Merry Christmas!

Grace and I wish y'all a merry Christmas. We had a quiet day here in Cambridge with some gifts, some pancakes, a walk, some cleaning and some packing. We're off to London tomorrow to see my family, who's coming for over a week. We catch a bus (trains are taking a Christmas break) down bright and early and we won't be back in Cambridge town till the first. We're also swinging by Paris while the family is here.

Anyway, there may not be any updates for awhile. But, unless my camera is stolen or something, there should be some pictures and what have you, when we get back. For now, enjoy this picture of the stockings hung over the heater with care.

Christmas Bonus

I've been working at my current job for two weeks now. I've figured out more about what exactly it does and what exactly I do. It's a company that tracks a person's investments and pensions. Previous to this company, there was no way in the UK for people to view all their different pensions and investments on one venue. Now this company, the first of it's kind in the UK, takes all your information and tracks all your investments and provides a simple website where you can view it all at once and make changes through a single provider. My job is that when people want to join, they fill out an application and I set up their account, and arrange their investment profile. If they send in a cheque (check) to add to their portfolio, I process that too. It's a little depressing to handle other peoples' money, like when someone writes the company a cheque (check) for £500,000 or something. But overall, I feel like I'm doing a good job and that the work is varied and not insignificant.

That being said, there are some elements of working in 'the office' that make me chuckle a bit. Last Monday we had a brief meeting and our immediate boss told us that the higher-ups had decided all of a particular type of application needed to be processed by the end of the week. There were about 60 to do (each one takes between 20-60 minutes to process, depending on complications that may arise in the middle) and they were confident we could do it in excellent time and if we finished them up by this afternoon, they'd go down to Tesco and get us all mince pies!!! {Reward for the desired behavior=Positive reinforcement} So we went back to work and plugged away and by noon, they were almost done (thanks in no part to me, at that point I still had no idea what I was doing) and our boss sent out an email: 'Exellent work everyone, we're almost done! I'm going down to Tesco to buy those mince pies!' She got the mince pies and set them out and it was grand. Around 3PM or so, we get this email that says, 'I looked at the information and it turns out we still have this, this and this to do. We need to do these NOW. Drop anything else you're doing and get these done." Fair enough. Around 4:30, and email that says, 'Guys, we need to finish these up immediately. Either we finish them tomorrow or I'm going to have to take away the mince pies until they're done!' Removal of a reward for unwanted behavior=bad operant conditioning. Never use a mechanism of positive reinforcement as a mechanism of negative reinforcement. That's just a bad manipulation of operant conditioning. See that degree in psychology wasn't entirely useless.

Add to that the fact that no one actually likes mince pies that much anyway. Except me now. I used to hate them, but maybe because it's Christmas, I couldn't stop eating them. They were on my desk the whole time, were never taken away and I think I ate more than anyone else. They really taste like Christmas.

Another silly thing about the office. This is Britain and people drink tea all day long. The office kitchen provides tea, sugar and milk and a hot water machine. Every morning there are 20 or so pint bottles of milk in the fridge and by the end of the day, they're all gone! This is an office of maybe 50 or 60 people, and the English seem to go light on the milk in tea, so that must be at least 3 cups of tea per person every day. And judging by the people around me, that's a good estimate. That much tea is bad for your teeth, bad for your blood iron content, bad for the caffeine and bad because you have to go to the loo so much. Still, I had 2 cups myself yesterday. They've stacked all the Christmas sweets on the edge of my desk because it's centrally located, and I decided if I was going to have a chocolate biscuit, I was going to have a cup of tea with it.

Speaking of slowly becoming British, Matt and I are thinking about possibly staying in England for longer than initially anticipated.

Anyway, the point of this post was to say that even though I've been working at this job for only two weeks, they're giving me a rather large retention bonus to stay with the company until they move to York in March, which I was going to do anyway. I won't say exactly how much the bonus is for and I won't get it until March, but it's enough for a ticket home to Iowa and then some. It's a NICE bonus, and I've never gotten one before. The company has been doing really well, so they can afford to give even temps these kinds of bonuses.

