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.

Night Fall

It's easy to forget that the UK is actually further North than the entire continental United States. The weather is so temperate compared to what we experience in the Northern reaches of the States. You don't need a winter jacket, just three layers or so. Your ears don't bite from the cold. You can't see your breath. It doesn't snow.

But you can see our proximity to the arctic circle in how quickly night descends in the winter. It's 6 o'clock now, but I've had midnight darkness since 4:30. Twilight starts between 3 and 4, depending on whether or not it's overcast. I bike home from class at 3:30 three times a week to wonderful sunsets. But it's only 3:30, c'mon!

It has wierd implications that I still haven't gotten used to. When you leave at 1:30 in the afternoon, to head into town, you should pack your lights for your bike, unless you're coming back within 2 or 3 hours. I'm not used to thinking about night at 1 in the afternoon.

And there's still 2 months till Winter solstice. How bad is this going to get? And what do they do in Scotland?

Christmas Dinner, English Style

It's not even December and Grace and I are attending our second Christmas dinner this week tonight.

Christmas starts early in the UK, and I blame the lack of a Thanksgiving. After Halloween, there's nothing on the horizon except the big day itself. So the lights start creeping up and the stores start to sell Santa gear. For the last three weeks city center has had lights up and a giant Christmas tree. And they take lights seriously here - they sparkle ontop all the street lights yes, but they also hang between all the buildings and overhead along the streets.

Anyway, Michaelmas Term (in American, Fall term), ends Friday, and everyone leaves not long after that. So the college starts having Christmas formal dinners and the economists are having a dinner tonight. Grace and I went to Fitz's college formal on Monday. Technically it's a Christmas dinner for the undergraduates, but we can't make the Graduate one, so we made do. Also, we bought tickets for this one before we understood there was a difference.

We arrived for dinner a little before 7:30. Some people were dressed as angels and christmas presents, but most people, myself included, wore nice clothes and their gown on top. Inside the tables were laid out with candles and stuff again, but they were arranged into 12 tables, each of which had a number. We sat at table 12 with a few other Graduate students we knew.

English Christmas dinner has some distinct traditions. There are little confetti poppers at each table, and you pull a string and it shoots a bunch of confetti into the air with a loud pop. So there were 120 of those going off througout the evening. And there is also a wrapped "present" at each plate, called a Christmas Cracker. You pull on one side and someone else pulls on the other and it too opens with a pop. Inside is some cheap little toy (Grace got a plastic hair pin with a cat on it and I got a star paper clip) and a paper crown which you wear for as long as you want.

And there's traditional food. After soup and rolls Grace had a traditional main course - meat wrapped up in meat on top of ground up meat on top of some slices of meat, with gravy. I had the vegetarian version, a pile of vegetables on top of some kind of bread thing and vegee gravy. Then there was traditional dessert of mince pies and Christmas pudding (we don't like either). Christmas pudding tastes sort of like steaming hot ginger bread, but it looks like chocolate cake which I desperately wish it was. After dinner there was coffee and mints and - a speech by the outgoing undergraduate president.

Basically she thanked a bunch of people.

Then she led us in the 12 days of Christmas. Each table sang one of the days (that's why there were 12, get it?). Luckily we were the last table and only had to sing once. There was a lot of one upsmanship going on, with one table yelling their part, then another table standing on the chairs and yelling their part and another standing on their tables and yelling. When it was our turn to sing, Grace and I were the only people at the table not to stand up, and I feel bad about that. It was a nice tradition though.

Tonight promises more of the same. I heard poppers were being bought, and similar meals sound like they're being prepared. Grace brewed up some eggnog and trifle this time around. The brits are eager to try eggnog. It's another thing they're seen a lot in the movies but haven't actually seen in real life.

Anyway, once December is here people start to leave. One girl at the table advised that Christmas holiday is pretty boring around Cambridge. By the time Christmas actually arrives, Grace and I will be on our own no doubt.

