(1 week holiday in the UK, 2 weeks tech transfer at contractor’s plant in Germany)
- The “Tube” does engineering works on the weekends, and not all of the stations can accommodate disabled people or tourists with enormous luggage.
- The reason stuff in Oxford looks like Harry Potter is because a lot of the HP movie scenes were filmed there.
- Speaking of Harry Potter, don’t try going to platform 9/10 at King’s Cross train station because there will be a queue of idiot tourists taking photos of themselves trying to get to platform 9 3/4 (heard this second-hand).
- If you try going through Heathrow Airport in studded jeans, you will set off the metal detectors unlike in the USA and they will make you go through the naked body scanner.
- People who say English food sucks are idiots who didn’t go to the right restaurants or pubs.
- English scones are light-years better than American scones (the hard crumbly things you get at Starbucks). Scones + clotted cream + jam = awesome.
- People in this part of Germany really really like fruit and herbal teas.
- A sausage floating in pea soup for lunch is a thing.
- People can’t figure out what the hell I am – possibly Spanish.
- Designing and building a vaccine production plant requires a staggering amount of experience, organizational skills, engineering, and ingenuity, and huge chunks of stainless steel that look like they belong in a sci-fi movie.
- There seems to be some version of “Please do not flush your pads or tampons and clog the toilet” in every public ladies’ toilet in the world.
- Toilet roll holders in the UK and Germany don’t have spring-loaded axles like in the US and Asia. They have rigid axles and it’s the brackets on the end that swing open.
- If you want to get into the cool glass dome with the spiral ramp on top of the Reichstag, you’d better book tickets in advance.
- Currywurst is not that awesome. It’s basically bratwurst in Japanese curry.