Matt and I are really excited about Christmas and wish all of you a Happy Christmas and New Year. We miss all our friends and family (well, not my family) and the holidays will not be the same without them. But altogether, we are very happy and content with life. We love you all, and we'll be seeing you soon!

Update on Paris Visa

Well, it took all day, a lot of running around, six hours of waiting in queues, a healthy dose of anxiety and some dispair, but I got the visa to go to Paris, so it's all sorted.

I went to town yesterday to apply and collect it and I stupidly thought it wouldn't take long and maybe I'd get to do some shopping on Oxford Street or something, but no, it took all day and I caught a commuter train home. The train in Britain is lovely, a much more comfortable way to commute than the metro. And as it's above ground and it's Britain, there are plenty of beautiful things to watch go by. The English countryside is indescribably beautiful right now with the frost and the mist. There is a bridge over the Cam that Matt and I cycle on every time we go to city centre and every time I've gone over it these last two weeks, I've had to slow down and look left and right up and down the river, it is just fantastically beautiful with the old colleges and the Backs shrouded in mist on either side. It's the kind of beauty you experience when you're at the top of a mountain or on an empty white beach with deep blue water, you can't describe it and you can't photograph it, you can only experience it at the moment and try to keep the memory with you. The human eye is extraordinary in the way it can collect stimuli and synthesize it into something a camera can never capture. It makes you think about the potential of the world and your own.

Bowling

Bowling! It was one of my fellow economists' birthday yesterday and we celebrated with some bowling! I'm happy to say Grace and I did well in this very American game, tying for first on one game and, well, getting second and fourth or so on the second.

It was a nice alley, less seedy and more bright than any American Bowling Alley I had ever seen. But, there was a complete absence of pros. When you go to an American alley, it always seems like the people in the other lanes are getting strike after strike, know what they're doing, are in leagues and so on. Here, no one had a clue and was just making it up as they went along. The girls across from us literally tossed the ball at the pins, so it left their hands (they used both??) three feet above the ground. One girl used the ramp that they provide for the handicapped. In other lanes people were using all sorts of crazy methods to get the ball down, sometimes falling over in the process. There were several instances of people bowling while the machine was still changing the pins, so the ball collided with the bar and rolled back up the lane. I didn't see anyone crack 100 who wasn't at our game. I get the impression the game is sort of thought of as a cheesy joke here. And hey, bowling is pretty silly.

America, take pride in your bowling skills.

New Photos

Frosted Spiderweb on a Shrub
Originally uploaded by msclan.

As I said, we've had some strange weather phenomenon. For the last two or three days we've had really, really thick fog for most of the day and night. Even now, I can't see the field outside my window.

It's also gotten cold all of a sudden. Not as cold as it gets in Iowa, but below freezing, which is pretty substantial given that we had been having temperatures in the low 50s up until then. As you can see in the photo, the freezing fog has produced some unusual effects. All the spiderwebs, and there seem to be thousands, have frozen into thick white crystals, making them instantly visible.

I suppose all the spiders are dead now though.

Anyway, I've been taking a lot of pictures the last few days. Now they're assembled in the "Christmas Fog" photoset on Flickr. You should be able to get there by clicking on the photo here.

Update on My Bike

About a week ago I went down to the police headquarters to claim my recovered bike. I was confident because I had found the key to my old lock while doing laundry. Sure enough, the key fit, and the police were convinced. The bike was mine again.

But it was still unrideable. I tried to inflate it's rear tire with an air pump, but it must have had a leak in it somewhere. I walked the bike into town and took it to the Bikeman, a stall in market square that sells used bikes and does repair work. I was interested in either A) selling it for a good price or B) fixing it so I could sell it myself on bulletin boards.

Here I learned why the bike had been abandoned without a lock. The rascal who stole the thing must have pushed it pretty hard. Both wheels were crooked and wobbly, the brakes were missing parts, and the rear tire, and possibly wheel, would need to be replaced. I was given the enviable choice of selling it to the bikeman for £3 or having it repaired for £35.

It being the gift buying season, I wasn't prepared to spend money on a bike that I didn't need. But of course, £3 was simply ridiculous. So I locked it up in town and went home. Someday I'll walk it home, when I have 45 minutes to kill.