One more thing. They unambiguously talk about "Christmas" here. I've heard no mention of Hanukkah or Kwanza. Or even New Years. It's Christmas break and it's Happy Christmas, not Winter break and Happy Holidays. And the economists are unambiguously throwing a Christmas dinner and inviting everyone without bothering to check anyone's religion. What's strange is people are most likely less religious than in the USA. I think it's something like 60% of people in the USA regularly attend a religious service versus 6% in the UK. But Britain has centuries of Christian tradition, so it's more like a culture thing. Professors wish you a happy Christmas when you take their last class. There's no thought given to political correctness about it. Political correctness is a huge issue in Britain, but this part seems to have slipped off the radar of everyone.

It's one of those things, like the monarchy and fox hunting, that I might have different feelings about if it was my country, but since it's a "foreign land" I sort of enjoy the differences.

Dentistry!

I got about one fourth of my major dental needs taken care of yesterday, when I got two cavities filled. It sucked and my face still hurts, but at least now I can chew on that side of my mouth again. Matt went insane when I said that to him, like everyone doesn't chew on one side of their mouth at a time. No, we're all flippin' animals chewing with both sides at once... please.

Thanksgiving

Last night Grace and I had 17 people over for Thanksgiving dinner (we were the only Americans). We set up three long tables end to end to end until the flat was entirely occupied by one long table. Grace cooked everything, which included sweet potatoes, stuffing, vegetarian and meatey gravy, cornbread, pumpkin pie, apple crisp, deviled eggs, guacamole, mashed potatoes, buns, cookies, cranberry sauce, and an obscene 29 pound turkey. Our guests brought the drinks (16 bottles of wine, all gone). Some of them made mulled wine, which is sort of like a hot sangria.
Things got started around 8 and Grace and I finished cleaning up at 1. For awhile we stood around eating appetizers Grace had made (pigs in a blanket, deviled eggs, guac, and cookies) and enjoying the mulled wine. After everyone had arrived we set up the table and Grace carved the turkey. We loaded up our plates buffet style and once everyone was seated I told the tale of Thanksgiving (something abour Settlers starving and not getting along with the Indians and then after winter coming together and sharing a feast with them). Then Grace said it was an annual tradition in America that everyone went around the table and said something they were thankful for (and it had to be unique). After that the food got going in earnest and we just ate and talked till midnight.
It was a really good time. A real success.

Photos of the day, along with some more walking photos are at Flickr

Weekend Update

This weekend, Matt and I did another long walk. We had to bike about three miles out of town to the Gog Magog Downland. It was a really nice 7 1/2 mile through lovely fields and a beautiful nature preserve at the height of its fall foliage. On the way back into town though, my bike tire went flat, so we had to walk 2 1/2 miles to the bike shop. That's a full 10 mile walk, like last weekend. We have been very fortunate to have beautiful sunny weather for our last two weekend walks.

It has only just now begun to feel like fall here. We hear it has already snowed in Iowa, and we miss the sight of it. There's nothing like being snug indoors while snow falls thickly outside; or going outside to freshly fallen snow like a fluffy pile of frosting over everything... we miss it, but at least we have pictures. I don't think it's going to snow here in Cambridge much.

We are having a traditional midwest American Thanksgiving dinner with some friends and some people from Matt's economics program. Time to show these Brits what AmERica is all about: food, and lots of it.

Eminent Lectures

This evening Grace and I went to a lecture given by the Right Honourable Lord Bingham about "The Rule of Law." Lord Bingham is roughly the UK equivalent of Chief Justice Roberts. The lecture was actually. . . really good. Lord Bingham basically started off saying that everyone agrees the Rule of Law is a great thing, but it turns out to be hard to define. He then went on to give an 8-point definition of what has to be true for a society to say it respects the "Rule of Law." This sounds really dry, but he showed how, according to his, quite reasonable definition, both Britain and the United States might not actually be in accordance with the Rule of Law.

For instance, one necessary condition to "Rule of Law" is that all citizens are equal under the law, except when there are objective differences in the parties (for instance, children can receive unique treatment). Both the US and Britain currently deny certain legal rights to non-citizens of their countries - Lord Bingham thinks this is unwarranted, since the key distinction between non-citizens and citizens, insofar as the legal system is concerned, is that non-citizens can be deported. And the ability to be deported isn't relevant to suspension of Habeas Corpus or the right to a speedy trial, to know the charges against you, etc. Anyway, it was a good lecture - you felt you were hearing an original, relevant argument.

