Colourful Accents
If people in England speak English, I’m not sure what language I speak. In London, two neighbors can speak with completely different accents. I knew to expect some variations in the vocabulary as well (petrol for gasoline, trousers for pants) but even those can change depending on who you talk to. Some people talked in Fahrenheit and feet, others in Celsius and meters. I am having a language identity crisis.
As soon as I started exploring the city on foot, I felt like I was walking through a Hugh Grant movie. A British accent makes the speaker sound so civilized and proper. If someone blatantly insulted me on the street, I would probably think they were narrating a documentary. Even tiny children seem like brilliant academics when they speak in their accents. Except when they are whining. Then the accent makes it even more obnoxious.
One thing I have noticed is that they love terrible smooth jazz here. Whether it’s the guy playing his saxophone in the subway, or the music in the elevator, it is just awful. We took one of the big red tour buses on our first day, and between brief descriptions of the landmarks, they played a loop of smooth jazz. It was worse than having “It’s a Small World After All” stuck in your head. We also saw some of the Greenwich Beer and Jazz Festival, which I think they should rename “Let’s get drunk while customer service puts us on hold.”
In conclusion, if a British musician offered to play jazz for me, I would tell him to talk about nature for an hour instead.
