I love the geordie accent and dialect. It's one of my favourites. It's held out much longer than most of the other Northern accents against the homogenisation of language.

If you move from Lancashire to Yorkshire the two accents find a place to meet and merge into one another. Same if you take most northern accents down south. My geordie mate has been living in Yorkshire for over 20 years and spent time living in the Midlands and the South before that. He still sounds distincly geordie, despite attempting to tone it down to be understood. When he gets drunk he slips into full on Tyneside, some of which I understand...

E-Business and Information Systems. So basically very easy classes and a bullshit dissertation. Yay... I couldn't get into their Software Engineering Program -- the same program I got into at Durham, but didn't accept.

Okay. I've been here for just shy of three weeks. I'm fairly well settled in.

Is it possible to have culture shock in my case? It doesn't seem likely, but I can't figure out what's wrong with me. I feel way off.

Lot of stuff to get used to in three weeks, up to and including a change of water supply. It may just be you're adjusting to lots of different, small, environmental changes.

Or, it's a little bit of culture shock:P

What do you mean by way off?

you think they don't have toothpaste in England?

There are a few little things that bug me here. For instance, everything comes with chips or mash. And then on chain restaurant menus they tend to use chips and fries interchangeably (Nando's for instance. The place sucks, I'll never go back.).

I've finally adjusted to crossing the road. It's been a few days since I've nearly been killed by speeding vehicles.

There's a postal strike on this week, which is annoying. I can't remember a postal strike in the US.

I want peanut butter that doesn't look (and taste) like mustard. I want maple syrup. Period. I want a can of Barbasol, and I only want to pay $0.99 for it.

I want to be able to say cheers without sounding like an asshole.

I could go on for a long time like this. . .

The funny thing is that I really, really like it here. There's just a bunch of niggling little things that are hard to let go of.

Of COURSE you can be suffering from culture shock! George Bernard Shaw (renowned British playwright) said that the UK and the USA were two nations divided by the notion that they shared a language. What is the difference between "chips" and "fries" - I thought they were the same thing? Get stuff you want posted to you (it'll turn up when the postal strike ends ...) however humble it seems.
The advice I'd give you is to make sure you travel widely from your new, but temporary, base. I'm still kicking myself for the trips I never found time for when I live in Moscow for two-and-a-half years. Let me know when Scotland figures in your plans ...

Peanut butter tastes like mustard? It always tasted very sweet to me. You can buy maple syrup, just go to a reasonably large supermarket and ask someone. If the supermarkets aren't stocking it you should be able to find it at a delicatessen. I have no idea what Barbasol is :P

Perry, try their pop. It tastes much better than pop here, because it is made with sugar instead of HFCS. (If you are a pop drinker.)

chips are different from fries in the States. Maybe you call them crisps?

What you call chips, we call crisps. Chips are a little like fries, but they are just potatos cut into long pieces and deep fried. Fries are very thin and usually made from formed potato rather than just chopping up a potato.

But....Ovenchips, are actually fries, not chips....because they are made from formed potato (usually) and are usually thinner (unless they claim to be steakcut chips).

you say potato, I say potato.

wait, that didn't come out right . . .

Thank you for the definition. I had made the assumption that in the UK 'chips' meant what 'fries' means in the US. Good to know that in the UK 'chips' and 'fries' are two similar, but different foods.

Barbasol is a brand shaving foam.

I haven't actually tried the peanut butter here. But I hear it's pretty disgusting/different than I'm used to. I got a jar of the good stuff from home yesterday. My girlfriend and I killed half of it for breakfast this morning.

Yup. Even their diet soda tastes better. Diet Coke in the UK is better than Diet Coke in the US, but Coke Light from continental Europe blows both out of the water.

The funny thing is that there's this little Cantonese restaurant in Friars that has French, Czech, and German bottled soda.