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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • My take is that best case scenario you’d arrive roughly at the same time you left.

    If you have breakfast in London at 8am, then make it to the airport by 8:30, you’re at the gate at 9:30 after one hour of security and controls, and you’ve made it exactly at the time when boarding starts, which usually is 45 minutes before takeoff on most airlines. You take off at 10:15, arrive at 11:45 (which is 6:45 local time), then still have to go through half an hour of border control and getting out of the airport, and then another half an hour to get to the city centre and have a coffee.

    You’d still arrive at about 8:30, but I don’t see the whole ordeal taking any less than 5 hours.

    I routinely take a 1.5 h flight to visit my family and while I’m a fair bit away from the airport, I don’t think I’ve ever managed to get door-to-door in less than 8 hours. 6 if we are measuring departures lounge to arrivals.






  • Agreed. It probably doesn’t help that Britain as a country actively tries to get erased from Europe’s mind, through Brexit, preventing immigration and trade, acting against tourism…

    Probably it’s not the majority of the country anymore that is pro-brexit anymore, but hey ho, we had a vote and this is where we are now. Trying to have the UK as its own little separate entity that doesn’t participate in the world economy or culture.




  • In my opinion as a “foreigner” living in the UK the biggest problem with the British cuisine is marketing.

    You have all the pies which are awesome, steak and ale, kidney pie, Toad in the hole, beef wellington, the Cornish pasties…

    Then cottage and shepherd’s pie which are not in the same category even though they share name, because they’re not bread pies but a “potato mash lasagne”.

    There’s the Sunday roast, and all things game are excellent - this country has a longstanding tradition of game and you often see in pubs things like venison wellington, especially in the countryside.

    Also fish and chips has the reputation of being fast food, but a proper one from a pub rather than a chippie is usually excellent.

    If we think about snacks, there’s many really nice things typical from the UK, that we routinely dismiss because we don’t think of a homemade version but what you can get from a supermarket. Sausage rolls, scotch eggs, things like that.

    And desserts - this country has a sweet tooth. Trifles, anything with rhubarb in it (rhubarb is quite rare in Mediterranean countries), sticky toffee pudding, Eton mess, rice pudding, crumble…

    I have missed many things like the ploughman’s, all of the cheeses, or the haggis which is hated almost exclusively by people who’ve never tried it before.

    Yet all of this gets routinely reduced to “fish and chips”. It’s like saying Italian cuisine is only pasta or all Spanish can make is paella. I find quite sad that Brits don’t do a better job at marketing their cuisine.





  • I don’t think anything with the word “intel” can be taken seriously in value comparisons…

    When I got my last laptop I ended up with a MBP because there were no high end options for Linux laptops with AMD. Now the options are better, but back then, the only realistic alternative to a MacBook Pro would have had a third of the real-world battery life if not less, even if I decided to spend £3k. That didn’t seem like an acceptable compromise so there were virtually no laptops in existence that could compete with an M2 MBP.