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Religion. Northern Ireland is the most
religious part of the UK with more people going regularly to
church/chapel each Sunday than anywhere else. As a result of that we're
only now starting to permit shops to open on Sundays and only for part
of the day even then. If you're reading this, you're
probably wondering why I've not written pages about the "religious
conflict" that's been going on here for over 30 years (some would say
300 years). Well, that's because it's not a religious conflict.
It's a political conflict between those that wish to remain part of the
United Kingdom (ie British) and those that would rather be part of a
United Ireland (ie Irish). Unfortunately, those that want to remain
British are largely Protestant and those that would rather be Irish are
largely Catholic and that alignment of politics and religion has
resulted in the conflict being labelled a religious one when it never
has been in reality. |
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Smallness. Partly because it's a small city the people are quite friendly
and people would normally know their neighbours. I don't know if
it's like that in the countryside in every country but here at
least any news spreads like wildfire, even more so if it's
actually factual news. You might also notice that people here can
be quite nosey, particularly in the country. |
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American influences... Well everybody uses
credit/debit cards these days: even my Mum! The TV is full of
American programmes, even more so for the satellite channels
though there are also foreign language channels from Europe on
the satellite but then nobody watches them (well except for the x-rated
ones from Scandinavia and the nude chat shows from Italy).
Surprisingly perhaps we only got our first McDonalds a couple of
years ago but the TV dinner has been well entrenched for years.
We drive on the left but I figure that sooner or later Europe
will enforce a switch which should be VERY interesting (they did
it in Sweden about 20 or 30 years ago). Both our electricity (220V)
and TV standard (PAL) are different so the Canadian across the
road has a garage full of useless electrical stuff which she
probably paid a fortune to transport here.
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European influences... Mostly this relates to
stuff that doesn't affect peoples' lives directly as it's at such
a high level eg there's a lot of legislation relating to
takeovers of European companies at the European level. We've not
adopted the 'social chapter' yet but some bits of that creep in
sometimes so that there's a maximum length of the working week
now of 48 hours. There's also bits and pieces relating to human
rights but really that doesn't affect normal people. Once you're
in mainland Europe you don't need a passport to cross most of the
borders but then the immigration people never really bothered
much about passports anyway. You don't need to go through customs
anymore when you're travelling between European countries which
is quite handy. The French keep trying to impose maximum quotas
on the American TV programmes but the UK is ignoring that as we'd
rather have the American programmes because they're much better
than the European (ie non-UK) ones and they do have the distinct
advantage of being in the right language for us too. Consumer
products tend to be produced on a European-wide basis these days
but it's really only noticeable on the multi-lingual packaging
and, of course, in the wider variety of food we've started to get
lately. |
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