Yeah, try taking a 7 and a 10 year old around a games convention and see how relaxed you feel at the end of it…
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Things that struck me on visiting the UK:
Toilet seats are cold.
Toilets being in the same room as baths is still weird.
Shower cubicles feel cramped.
Pedestrian walk/don’t walk signs are often on the same side of the road as you, such that you have to look 90 degrees to the right, in the same direction as oncoming traffic.
The “walk” period is like, 3 seconds. Blink and you’ll miss it.
Lots of places no longer accept cash.
E-scooters to get around are cool, assuming you have a UK driving licence.
Charity shops still outnumber for-profit second-hand shops, most of which sell only books.
Food diversity seems to have improved and is now good, and surprisingly good eating can be found in unexpected places, but the baseline for quality is still low (you can pay a lot for what I consider below-average food, and the cheap tier of supermarket food can be truly awful).
Lots of people sleeping rough, lots of boarded-up shop-fronts.
Fairground rides are way faster and more violent, mostly pitched at somewhat older riders.
Lack of air conditioning made the hot summer weather kind of unpleasant at times, but interior spaces were still cold in the morning even without air conditioning.
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May I add a question:
Still freezing cold and boiling hot taps separate? Or in the last six years have they started installing more mixed taps?
EDIT: for our American friends tap=faucet
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Still some separate taps in the old houses we stayed in.
I was pleased that nowhere “ran out” of hot water this visit.
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Oh, there’s more:
The procedure for buying a house is insane (my brother was approaching the final steps in the process, my mum had recently had a sale+purchase fall through at the last hurdle. Both of them had sunk thousands of pounds into it by that point, with no guarantee of purchase).
Traditional banking is dead. The UK debit card I needed had been intercepted when my brother tried to send it to Japan prior to my visit and returned to my “home branch”. When I tried to pick it up from my home branch, I found it was now a tapas restaurant. When I tried to get my registered address changed at a different branch, I was turned away at the counter by a woman who told me it wasn’t what the counter was for, it would take her more than 5 minutes to do it, and she wouldn’t do it because of the queue of people behind me. So I went to the only other staff member in the building, who put me on a waiting list and told me they probably wouldn’t get to me within 90 minutes. I realised why that number was significant when I returned 90 minutes later to find the branch closed.
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Very much so. I know a couple from Wales that had their buyer pulling off the day before they were supposed to fly to NZ (to move for good, and complete the sale). Then Brexit hit, then COVID, with a result of not having sold the house by late 2022 and having to rent for nearly 5 years (with the aggravation of inflation of NZ prices while UK were dead).
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Yeah, it’s shocking at times.
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Same here. Except us. We now have a fancy Japanese style toilet after the renovations… and I am not giving it back 
But it is in the bathroom.
What are showers like in Japan? Now I am curious.
We don’t have a cubicle anymore, we have walls on two sides, a ~1.2m wall on the third side and an open front to our shower because the glass cubicles do feel cramped but this was from ideas the architect had…
We still like cash over here. Though there seems to be a real campaign to get everywhere to finally accept cashless payments. I have never encountered a place that didn’t take cash.
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This is ours, which is fairly typical. The whole room drains into the middle of the floor. It’s pretty roomy - wider than the bath is long. We once had a guest who thought she had to stand in the bath to shower, which must have been awkward.
Other features that might look a bit odd:
You can see the drying pole and just out of shot is the ceiling heater/air circulation used for drying stuff that can’t be tumble dried when it’s raining, and preheating the room during winter. Also the lid that can be put over the bath to retain heat (as multiple family members use the same bath water).
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Your toilet seats are warm? Ooh no, I wouldn’t like that at all.
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Most people have modern(ish) boilers now, so the old-school hot water tanks have largely disappeared, which is probably no bad thing. But airing cupboards have of course vanished with them, which is a shame.
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There’s a big range between a cold toilet seat and a warm one, and we can select whatever we like within that range. Of course no-one usually wants a toilet seat that is warmer than your bum - that would be unpleasant. The exception might be in mid-winter if you are feeling very cold.
In contrast, I nearly jumped up the first time I sat on a cold ceramic(?) toilet seat in many years - the least I’d expect is a material with reasonable insulation properties, one that doesn’t feel like it’s sucking your body heat out.
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I suppose you get used to it, but to me it would just feel like someone else had recently been sitting on it.
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The cheap Euro supermarkets (Lidl, Aldi) aren’t that bad generally. I’ve found Asda’s cheap stuff to be truly awful.
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We ate very little supermarket food tbh, as I wanted my daughter to have the best impression possible. We got off to a bad start though, with the Margherita pizza my mum had bought in advance from Tescos - the cheese was tasteless, the tomato was tasteless, the basil was tasteless, and the base was tasteless and dry. Actually surprising, just how bad it was.
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Conceptually it’s meant to be “start walking”, while the flashing mode is “keep walking if you’ve started, but don’t start now”. (Presumably red is “panic and freeze in place”.)
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I don’t think there was a flashing period, that was part of what struck me as weird. But also because of the placement off to one side and behind me after I set off, I suppose I might not have noticed if there had been.
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I only bring a bit of cash in case I need an emergency kebab. Even the Chinese place local to me does card
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Same here, but the difference is that here everywhere also accepts cash. The number of places simply refusing cash as an option was what surprised me (especially since my UK bank debit card was tied up in bureaucratic red tape).
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My elderly parents are furious at places that only take card not cash, and let them know that they’ve lost this sale because of it and they’ll find a different cake shop to buy cake from.
(The 18 year-old behind the counter doesn’t look as though he’ll persuade the CEO to change the strategic business decision that was made for financial reasons).
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