Anyway, yesterday I went to see how it was doing, and it had a sticker on it, advising that the bike was being regarded as derelict and would be confiscated unless I called a number quickly. So I pulled the sticker off and moved it to another bike rack. I think I'll be doing that for a month or so.

In other news, Grace is in London today, standing in line at the French Consulate so she can get a visa for our trip to Paris with my family. And we have amazing frosts in Cambridge now, but my camera usb cord is busted, so I can't put up photos yet. Sorry.

Discussions

Living in the UK has allowed Grace and I to have discussions with non-Americans. Here are some highlights from the week:

1. National Pride

According to our friends, only the really posh and the working class fly the British flag. For our friends, the flag was mostly associated with soccer hooligans. National pride is just not something that seems to exist. They were bewildered by this idea of being "proud" to be an American. "Why would you be proud of where you happened to be born?" was the general theme. They thought the Americans who loved to assert that their country was the greatest nation on Earth seemed unable to realize that they probably had nothing personal to do with that. "It seems like it's almost like a meta-faith in the consititution, and the ideas of America or something," one said.

Personally, I think we might have different ideas about what it means to be part of a nation because A) America is relatively isolated from other countries compared to EU countries, and B) we have an idea of what it means to be "American" that doesn't depend on ancestral identity (the way being "British," "French," or "German" might have), and so we've kept that identity strongly in the wake of massive immigration and globalization.

But hey, I'm no sociologist and I'm welcome to other suggestions.

2. Sweden

Is Sweden actually the greatest nation on Earth? Consider the facts:

A) One of our friends said it was and
B) Instead of having an army, they give everyone in the country a gun and make them report for two week training duty annually. The idea is that if they're ever invaded, the entire country will shift into a guerrilla warfare mode. Sort of a militia where the entire population is trained and armed. Apparently they have bunkers up in the hills and mountains and if they get invaded, they'll sneak out and take up positions there. Pretty much the greatest idea ever I think.

3. Turks

This one guy at lunch is racist against the people of Turkey, which is just really wierd. My favorite anecdote (paraphrased):

Turk-hater: "One time me and my friend perfored a citizen's arrest. There was this person who snuck into college and pretended to be a student. We saw him carrying two laptops, so my friend asked him why he hadn't seen him around, and what he was doing there. The man took off running, so we chased him and placed him under arrest until the police came. And you know what, he was a turk."
Other guy: "Oh my, did he survive the arrest?"
Turk-hater: "Yes, but my friend broke his arm in the struggle to arrest him."

Also, where he's from, they have an old saying (no joke):

"The only good turk, is a dead turk."

Can you believe cliches like this are still used un-ironically?

Grace has a job

Hey, I interviewed for a job on Friday and I'm starting on Monday (tomorrow). It is with a financial services group and I'm going to be an "Operations Administrator" which sounds a lot more fancy than I think what I will actually be doing. It's mostly data entry. But, it's only going until March, because the company is moving to York. Matt's term ends in March too, so that leaves us with some extra time to travel perhaps. And I will be earning some money, and staying busy during the day, which is nice. I have already been warned by someone who used to work there to stay away from a certain Mark, who is a wanker.

Christmas in Cambridge

There's a lot of festive spirit in Cambridge's city center this holiday season. This old man with his face painted black is an example. He's part of the "Molly Dancers" a bizarre troup of people who perform ancient english dances. I put pictures of them, along with some others at flickr. Click on the Christmas Time photo set (there are a few new photos of London in the "UK Trips" photoset as well).

The Molly dancers were a troup of fifteen to twenty people, all with their faces painted black. Some of these people were actual dancers, some of them seemed to be guards and guides (the man pictured above would be in this category) and some of them were part of the band. The band seemed to be made up entirely of women, and they dressed very strangely, in black overcoats with green sashes and huge hats of foilage and plastic plants that draped down their backs.

The band played it's odd assortment of instruments - iron triangles, accordians, recorders, bass drums and a string attached to a pole - while the dancers performed traditional english dances and jigs. The audience they attracted wasn't really sure what to make of them, but some of the older people seemed to know what was going on immediately. One particularly old women squeeled "Molly Dancers!" when she saw them and then proceeded to tell her teenage grandchildren about them. Between this old women and the guides I learned that they're an old tradition of dancing beggers. They paint their faces black to remain anonymous because it used to be a crime to beg.

