English people are funny!

There was a party last Friday, because one of my new colleagues was already becoming former colleague - he left the company, and wanted to celebrate this. (Btw, another word to my collection of new English words I did not know before: do. It means also party.) Anyway, we went for few drinks etc., you probably have a decent idea of how this works. During this party, I engaged in a terrible argument, in which I've discovered the following:
- parts of Greater Manchester where there is no tram connection to the city centre suck, and are considered inferior;
- people from Liverpool tend to steal things and stab other people;
- I myself am funny person because there is no tram going to the place I live;
- you are allowed to criticize things, and you are allowed to say things as above (...that Liverpool people are thieves, or that people like me are inferior because of no tram) - as long as you do not mean them.

To explain the bad things mentioned above - you can generally say nasty things light-heartedly, but you must not say nasty things if they are actually true. If you want to really criticize something (...you are really unhappy with that thing), you must not say it like this, you must 'wrap' it, present it in a softened, much nicer way. Example: my colleagues could not care less where I live. Therefore they can say that I live in dirty suburb. However, if I don't like some stuff that some people do in the office, I must not say 'you are doing lousy job, and the work product sucks'. I must say something like 'have you considered doing it little bit differently', 'I did not quite understand what you meant here', or something like that. O_o

(To be fair, I have seen funny things on the bus which seem to confirm the 'lousy suburbs' theory. For example, there was a lady who cleaned her teeth... with her jumper! She just grabbed the sleeve of her jumper, and cleaned her teeth. Duuuuh! And other disgusting stuff I do not really want to describe here.)

Apart from this, more funny things happen to me every day.
I am constantly offered milk in the kitchen of our office. Every time I am in the kitchen, making tea (green tea...), and there is someone else, the person is (i) pouring milk in his/her drink, and (ii) offering me milk before putting it back to the fridge. I think that one day I will give up, make a cup of black tea - and then use the milk. But I think that when it comes, I will ask some English people for explanations, and I will make them tell me how to do this properly. It will be fun!

The other day, we had a visit from Asia in our office. The guy came with some little Asian cakes and cookies. Well, I expected them to be more exotic, but nevermind; the funny part was that some of these cookies tasted like pineapple. English people told me that pineapples were pretty exotic. I told them that now it's 21st century, and pineapples are, like, everywhere, maybe even grown in Europe in some greenhouses or whatever. Well, they replied, pineapples were considered exotic in 18th century, and still are, and that's that. Like, seriously? O_o In case you haven't noticed, it's 2015 already!!

The English people also keep correcting everything I write. I mean, I write quite a lot in my job, and these English guys are very obsessive about many things - meaning that they usually say 'I have made few minor stylistic changes', and this means that all my sentences magically disappear and are replaced by their words and sentences. Which makes me kinda depressed, because I've never had problems like this (in particular, no one has ever told me that what I write had been unclear). I am also not that convinced that I would ever write like a native speaker (simply because I am not one, and I cannot change this).

But just to finish this - English people are not the only funny people around. My husband is also very funny sometimes. In particular, I don't quite understand why he struggles so much with local coins. English coins are: 1p (small copper circular coin), 2p (big copper circular coin), 5p (small silver circular coin), 10p (big silver circular coin), 20p (small silver heptagonal coin), 50p (big silver heptagonal coin), £1 (small and thick yellow coin, quite distinct), £2 (big bi-coloured yellow and silver coin, again quite distinct).
It's not that difficult, is it... but for unknown reason, my husband is absolutely unable to remember the coins, and every times we have to pay anything in any shop, it takes ages, because he has to check every coin value, and decide whether it is suitable for the purpose or not.
(My husband now insists that I add the following information: (i) the coins do not have the value written on them in one easy, big number, they rather have just text (quite small to be fair) that informs you that this one is 'one penny', 'fifty pence' etc.; (ii) it's not that the bigger the coin, the higher the value, and the sizes vary: 5p (the smallest) -> 1p -> 20p -> £1 -> 10p -> 2p -> 50p -> £2 (the biggest).)
And the funniest part is that every time I lose my temper and just pick the right coins from his hand straight away, he accuses me of being English person!