Snow, burns and reputations

Snow because... I was discussing skiing with some people on a forum and then had "Let it snow" in my head all day. And it's going to snow again on Thursday - yay!

I burnt myself on my oven today... twice... again. Admittedly only one of them hurts but it hurts quite a bit. I have one of those ovens in a box like a microwave. Which is the daftest thing. I would rather have a smaller room than that oven. Because, from what I gather, Rotterdam is big on apartment living. But often the kitchens I've seen have been small, no more than "galley kitchens". A colleague of mine doesn't even have an oven. What he cooks chips in I don't know... ;) But, thinking about this more as I go along, I guess it must be a product of their culture in some ways. In britain the hearth was very much a focal point of the home and food is a big thing in Britain so kitchens have stayed fairly big. But in Holland maybe they don't have the same kind of history that attaches them to their kitchen so much. It's a shame. I love cooking and I love my familys' big kitchens with a dining table in so we all hang out and talk and stuff. And it's something I definitely want to have in my house, a really big kitchen where there can be food making and eating and entertaining and kids can do their home work. Really keep the kitchen as the centre of my home.

Plus then I'll have an eight hob four door beast of an oven and won't burn myself all over my hands while trying to take cauliflower cheese out of the fricking thing.

Reputations then. I was telling my friend how I thought that everyone should live in Holland for a couple of months, proper living there - not in hotels. Because then all the people who loved it could stay and it would give everyone else an appreciation of how wonderful Britain is. He said it's probably a "Grass is always greener" situation and he might be right to a certain extent. I still think this is more than that though. Well, maybe I'm loving Britain a *little* bit more than is justifiable and perhaps I'm propping it up on a pedestal. Regardless. Holland is not for me.

So my friend says that England sucks (he's welsh) and I asked him why he thought that it was just England that sucked and he said the Wales rocks and it was England that was letting the side down. He said it had a bad reputation. For a whole bunch of things. Which I thought was unfair. OK so it has a bad rep for the big things like "being America's lap dog" - which was Britain not England FYI Mr. Welshie - but there are lots of good things about England (and Britain) and those are the things that I think sit in other people's subconcious.

The cities, the beauty (which he also contested), tea, scones, marmalade, rowing, hills, Cricket (even when we suck) Harry Potter! But these are things, I think, that are conjured to mind when people mention England. They might be wrong - not everywhere is beautiful, not all the cities are cool - but they are there.

Let's do some other countries shall we?

France:
Bad Reputation: poncy snobby elitists
Actual subconcious things that spring to mind: cheese, wine, healthy, Paris, mediterranean summers.

America:
Bad Reputation: George Bush (it's going to take a while to get that stain out I'm afraid)
Subconcious things: Liberty, space, diversity, snow (just me), Starbucks

Not to mention all the other things that an individual might think of :-

People: Stephen Hawking, The Beatles, Voltaire, Daguerre, Nicholas Flamel, Martin Luther King, George Washington
Places: London but also Southwold or Great Yarmouth, Paris, Carcassonne, Toulouse, Washington, Salem, Forks WA (Read Twilight ;) )
Things: Wellingtons, stamps, pasteurisation, the metric system, the light bulb and sticky tape apparently - Go Team USA!
Food: fish and chips, sandwiches, cheese, raw steak, chocolate chip cookies

So you see - despite some major bad reputations - it really is the little things that matter.

Good night.