In the summer of 1990 my parents took my brothers and me on our last grand family vacation, and made it the grandest of all. We went by airplane — which was still, believe it or not, a big deal for us in itself — to London, England, and spent some two weeks “overseas,” first in Wales and then in Europe, where we took a wandering tour almost entirely by train through Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and France.

Traveling always offers the opportunity for chaos and mayhem, and my family is especially inclined in that direction. Fortunately we share enough of a laid-back good-nature that we can stumble through such things without getting or going too mad. But I remember clearly coming to the dining room of the bed-and-breakfast where my brothers and I spent our first night, having left London almost immediately, headed for Wales.

(“Where did your parents spend the night?” the attentive reader asks. At another bed-and-breakfast down the road. The landlady at the first one had unintentionally double-booked my parents’ room to guests who had arrived before us. I was still outside in the rented car when this was discovered, so I missed this part. But my parents still tell the story. “Picture us: we’ve just managed to make two long flights in a row, arrived in a foreign country, and immediately embarked on a drive through the gantlet of a major city, an unfamiliar road system, in a rented car, in a country where all the traffic rules relating to left and right are backwards to what we’re used to. We make it to our first overnight stop without injury, without having lost anything or anyone, triumphant but haggard. And we go in to check in, and when we announce ourselves this poor woman, the landlady, went down on her knees and begged our forgivenessfor having given our room to someone else!” A very surreal scene, and just the last one of the day demonstrating that, despite ostensibly speaking the same language natively, we were in a very different place.)

I was still getting used to the continuous, mild shock of the ways in which the area we were visiting was like and unlike what I was familiar with in the United States. Most of them were subtle, but even the subtle ones accumulated to great effect. The exit signs at Heathrow read “Way Out” and the yield signs on the roads read “Give Way.” I placed an order at an open air fish-and-chips shop and was asked — at great speed — “sit in down o taken away?” instead of the more familiar (and less cumbersome) “fur hearer to go?”

The breakfast that first morning continued the theme. Scrambled eggs and sausages were nothing out of our ordinary, though they were (of course) much better eggs and sausages than are typical in the US. (We’ve all heard that story, I won’t belabor it.) But on the plate with them were baked beans and a half-tomato, grilled.

If it had just been the tomato, I probably wouldn’t have given the menu any thought. But baked beans! For breakfast! I don’t mean to make myself sound parochial, or to suggest that I’ve become very much wiser or knowledgeable in the time since. I have habits and biases and preferences and expectations just like anyone else. But well before I experienced a little first-hand, I knew that habits and customs vary over the face of the earth in ways that can be merely surprising to a displaced observer, or delightful, or frightening, or abhorrent. And I knew that I might encounter some of that by going to Europe, though I knew any of it would likely be mild compared to experiences I might have in other parts of the world, just because of the historical relatedness and ongoing communication between my native culture and those of Europe.

No, it was the juxtaposition of the familiar with… the familiar. I recognized everything on the plate, but one of them was quite clearly “doin its own thing,” as the saying is on Sesame Street — at least by by my standards. I had yet to encounter mashed peas, or the jarring uses the British sometimes have for maize-corn.

Anyway, there were other people staying at the bed-and-breakfast, obviously, but they were all more or less locals compared to us. They all said good morning as we walked in, some of them having to twist around awkwardly in their seats to face us, and one of them either asked us where we were from or whether we were Americans.

Upon learning that we were, in unison they wished us a happy Independence Day. In the wild confusion of our journey, and absent all the usual cues, I had completely forgotten. But it was the Fourth of July.

We thanked them and sat down to breakfast. I ate in startled bemusement and considered the various causes. There were the baked beans, of course. And there were the other guests, unconsciously reinforcing the stereotyped politeness sometimes associated with the British. There was the surprise of being reminded by foreigners that it was my holiday that day — in many ways the American holiday. And there was the further irony that they were the very foreigners on the other side of the day’s celebration.

The rebellion of the American colonies, their establishment as a separate nation and the period following, are exactly the sort of conflict which can begin bloody and horrific feuds that last as long as anyone identifies with one of the parties and thinks she can identify surviving members of the other. But there I sat at breakfast with my brothers, a mere 214 years later, surrounded by English, congratulating us on our independence.