The US still has mail on saturdays. Canada dropped saturday mail decades ago. In Canada it can take a week for a piece of post mailed from an address in Toronto to reach another address in Toronto. It recently took five weeks for an air mail envelop (light - contained a scarf a cousin had knitted for christmas) to arrive from california to the UK. "Typical" was the only reply.
In the UK, you can order a parcel from Scotland on Monday, and it will be with you in England by tea time on Tuesday.
To a Canadian, such postal service is just this side of miraculous; it's this kind of service that makes internet shopping something equally magical: order something from electronic scales to sneakers at a UK internet shop and it's there the next day - two days at the most - and at a savings from buying "on the high street." And there it is: brought right to your door. For those who are not keen on the hurly burly of heading into stores (the get in and get out types) this kind of shopping service is heaven sent.
And really, in the UK, there is an online store for everything. A colleague was telling me about a place that just sold hassocks. Another, that i wrote about earlier, just does light bulbs.
I thought perhaps this kind of internet service was a global phenom. It isn't.
i wanted to get a pal in the US a gift, so was looking to order something from a US online shop to be delivered to him - in the US: it would take 3-5 days to process the order and then another week for delivery of the goods. A ten day to two week process. The business processing the order was one part of the hold up; speed of the post is another.
Now maybe it's just that the UK has hit the sweet spot between geography and population density, such that it can move mail with such alacrity. After all despite Canada's land mass is three times the size of the US (the UK would likely fit inside the province of Alberta) it has a low population (about 33mil) compared to either the US (295mil) or the UK (60mil). Too few people to form a chain to pass the mail from one end of the country to the other?? And in the US? Just too many places for mail to get to, to be delivered efficiently? Dunno.
There's a lot of problems with services in the UK, as there seem to be in any country. Ask someone about trying to get an NHS dentist in the UK; where the concept of a semi-private room in a hospital is a complete non-starter (wards - just multibed wards here. does canada have wards in hospitals outside of Intensive Care Units?).
But when it comes to the mail, and what an efficient mail service enables for local trade, it seems quite untouched. I don't know what the rest of Europe is like, but compared to North America, the Royal Mail is a wonder.
In the US, there is a legal definition for a bedroom (must be for house selling purposes): it's a room with both a window and a closet.
In the UK, bedrooms - any rooms, even in new houses, do not have built in closets as part of the layout of the room. Tho many home-depot like shops will sell do-it-yourself build in cupboard solutions, these kinds of things are not part of the architectural imagination. C.S. Lewis Wardrobes, sans lion and witch, are still the norm.
What is equally distinct between North America and the UK, it seems, beyond ideas of what constitutes a bedroom, is the notion of the bed itself. Bed sizes are different. There is, for instance, no notion of a Queen size in the UK, whereas Kings are shorter in the UK than their NA equivalents. Box springs are rare: the mattress goes direct onto a platform (North Americans are most familiar with this approach when shopping for beds at IKEA).
These differences in size and support are as nothing to the myth perpetrated by hoteliers that two twin beds squished together can be advertized as a "king" bed in a room.
While not restricted to the UK, the UK must be the biggest perpetrator of this hotel slight of hand. A room advertised with a king size bed invariably means "two twins pushed together"
Word to the business traveler: if you're given the choice between a room with a double bed and a king, take the double. If traveling accompanied, even your partner will be grateful: that split in the middle where the twins come together to approximate a king, as you can guess, becomes experienced throughout the night as an increasingly vast chasm.
How did this bait and switch start? or does every native EU resident just understand that King at a hotel means squished twins, and it's just the naive north americans who take a King to mean a single unified mattress surface of king proportions?
The confusion is not mine alone: check out trip advisor for say any Radisson Edwardian in London, and look at the complaints about the faux king experience. Bottom line, it's just not comfortable. I was pleasantly shocked last summer when i had a gig in London requiring an overnight, where the hotel screwed up a room, and ended in bumping the accommodation up to their suite. It had an actual king in it. wow. the real thing: a vastness where you have to go on an expedition to get from one side to the other.
An advertised Kind that was a King. how odd.
In north america hotel travel, you may not get breakfast included with the room rate (uncivilized to be sure), but a bed is a bed and a king is a king and never the twins shall meet.
Sometimes business travel is like a long walk down a long, boring public hallway. It's better than the alternative - not to travel, not to connect with the people at one end of the hallway or another - but still the sojurn takes place in a pretty dull hallway.
I've just done a trip from london to frankfurt, return, where the gig was at the hotel connected to the airport. That epitomizes the hallway trip: get boarding card from machine, walk down hall, prepare for new "please remove your computer from your bag" step at security (north america has been doing this maneuver for years. alas, it's made its way across the water. why? how have machines changed in the past three weeks that computers now need to come out of bags rather than be left in, but that's another sidebar), then walk on, then sit down, possibly plug in, jack in, use computer for email for a bit; pack up, queue up, board, load luggage into overhead bin, sit. sit sit sit. eat. p. sit sit. "Please wait for the plane to come to a complete stop and the captain to turn off the seat belt sign." Get up, unbin bag, walk walk walk. In this case, the walk lead right to the overpass for the hotel. Consequently, there has been no sense of location shift (or fresh air). Yes, the languages one hears around one are slightly shifted at the different ends of the hall, but then one hears multiple voices in any airport.
No, the only real sign that you're not in kansas, of for that matter canada or even the UK itself anymore is not the language; it's the second hand smoke.
After hours of recycled air, the first inhalation off the plane is - second hand smoke. This is an experience of which most north americans have lost the memory. Not so in europe. Whereas in the UK, smoking is largely contained at airports in semi-enclosed plexiglass cells, in other EU country airports, the "no smoking" area signs are frequently, tacitly ignored. Beyond the airport, in the hotel, the aroma of tobacco products - mainly cigarettes - is pervasive. Rather than a few places being designated "smoking" areas, few places are designated as non-smoking.
Are the stats on the numbers of smokers different in the EU than in the UK or in North America? Or is smoking just less suppressed in the EU? According to the EU's Europe Against Cancer programme report of 2003:
Of the six World Health Organisation (WHO) regions, Europe has the highest per capita consumption of manufactured cigarettes and faces an immediate and major challenge in meeting the WHO target for a minimum of 80% of the population to be non-smoking.
The same report also indicates that 30% of all cancer is related to smoking. Despite its own programme, the EU, in a 2004 statement, said that it will not implement a plan for an EU community-wide ban.
The interesting thing is, i see from stats on the web, as i wait for boarding down at the other end of the hallway, studies are also showing that in places where there are smoking bans, health levels improve quickly. Even local air quality improves.
So what's going on? Why is the EU the highest cigarette consumer when the evidence so clearly shows the benefits - financially to the cost of health provision as well as physically in terms of health and mortality rates - of (a) not smoking and (b) smoking bans to encourage folks to quit?
What does smoking mean, then? why are bans in some countries and not others? beyond the addiction, what's the cultural signifiers?
Hope they'll show "thank you for smoking" as an onboard movie soon.