The photos show that there was another, much more colorful group of dancers as well. These people had no specific name, but I can only presume they were another group of traditional dancers. They had jingle bells on their shins and different props for every dance. One dance used sticks, another used flowers, one used streamers etc, and before each dance they would announce where it originated from.

While Grace and I were in town fighting the crowds I took two more pictures of Cambridge, but since they're stuffed in the back of the Cambridge photoset, I'll post them here as well. Here's a view of St. John's (I think).



And these are some gargoyles that I never noticed before. They're above us as we walk along one of the main streets.



Yes.

A Twist in the Bike Story

Grace and I had been in town for a few hours when we saw leaning against a black iron fence my stolen bike. In case you didn't know, my bike was stolen the night of November 5th. It got a flat tire while we were out celebrating Guy Fawkes Day and so I took a cab home, leaving my bike in town overnight, locked to a bike post. When I came to pick it up the next day it was gone. I filled out a crime report the next day and waited a week for something to happen. When that didn't work I bought a new bike.

Anyway, there was my bike. It was unmistakable. It has really unique yellow handlebars. And it had black electrical tape at the right places. It was the right make and model, because it was my bike. It even had my old lock hanging from it. It was exactly my bike, except the back tire was completely flat, one brake cable was completely slack and the front wheel was new. I thought maybe someone had taken off my front wheel and broken it to get the lock off it - and the lock looked like it had seen better days. Part of the rubber covering around the cable had been cut away.

Remarkably, it wasn't locked up at all. It was just abandoned by the side of a fence.

Grace and I weren't sure what to do. It didn't really occur to us to just take it back and now that I think about it I'm not sure why. I guess we figured that if we stole it back and someone had unknowingly bought the bike from a crook we would have been screwing him. Plus, we would have had to walk it home, since it wasn't in rideable condition. Anyway, we decided that Grace would stay behind and guard it while I went to try and find a police officer.

I was nervous that the bike's owner would show up and try to get away, leaving Grace in a tight spot. No one wants a big scene. And I circled town centre but couldn't find a police officer. So after a few minutes we regrouped and decided to lock our bikes together and use Grace's lock to keep my stolen bike in place. We locked the stolen bike to the iron fence it was laying against. Then we headed to the library to look up the police headquarters number (it didn't seem like a good idea to call 999).

Anyway, on the way to the library we saw a pair of young police men. I went over and explained the situation to them. They weren't sure what to do and told us to stay put while they went to ask. After ten minutes they came back with this solution. Since the bike was not locked to anything, they would confiscate it as an abandoned bike and take it to the "nic." On a weekday, I could come in and explain the situation and, since I had filed a police report earlier, and since the bike matched my description on the report, I would probably get the bike back.

They told me to bring anything I could to help prove my ownership of the bike, including the key to the old lock, photos of me riding it, my copy of the crime report, anything. Naturally I've since lost the key to the old lock and there are no photos of me riding the thing. Nonetheless, I'm confident I'll get it. I'm much less confident I'll be able to return it for any substantial refund.

College Food

About a week ago I realized that I have a meal plan. Included in my tuition is £200 that I can spend at the college buttery (a cafeteria that can be dressed up to be nice). Grace and I have since been trying to make as much use of the plan as we can over the holidays. We've eaten at the buttery for lunch the last two days, and for dinner two nights ago. Because of holiday we've got only a half hour window to show up and get served (though we can sit around and eat much longer).

Anyway, the food is decent, sometimes good, but always filling. The one thng that annoys me is the health conscience way food is prepared. I've said it before, but the British are very concerned about the nascent but growing obesity problem in the country. And it makes sense, with the taxpayers supporting the government run healthcare system. Still, it means for me no ice cream or brownies or chocolate whenever I want it.

A little digression about obesity and Ricky Gervais:

There's a running joke about how Ricky Gervais (the boss in The Office) is fat (go here and click on Clip 4). Clearly, by American standards, he's not fat. He says as much in another stand up act, where he distinguishes American fat people from British. The Americans are a whole different species of fat, he asserts.

