I think I'll finish my thoughts on Japan tomorrow because I realize I probably should have started with the U.K. if I want to maintain any semblance of chronological order. So, on to our second island, proud and alone - the United Kingdom!

I knew the UK made a distinction between itself and Europe. After all, they speak of "taking a vacation on the Continent" and such. I didn't quite realize how profound it was till I went to Scotland and ate dinner with the family that ran the Bed and Breakfast. It was a lovely place in Paisley, called the Ashtree House, (not to be confused with the place I stayed at in Cashel that had a similar name) with huge comfortable rooms and friendly hosts.

The family that ran it were so nice, in fact, that they invited me to eat dinner with them the night I arrived. We chatted for hours about a wide variety of topics, and one was the way the UK was proud of not being European. As an American, this seemed a little odd to me, because the name "North America" doesn't really mean much beyong the geographical sense. It doesn't have many cultural implications, since (if you follow the North, Central, South division for the Americas) North America has only 3 countries. Each takes up lots of space and so dominates it's area of the world. No need to lump the three together for clarity since alone each is already bigger than all of Europe. OK, Mexico may not be as big as that whole continent of Europe (especially depending on which projection you look at. Never use mercator - so inaccurate for land mass size. This, however, is a digression).

So I would respond quicker to American, but if someone insisted on calling me North American it wouldn't bother me in the slightest. Of course if I was from Hawai'i I might feel differently. They are an archipleago, after all. The Hawai'ians, of course, are thousands of miles from the North American continent, not mere hundreds like the UK and also were never legally annexed into the United States in the first place. Heck, they pretty much have the whole Pacific techtonic plate to themselves. So that is another issue entirely.

The label "European" would intensely bother the British, though, most unlike my response to my continent. After all, there is the English Breakfast (Not to be confused with Irish B. of course) and then there is the Continental Breakfast. There is the Euro and the Pound Sterling, even though the UK is part of the EU. I could go on. The term European has a cultural connotation

What about the countries on the continent? They certainly are just as proud of their individual countries as the citizens of the UK, but the "European" label doesn't bug them like it does the British. Is it because they are not a self-contained island like the UK, and so couldn't get away from "Continent" status? It's more than that though, because (not on this trip, true, but on my European backpacking expedtion of 1998) I visited France, Germany and most of western Europe and the breakfast was fairly consistent everywhere we went - fruit, yogurt, milk, juice and bread. Oh, and cold cereal sometimes. Granted, in France "bread" meant a brioche or croissant (lite, white and fluffy breads), while in Germany it meant denser dark breads. So regional differences did come through, but the basic menu did not change. Yet when we were in England, suddenly fruit and yogurt became the continental option, while a real English breakfast was 5 kinds of meat. Why is that?

We didn't really come to any conclusion around that dinner table in Scotland. They mused that maybe it was because they were isolated from the continent to an extent, but then we disussed the Roman, Viking and Norman conquests and decided that perhaps they did share quite a lot. I told them how most Americans, especially when you are young and learn the continets, lump Britain in with Europe. In fact I just found a song on the Teachers.Net Gazette website (a resource web site for elementary school teachers) that was intended as an aid for learning the names of the continents. It included the lines: "In Europe you'll find England,/Where the queen rules every day". See what I mean! England, and Britain at large, would not appreciate that.

I hadn't seen this particular song at the time, but I did know the spirit behind it, and described that attitude to my Scottish hosts. They thought that was so odd, as if they couldn't see how we would make that mistake. In their minds, they are so obviously NOT Europeans that calling them such would be like mistaking your neighbor for a giraffe. It just doesn't make sense.

At this point one of their kids said (or did this bit happen on the plane? I spoke with a couple of people about this), "So which continent are we on, then? I mean, if you had to choose from one of the seven." And there was a long pause, as they considered. I believe the first response was to say that they weren't part of any continent, much as New Zealand wasn't part of Australia. Then there was a long discussion amongst us all about the definition of continent (do you include the continental shelf?) verses techtonic plate, which goes beyond the traditional seven. After being pressed by the child the native adults in the room conceeded that perhaps they were, technically, Europeans. But only technically, the stressed.

For the record, the UK is well within the Eurasian techtonic plate and doesn't have a continental shelf (defined as the sediment runoff from rivers that makes a sloping sea-floor before the final drop-off to the deep) separate from Europe. The Channel is so narrow that the sediment from the British island merges with that of France. So really the difference is all in the mind. But that is where it counts, so I'm not arguing.