Even the questions section afterwards went well. Normally I dread the questions section of lectures. At ISU, we always got people who would ramble on for 10 minutes, with no intelligible question at the end of it all. Or people would get hostile, because they were Fundamentalists and the speaker was an athiest. Here though, questions were respectful and interesting.

But, oh my God, the end. Everything was over. It was time to leave, but before we went, the MC of the whole thing said he wanted to "invite the head of the Law department to give a vote of thanks." The man came up, and things got ridiculous.

I don't even know what to say about it. He says it all so well. Some choice quotes (from memory):

"I would like to thank Lord Bingham for his wonderful lecture. I can honestly say that the lecture was elegant and exquisitely analytical. . ."
"I made some notes about the topics covered in the course of Lord Bingham's lecture. Lord Bingham's remarks ranged from. . ." [reads a list of some 10 topics]
"It was all tied up in an argument which, if I may say so, was brilliant."
"I can not wait for Lord Bingham's lecture to be published, so that I may read it again, for a second time, and give it due thought and serious contemplation. . ."

Grace and I were stunned. It kept going. It KEPT GOING. We looked at each other, but no one else seemed to think all this butt kissing was unusual. Later we found out it wasn't.

I want to go to more lecture series.

Bike Crash

Bikes Bikes Bikes.

I've got a new one. I gave the police a week, but three country-wide manhunts later, I was still walking to class, and that takes a half hour. So I got a used mountain bike this time. It's got shocks and all. I'm going to invest in a heavy duty chain - not a cable, a metal links chain. They'll need a blowtorch to get through this thing.

Speaking of cutting through bike cables, my bike was stolen because someone cut through my bike cable. Probably. Maybe I didn't actually attach it to the post. You doubt yourself when your bike is gone. It had gotten a flat a few days before, so I finally got around to patching the tire only to have it go flat on me again. I left it chained (?) to a bike post in downtown overnight, but the next day, she was gone.

Anyway, I've got a new one. And I was going to take it on it's maiden voyage out to get some pizza and see a movie (incidentally, we saw "The Prestige" which I liked more and more the next day. The theatre was cool, because you could buy beer and bring it into the theatre in a sweet plastic pint glass. I just had M&M's though, because it was the first place I had seen that sold regular M&M's). So we had to get down to the pizza place by 7.

At 6:30 I went down to attach bike lights to my new bike. You have to ride with lights at night in Cambridge or it's a £30 fine. I've already gotten one £30 fine for biking in a pedestrian area so I didn't want to take any risks. Anyway, Grace came down ten minutes later, but on the way she accidentally dropped her light and it cracked. We went back to the apartment to get some scotch tape and we taped the thing together.

We were running a tad late then, so we hurried off. After five feet though there was a crash. Grace's light, the same one, had somehow come unattached from the bike clip thing and fallen to the concrete. This time the bulb was broken. So we went up the apartment again and grabbed an extra light we keep up there.

So now we were late, and we took off. I got going pretty quickly on my new bike cause I wanted to give it a bit of a test. Anyway, I got pretty close to the pizza place when I realized I had lost Grace. So I waited for awhile and she wasn't coming and it became clear she hadn't just missed a traffic light or something. Then I saw her walking her bike down the sidewalk.

I went over and it turned out that she had crashed. Her back brake is pretty shoddy, and we've been meaning to get it checked out (new bikes have a problem that their brake cables stretch out a bit and if they're not tightened up they can become unresponsive). Anyway, Grace was going along and she came to a busy roundabout and realized she had to stop quickly.

Well her back brake failed and she went over the top of the handlebars, banging her knee and her shoulder. She's still got a nasty bruise on her shin. Mostly though she was embarrassed, because there was a lot of traffic.

When we arrived at the pizza place we told the story, but we were trumped pretty quickly by our friends. One of them had just seen Professor Stephen Hawking out around town and the other had stories of far, far worse bike crashes that his mom had witnessed while biking around Vietnam the past week (someone got so hurt she puked when she saw the wound).

At the end of the night, after the movie, Grace forgot her bike light in the theatre, but we went in and got it.

Anyway, Grace isn't too beat up. She played Cricket again tonight with a girls team she joined. Apparently she's got a lot of natural talent for the game. Her teammates insist she's the best on the team. I think she should go pro.

Rambling

Checking the Map,
originally uploaded by msclan.

