Cultura Inglesa (Eng)

What is different in British Culture?

Introduction
This study has the objective to describe some very specific cultural aspects about the British Culture. The aspects that will be referred are the Drive Left Law, the Tea, the Routemaster, the Pound Sterling, the Red Telephone Box, the Black Taxis and the Pubs. We have chosen these cultural issues because they have an huge impact on theBritish culture, not only in the museums or history books but also in the quotidian life of the British.
These features have a lot of importance for anyone who tries to make relations with the British, because some of them are like the national flag of their culture. Not knowing anything about this it’s like not knowing nothing about what United Kingdom is.

Drive left law
When we talk aboutdriving by the left side of the road our thinking may go instantaneously to British people and their way of always being different. Yes, it’s true that maybe they have that kind of attitude alongside with their American Brothers from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, but what you may not know it’s that the Human History cover their back in this subject.
In the Middle Ages when travelling thepeople kept to the left for the simple reason that they never knew who they would meet along the road. They wanted to make sure that if a stranger passed on the right they could use their sword in in case of unfriendly meetings. And since most of people are right handed they kept to their left.
And despite the lack of proofs about the rules of the road in the old Greece, Assyria or Rome, there aresome evidences that may suggest how thinks worked back in that time. In some old Roman pits in England, the groove and degradation is higher on the left side of the roads that connect to that pits. This is signal of the heavy and full wagons that travelled to fulfill the population that used to live in those pits. On the other hand the right side of the roads indicate signals of a less degradationwhich it’s explained by the weight of the wagons that coming back empty, destroy less the pavement. Other evidence comes from a roman coin. The image shown in one denarii coin from the years of fifty B.C. to fifty A.D. shows two knights crossing in opposite directions, right shoulder with right shoulder, which means they kept in the left side of the road.
This custom was given official sanctionin 1300 AD, when Pope Boniface VIII invented the modern science of traffic control by declaring that travelers headed to Rome should keep left.
So if this was the custom why the rest of world would later change the normal course?
Well, the response can be found in the late 1700s, when teamsters in the United States and France began transporting farm products in big wagons pulled by several pairsof horses. These Wagons had no driver’s seat. Instead the driver sat on the left rear horse, so he could keep his right arm free to lash the team. Since the driver was sitting on the left, naturally they wanted everybody to pass on the left so they could look down and make sure they kept clear of other’s guy’s wheels. Consequently they kept on the right side of the road. The first know keep-rightlaw in the U.S. was launched in Pennsylvania in 1792, and in the ensuing years many states and Canadian provinces followed as well.
In Europe the keep- right law was established pretty much the same way. However, an added impetus was that, this being the era of the French Revolution, people figured that no pope was going to tell me what to do. Later Napoleon, the leader of the French armyenforced the keep-right rule in all countries by his armies. It’s, though, imperative and curious to know that Napoleon was a left handed person. The custom endured even after the empire was destroyed.
In England, though, they didn’t use the monster wagons that required the driver to ride a horse. Instead the guy sat on a seat mounted on the wagon. They usually sat on the right side of the seat so...