Tuesday 26 December 2006

Huge plugs

Can someone hint me why in the UK we need plugs at least twice as big as those in continental Europe?. Yeah, I know, there is a fuse in them that adds safety. But then the question is, why they do not need the fuse on the continent?.

No switches or plugs in bathrooms.

Everyone who has visited the UK will remember the first time they entered a bathroom and could not find the light switched. Some of us spent quite some time feeling a bit embarrassed looking for the bloody switched and thinking: "come on, I cannot be such a dumb, it has to be somewhere". Well, it wasn't anywhere, was it!. They are outside the bathroom. The reason comes from the very early times of electricity in houses about a hundred years ago. At that time, the insulation materials used to protect the cables were not as advanced as now and a bit of humidity was likely to produce a shortcut. Shouldn't the regulations catch up with technology?.

Intro to this blog

The UK is a great country with great people. A wonderful place to be. I would dare say one of the most important cultural centres of the western world. Here, the production of world class theatre, opera, music, literature and scientific research is stunning. However, these noble activities are not everything Brits are up to. Much of the energy they don't spend in the subjects mentioned above they use it in trying to show the rest of the world they are different, specially different from continental Europeans. It is enough to have a look at the newspapers to see that they love contrasting taste, laws, regulations, news, anything with continental Europe. However it is not their laws or taste for food or clothes or not having the euro or driving on the left that makes them different. The difference is somewhere deeper in the cultural roots and can be appreciated in the way they have to understand what surrounds them. This difference is reflected on almost everything from common sense to written laws resulting in situations and regulations difficult to understand to the newcomer or traveller to whom they will look absurd. It is the aim of this blog to bring out some of these "absurdities" and comment them. On each of them there will be many different points of view, all of them valid and at the end what looked absurd might look clear as water... or may be not.

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