Today Grace and I embarked on a ten or eleven mile walk through the English countryside around the town of Ely. It took us a little over five hours, with a pint at the end and extremely muddy conditions. On the trip we saw many things - old Churches, little villages, lakes, rivers, fields, trains, trees, rabbits, and a Cathedral. And a mysterious burning pile of refuse. And a squirrel shimmying along a telephone wire. We didn't see many people at all. No one else out walking anyway.

We found the walk at our library and we're going to make an effort to do some kind of similar walk each weekend. We like doing it. When we have a long vacation, we would like to go back to Ireland and try tackling the Dingle Peninsula walk, which takes seven days.

I put some pictures up on Flickr. I made a new photoset called "Rambling" which has all the pictures.

Depressing Thought of the Day

Matt is a physicist so he speaks the truth about the natural world to me and we were chatting one day about it and it turns out that in space, if you were to, say scream, no one would hear you! There is literally no sound in space. Think about it. Sound is just the vibration of continuous waves of air molecules against your ear drum which vibrations are interpreted in your brain and are perceived by your conscious person as an audio sensation. In space, there is no air, no vibrations, hence, no sound. So all that cosmic movement, expanding, stretching, grinding, pulsating, churning, exploding; it's all happening in complete silence and no one will ever, no matter how advanced we become, be able to hear our great universe speak because we will never distribute air molecules throughout the universe in a uniform enough pattern to create the same conditions under which we can experience sound here on earth. How depressing is that?

I play cricket!

Yesterday, I went and played real English cricket on a really casual girls team. It was well fun, and I think I was pretty good for my first time. A lot of the moves are exactly what you would do in tennis, so they felt familiar.

Also, many congratuations to the Democratic party and to the people of the United States for, finally, not shooting yourself in the foot on election day. Well done.

Bicycle Thief

My bike is stolen.

CREEPY!

Check out this website:

http://mattandgrace.com/

These poeple are us only not us at all! And they have our domain name! Damn it! Matt and I will just have to get graceandmatt.com.

Darwin College Formal

The day before Guy Fawkes day, Matt and I and a bunch of people from "Team Economics" (the other people in Matt's economics course) went to the Darwin College formal hall dinner as the guests of three people who are members there. We got dressed up very nicely and wore our wool coats and our new hats and gloves and scarves. It's getting cold in Cambridge! (More on that later.)

The evening started with sherry in the parlour. Then dinner in the hall. They refilled our wine glasses three times. People kept dropping pennies into other people's drinks. Then you have to drink it all up in order the save the Queen from drowning. There was a good deal of Queen immitating. The first course was stuffed eggs with some kind of red sauce and salad. Main was chicken with a mushroom and madiera sauce. The alternative vegetarian option was stuffed aubergine (eggplant). Then we had a lemon tart for dessert. Matt tried to tell people about the time he went to Key West and brought back a real key lime pie all the way back on dry ice for his parents. But they had no concept of the distance. They don't seem to understand that Iowa is bigger than the whole of England. After dessert, there was a cheese course! And finally, port and coffee back in the parlour. Followed by Hoegaarden, a lovely Belgian wheat beer that I've been drinking a lot of here. That's a lot of drinking! After all that and some sitting around chatting with TE people, we met up with Gareth and his girlfriend Deb at The Eagle pub and had a short chat before going to the Sino Tap to get dumplings. The Eagle is famous for being where James Watson and Francis Crick first announced their discovery of DNA. It's a weird, old, rambling pub with lots of nooks and crannies. They have a pub meal on Saturdays and a heated outdoor patio, but we have never been able to avail of the meal. It's probably one of our favorite pubs in Cambridge and it's a local favorite too. The other bar/pub/restaurant (?) is the Sino Tap, which we were told was formerly the only gay bar in Cambridge. But now it's a weird mix of nice old pub and chinese food restaurant. I was still hungry after we went to the Eagle. In England, pubs have to close by 11:30 so after that there's pretty much nowhere to go in town but a club. Except there's this weird little Sino Tap that doesn't seem to follow any regular rules about pubs. It's always seems to be open at any time of the day or night and it's always serving food and there's always at least one dog in there roaming around and trying to get your beer!

