LaughAtlantis

Stuff that's better in the UK:
* Street signs - clearer, bigger, and occasionally painted on the roads so you're sure to be in the proper lanes
* Chocolate - made with more milk, for creamy goodness
* Rude expressions - Sod off, mate!
* Old things - Castles in the US are of the pink plastic or bouncy variety. Stone ones are much cooler.
* Buses - I want double decker buses here in Boston, I really do.
* Movie scheduling - The theaters provide a time when the previews start, when the movie starts, and when the movie ends. Nice.
* The view from a train - rolling hills, farms, sheep... and (as my husband put it) "no poor people's back gardens!"
* Marks & Spencer - We don't have it here. We should.

Stuff that's better in the US:
* Plumbing - It's newer.
* Showers - They aren't electric. It's very odd to have to flip a switch on a shower that is outside the shower - or outside the ROOM. America also has better water pressure. (See: Plumbing.)
* Movie variiety - We have more multiplexes.
* Continuity - It was very weird, in London, to have Buckingham Palace next to The Gap (figuratively speaking). It's just a really weird amalgam of old and new and stuffy and wild and austere and commercialized.

I liked Scotland a lot better than London. London was congested and commercial and sort of cold... it was like Rome & New York combined, with this strange sense of history and significance surrounded by stores, stores, and more stores. I liked Edinburgh better... the sense of history there isn't as stuffy; it's castles (pillaging!) rather than palaces (being all courtly and that) and the city just integrates itself better. It's got gorgeous architecture and you just sort of walk around appreciating that, while also soaking up the fact that it's a cool city. In London, the Planet Hollywood and TGIFridays made it tougher for me to soak up the feel of the place.

So, in a nutshell... Scotland, wonderful; London, eh; Marks & Spencer's, huge thumbs up; American plumbing, BIG yay.