The British Countryside

Yesterday, we drove 4 hours south to Reading, Winnersh, and west London suburbs for customer metings and I did a sales training with our UK sales team today. Beautiful drive through the countryside. Lots of rolling hills, green trees and grass, stone fences, sheep, cows, horses. In many fields there were so many sheep dotting the green pastures that it almost looked like bundles of snow! And there were lots of tiny lambs just lying around enjoying the sun - they really were cute! It was absolutely picturesque.

The weather was beautiful the last 2 days - probably 70 degrees. We had a nice dinner of Indian food and pints of warm beer with the sales team last night. There were guys in town from all over England, Scotland, Ireland, and the Netherlands. Of course I was the lone female but they were all nice. Now I'm back up north in Manchester til Friday. It's interesting to be in a country that does not have a "right to bear arms" in their constitution after the shooting at Virginia Tech yesterday. People here just can't fathom why we allow people to purchase guns legally.

Just a few of the funny British words for the week:

Cheers - the end of every phone call before Bye

Brilliant

Smashing

Loo = toilet

Petrol = gas

Surname = last name

A few pieces of British trivia:

• people quote their weight in "stones" and 1 stone = 14 pounds
• gas (or petrol) is selling for about 1 british pound per liter which is about $8.50/gallon so no more complaining about US gas prices
• they are really serious about speeding here - everywhere you go there are photo radar and cameras that measure your average speed based on how long it takes for you to go a certain distance and mail you speeding tickets
• today the british pound reached an all-time high against the US dollar with 1 pound = $2.01 - I'm sure glad this trip is mostly charged on the company credit card and not mine

I got a ticket to go see the musical Wicked when I'm in London this weekend!