1. The English and Us
Talking to strangers at a party can really open your eyes.
So this past weekend one of my homestay brothers celebrated his 24th
birthday by inviting around 25 friends over for a party. He was a true gentleman and
invited me to come with some of my friends. So, I brought two other students with
me and upon our arrival Ben, the brother, literally introduced us to all of his party
guests. Two or three of them seemed genuinely interested to talk to the ‘Americans’
(real life, that’s what they refer to us as). This conversation continued through the
whole evening and opened my eyes to a variety of very interesting things.
The one, Luke, was a med student here in London. He asked about our
studies and what we want to do. Naturally, the subject of money and how much our
degree will cost us came up. Luke talked about a girl from America who was in some
of his classes here and was telling us how more she would have to pay if she went to
school back home. Here, if you are a citizen and go to medical school you will pay
less than $50,000! Are you kidding me!?!?! For medical school!?!?! This includes
undergrad and graduate and housing! Luke also said that the American in his classes
does have to pay a little bit more for some type of foreign student charges, but she’s
still paying way less than she would in the states. I then told him how much we are
paying for our undergrad and he was literally blown away. To be honest, I was too. If
it is so much cheaper to go to school over here, and it holds the same weight as an
American degree, why are we all staying in America and paying so much more for
practically the same thing? This is when the next eye opening remark came up.

2. After I said something along the lines of “wow, I wonder why more
Americans don’t come here for schooling or at least medical school”. Luke’s
response was “probably because most of them don’t even have passports! Ha ha ha
ha” as he looks at his ‘mates’ for a good laugh… My two girlfriends and I all looked at
each other a bit confused. The boys’ noticed, they said they didn’t mean to offend us,
“just most American’s don’t have passports”. We honestly weren’t sure, but I was
intrigued. So, I did some research. The number of American’s who have a valid
passport, according to the State Department statistics issued in 2013, is about 36%
of the population. To put that into perspective for you it means that about 3 out of
every 5 American’s can’t even fly to Canada! Whereas more than 80% of UK citizens
have passports! That’s a pretty big difference, so I understood why Luke and his
friends thought that about Americans. It makes even more sense when you know
that in 1991 only 5.7% of the American population held passports! So, although our
percentage is still fairly low it has drastically increased in the past 22 years.
Needless to say I had a very interesting and eventful night, but I also learned
quite a bit. Every conversation I have with the British I seem to come to some type
of interesting realization about the difference in between the English’s, and by that I
mean the English and us.
Cheers.