I lived in Ipswich, England between 2011 and 2014.

It was an experience that I honestly hated overall, but an experience I'm glad I had and wouldn't trade for the world. Living in a country is VERY different from visiting a country, and spending time as a normal, working/learning non-touristy person in the UK showed me some surprising things. So here I am to gleefully burst the Whovian Angophile bubble. But not really. Okay, a little. But I mostly just wanna give an insider's perspective on the things the BBC might not show you.

1. The accents lose their charm quick.

Real quick.

It got to the point that glottal stops and non-rhotic voicing caused literal headaches in me. I was friends with one or two Americans, and their voices were unhyperbolically like balms to my ears.

We arrived in Boston when we moved back from America, and though the Bahston accent is notoriously obnoxious, the wicked shahp shriek of the non-plussed baggage lady was like music to my ears after the relentless barrage of British.

2. Immigrants find each other.

Seriously, it was weird how many immigrants I knew in Ipswich, which isn't even a particularly large or diverse town. And I don't mean I just found all the other Americans either. I mean across the board, across the globe, anyone who wasn't English seemed to congregate.

I knew South Africans, Chileans, Canadians, Dutch, New Zealanders, Poles, Indians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Spanish... and across the board we all felt the same weird “offness” to British culture that can't quite be put into words. It's kinda like the color and joy got drained from life and pumped into the prices.

3. You get oddly patriotic.

I'm not a gung-ho, gun-ho, bald-eagle-ridin' 'Murican by any means, but living in another country really did make me appreciate the good ol' USA.

Yeah, there's a lot of crap here, but spoiler alert: there's a lot of crap everywhere. No place is perfect; it's just that we become more acutely aware of the problems that OUR particular culture face since we're immersed in them, while we only see the proverbial polished Instagram feeds of other countries/cultures/times.

Most people in England were actually pretty chill with Americans, but we'd occasionally throw shade (mostly in good will), and I became MUCH quicker to defend and fight for American ideals that I would've been before, because I now could see the cultures in perspective, from a more objective outside view, and it really gave context to complaints.

4. They're no classier or better educated than Americans.

Seriously, a lot of people were basically functioning alcoholics, and cursed up a storm something fierce, and really just didn't know anything outside of their little bubble. Basically, the crassness Americans are accused of is just as common there as here. Even their tea drinking was more like necking giant vats of Tesco brand crap while riding the bus to uni than anything particularly civil.

5. It changes your diet.

This wasn't better or worse than America, but it was just odd. Their supermarkets pretty much offer the same things that American stores do (in fact, they literally have Walmart, they just call it ASDA).

It's just that the ratios of cheap-to-expensive are way different than here.

In the US, chicken is generally the poor man's meat; in England it was lamb. They did drink coffee a lot, but it was almost universally instant. Ramen and potatoes were still a poor man's staple, but canned fish replaced microwaveable burritos. Curry was the go-to ethnic food instead of burritos, and for some reason every foreign run grocer was either Halal or Polish. They also LOVED “MacDonalds” (basically THE teenagers' hangout spot) and KFC (though generally didn't know what its acronym meant).

The water was undrinkable, so this weird juice concentrate called “squash” was almost a prerequisite to surviving there, and we also basically lived off this casserole stuff called “pasta bake.”

And yes, the stereotype about bland food is actually pretty accurate.

6. Places close really early.

Like, really really early. Seriously, Ipswich is a decently large town, but it went DEAD at sundown. Except kabab shops. Those stayed open till like 4 AM, but everything else went still as a graveyard around 8 PM.

It is the eeriest thing on earth to stand on the High Street of a very urban setting at around 10 PM and be literally the only soul about, except maybe the indistinct sound of a couple drunk chavs off in the distance some place out of sight. It's ghostly at night in Ipswich, and from what I gathered, that's pretty common in most of the UK.

7. You may not pick up a lot, but you do pick up some strange things.

I still prefer to read clocks in 24 hour time. I still sometimes write the date day/month/year on job applications. I still call it “university” instead of college most of the time. I even say “chav” and “cheeky.” I still gross people out by saying I gotta use the “toilet” instead of the bathroom. I also noticed a strange, inexplicable phenomenon that sometimes, when I was tired, I'd begin to speak in a slurred sort of New Yorkish accent... I think England caused that, but I'm not sure why to be honest.

I didn't pick up too much. It was just weird spatterings here and there of random phrases that stuck.

I mostly did and always will speak like an American, but it did affect my vocabulary somewhat.

8. It's always someone else's fault/responsibility.

I'm not TOO staunchly capitalistic, and can certainly see its downsides, as well as some of the potential upsides of socialism (for example, I got orthodontic work in England that we could never afford in the US)... but lemme tell you, it really does change people's attitude to working. I knew a good number of people who simply preferred to NOT work and live off benefits because they actually made more money that way.

There was an almost universal attitude of “everything's screwy, but I'm not gonna fix it... I'm just gonna whinge and wait for someone in charge to do it.”

There's very little go-to-it-ness or motivation, culturally, and the sense of decay that pervades everything there is directly traceable to the bureaucracy of England's socialism.

9. Life is strange.

That's not England, that's just in general.
But really, I once saw a guy walk down my street at 3 AM dressed in a full suit of plate-mail armor. We once had a weird demonic-looking deer called a muntjac get his head stuck in our gate, and he kept screaming what sounded like “ERIC!” in a highpitched voice. There was a stabbing near my friend's house. I once got locked into a closed park at night and had to climb a fence into a graveyard to escape. I had a random drunk girl I'd never met before proceed to curse me out for simply being American. I had to clean up vomit while running a sample stand in a supermarket. I met a guy who was the epitome of a British Barney Stinson, and a Dutch girl at a party who got so drunk she forgot how to speak English... then forgot how to walk.

Basically, I knew a TON of awesome people there and had a ton of awesome things happen, and it really did grow me as a person and turn me into an adult, but there were also a ton of downsides, and I would never want to live there again. I'm an American through and through, and I'm glad to be home.

I may visit the weird world of England again someday, and in fact, I really hope I do... to pub-hop, go shopping, annoy the Buckingham guards, ride the Eye, see castles, and do all that touristy jazz...

but the biggest thing that living in England has taught me is that life isn't magical, and it isn't defined by your surroundings; it's defined by your attitude.

So if you hate America and aren't satisfied with where you are right now, moving to Wholand or Canada or 'Stralia or Nippon or anywhere else won't fix that.

So find the beauty and the joy in where you are, appreciate what you have, and fight to improve it instead of pining for where the grass may be greener, but the sky is also grayer.