department store, sold duvet covers (pillow cases for the comforters) for 80 pounds while the Pound Stretcher sold duvet covers for 8 pounds.

Now why do I need a duvet cover? Here in Scotland, they don't use top sheets. You make a bed with a fitted sheet, a duvet or comforter, and a duvet cover. Nothing is tucked in or folded. It does shorted the time to make the bed to just straighting the duvet. I really like it.

While we are talking about the home, I should mention that there is a switch on everything! Every outlet has a switch and even the outlets for major appliances. I cannot say how many times I put something on the stove to find out ten minutes later I had never turned on the switch to power it. I also made the mistake of turning off the switch to the refrigerator and ended up with a puddle around it. Luckily, we had not bought much groceries yet. This switch fetish apparently derives from the super high electric bills. I have not received ours yet, but people are obsessed here about saving power. Many homes do not even have a dryer. People just hang their cloth in front of the heater.

We are still trying to figure out our heaters. There is an electric space heater in every room and no central thermostat. Kerry had I have to figure out which of the three awkwardly labeled knobs, a switch, a timer, and and two outlet switches to adjust the temperature. We then have to decide which of the heaters to actually adjust to begin with.

So back to cooking, the stove has two compartment where we usually just have a oven in the US. One is the oven and one is a grill. The tiny stove has done well so far, when I turn it on and when I remember it is labeled in Celsius. Luckily, we have not had any fire alarms go off. That would be too embarrassing.

Of course somehow this leads me to my recent observations about Christmas. Many stores have just put out their Christmas things, but so far the Christmas sections are quite small. They also have these things called crackers which are little wrapped gifts in the shape of tootsie rolls. Two people are supposed to pull each side and it give a little pop. Inside is a small gift and a paper crown. The one who got the largest side wins the gift and the crown in some people's versions and some people just give the gifts to everyone to pop open. These crackers are about as popular as Christmas cards.

Well, these are my observations for now, but I am sure there will be a continuation. So until next time, as they say here, cheers!