A Trip to London

Grace and I spent Monday afternoon and most of today in London, visiting a relative and babysitting her new baby. We're back in Cambridge now, where the place is still a bit of a mess.

We took the train down yesterday, the first time for me, although Grace is getting pretty experienced. The ride down was really nice - fast, comfortable and we had nice views of the manicured English countryside. When we arrived in King's Cross station we took the tube down to Westminster, and we walked to the flat from there. I had heard that the English tube system was the most complicated in the world, but we didn't have any trouble. New York still seems worse, with it's numbered cars that follow different routes.

That afternoon we went over to the Natural History Museum, which we had heard was really good. My favorite museum in Washington was the Smithsonian Natural History museum and I was interested to see how this museum stacked up. The building itself was really interesting - dark, gothic and detailed. But I think Grace and I are tired of museums, as they were one of the great free attractions in Washington. We found ourselves walking quickly through the exhibits.

That night we had babysitting duty and when we were done we went to a regular English pub (butcher block tables, wooden chairs, red carpet, ales on tap). I can tell things are going to get pretty quiet for the next few months. Classes are over and people are heading home. We're looking forward to my family's visit in three weeks.

The next day, we decided to avoid museums until the afternoon, when we had a plan to combine babysitting and visiting a museum. We went to go see the famous changing of the guard at Buckingham palace. We were a bit bewildered by it.

To set the scene, Buckingham palace is a large, nice, grey building. There are flourishes on it, but it doesn't have domes or gargoyles or bright colours. At least, not any that I remember, though I couldn't see it very well, because a very tall black iron fence keeps everyone about 100 feet back. And there's no lawn in the front, just pavement. Outside this gate is where the tourists mill about. There's a large open space, with a tall monument, but really everyone tries to crush up against the gate, to get a good look at the guards and the palace. But there isn't enough room for everyone to see, so there's a lot of straining to see over people. And beyond the wide open space is a busy road with fast moving cars.

When we arrived, it started raining and the rain quickly turned into a downpour. Probably a third of the tourists there had no rain gear at all and got soaked. Grace and I would have been among them if our relative hadn't given us both her umbrellas right before we left. There was no shelter to be had in front of the Palace and people put their jackets over their heads, but, they got soaked.

Something was happening though. Two ornate horsedrawn carriages preceding a fancy black car came through. The carriage drivers were dressed in traditional uniform. And we could hear drums in the distance. And traffic was stopped by the bright yellow vested police, who were getting soaked. And on the other side of the gate sixteen or so grey vested guards emerged with their M-16s. Their corporal, or captain, or something, yelled at them, checked their weapons and so on. Then the drums became louder and a military band, also in grey vests, came parading in, and then out a side street. When we turned back, the sixteen guards were marching somewhere and the police started to let traffic through. People started milling about and it became clear that whatever had happened, was now over. And a few minutes after that the rain cleared up.

From there we walked to Harrods, a massive, expensive store. They're having a "Christmas Royale" theme for Christmas. Grace and I spent most of our time in "Christmas World" looking through the hundred upon hundreds of Christmas ornaments.

The store reminds me of a more expensive, more upscale, more confusing version of Marshall Fields, the great 8 story Chicago department store. There are no grand vistas here (like the center of Marshall fields where you can look up or down through all the floors) - just room after room of upscale consumer goods.

On the way back I thought we should try to cut straight across the city to the flat, but it turned out there really wasn't a straight way to go. We were late getting back, but we saw some more regular parts of London. There was a worker with a fire tool melting and scraping paint off a fence and a bunch of really nice small shops. The walk home was sort of like Harrods in that we could never see very far ahead before the street curved off in a new direction.

That afternoon we walked to Trafalgar square and the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. Both were great Art museums, but we were still a little tired of museums. The walk back, at 4:45, was pitch black with the early nightfall. Shortly after we got back we were packed up and heading back to the train station.

The ride home was really crowded, and we had to stand part of the way. Once back in Cambridge, we found our bikes had not been stolen and we had a long, nice ride home.