Ah, sorry for silence, folks. In addition to just generally being busy and overwhelmed, I had my old laptop - that electronic beast that rules my life - suddenly die on me and spent weeks trying to run all of my life from my tiny travel netbook.
But! Here are a couple scattered thoughts left from my trip to Wales.
Something small, pointless, but ticklish to my language brain, realized while in the UK this time:
The British send each other "post" (not "mail") that's delivered to them by the Royal Mail. In the US we send each other "mail" via the US Postal Service. Why? Could we maybe just switch?
Also, one day, on a narrow path during our week of hiking in Wales, I accidentally bumped into Peter (the only Brit among our group, from Scotland) and he apologized to me.
Folks, that stuff they tell you about the British is actually true!
(This book is apparently quite a fun read on the subject of all those typically British/English things the British/English do, though I haven't read it myself; one of the experiments that the author – a social anthropologist – conducts is that she goes around intentionally bumping into people, just to see how many of the bump-ees she can get to apologize to her, instead of the other way around. My favorite Brit-living travel blogger reviews the book here, which is how I know about it.)
And that (an anecdote of British politeness) segues well into some thoughts about German, er, rudeness, but I'll make that a separate post.
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