Liverpool
1) I can read all the advertising messages around me.
2) I can speak idiomatically to people in shops and express complex meanings.
3) I can actually understand what people in shops shooting the breeze are saying to each other.
3a) This is only true about half the time—walking around I often fall into the now-familiar feeling that I’m surrounded by a steady murmur of a foreign language, until I remember that what people speak here is ostensibly English and with some concentration I should be able to make it out.
4) It’s easier than I thought it would be to slip back into science mode, although I can feel that background stress field I usually walk around in coming right back with it. Food for thought.
5) The 20p coin is heptagonal. I had forgotten.