Now about Cambridge being cold. When we first got here, people kept telling us that Cambridge gets cold like the Arctic in winter! That we get all the winds of Siberia! So be prepared! We thought they were joking and also we're Iowans. It is extremely difficult to impress us about cold weather. So in our minds, we were thinking, 'Whatever. Cold by English standards is late spring in Iowa. I'll probably only need a sweater and a jacket the whole winter.' It turns out that maybe those people weren't joking. Because since then we have discovered that there are quite literally no geographical barriers between here and the Ural mountains. And when the wind blows, it does indeed blow down from Siberia. So maybe it will get kind of cold.

Speaking of Iowa, damn I have had some awesome Halloweens. Halloween in England is not a big deal. Maybe because five days later, they have a big event where they burn a Guy's effigy on a huge bonfire. Around Halloween this year, Matt and I got sad and missed home a little more. It just didn't feel like Halloween. It wasn't cold enough yet and the trees are still green. They don't do trick-or-treating here. I wish they had because there are lots of kids where we live and I love giving out candy as much as I loved trick-or-treating for it when I was a kid. It's such an American thing, something that we all look back upon with great fondness. We hear that in the UK, people have started doing a messed up version of trick-or-treating though. Teenages go around to people in restaurants and shops, not in costumes, and ask them for money! People actually turn their porch lights out and pretend to not be at home to avoid them. I can't believe how much they've perverted our perfectly innocent and cheeerful tradition! Brits.

Guy Fawkes Day

"Remember, remember the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, Treason and Plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason,
Should ever be forgot."

Five hundred years ago Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the house of parliament and every year since the British celebrate the event with fireworks and bonfires where they burn Guy Fawkes in effigy. Grace and I were in attendence.

We were pretty excited because it was the first non-American holiday we had ever celebrated, and we had real British friends to show us how to celebrate the event properly. It's not complicated really. You show up and watch the fireworks and then the bonfire. Since it's winter, everything is over by 8 o'clock. There was a carnival in town as well, but we went to eat.

The fireworks were really good though. I thought we were really close and a lot of the time you had to really crane your neck back to see everything. There wasn't really a grand finale though - the whole thing was spectacular, but then it was over. Someone was on a PA system the whole night, counting down till the fireworks in a calm and cool voice. When the fireworks finished he just said, "Well, how about that folks? Let's hear it for that display."

And then they lit off the bonfire. Sadly, effigies were nowhere to be seen. Apparently that part of the tradition is falling away. The bonfire was this enormous stack of wood palates. They were probably stacked fifteen feet high and once the fire really got going the flames leapt thirty or forty feet into the air. Everyone was kept quite a way back by two fences, but you could still feel the heat off the thing. It burned fast and furious, reducing the palate to a third of it's size in ten minutes. I had never seen a fire on that scale. It's quite a thing to see.

I had hoped Guy Fawkes day would be an event where the British people would revert to their ancestral origins, whooping and hollering around a fire without clothes on. That's not the case.

I put up 12 pictures of the whole thing on our flickr website. They're under the Cambridge photoset.

Snooker

After econometrics class this afternoon the economics team was standing around deciding what to do. It was decided we should go play snooker, an English cousin of billiards, if you don't know what it is.

I've never played snooker, but back when Grace and I were studying in Ireland they played the world championship on television for days on end. It's like eight ball, only on a much, much bigger table with smaller balls and smaller pockets and more balls and different rules. When Mike and I were in Hong Kong there were snooker tables in the basement but we were overwhelmed by the seemingly endless rules to the game when we looked it up online.

So we went to the Cambridge Union and up to the snooker room. The snooker room used to be something else probably. One whole wall was shelves of books, some of them ancient, ancient. The newest ones were from the seventies. They were not arranged lovingly, but stacked and crammed onto the shelves in any way they could. If you looked closely at the titles they were all pulp fiction or outdated science books. It was a like a graveyard for books that have no relevance anymore. Another wall was shelves of even older books, most of them music scores.

Anyway, the only lighting for this room were the two hanging fixtures over the two massive snooker tables - the tables were seriously as big as four pool tables. So, with daylight saving time, it was night by 5:30. So it was really dark, the only light was from the snooker tables and the city outside. And outside the windows happened to be all these ancient building - old colleges, one of the oldest churches in Cambridge and so on.

The clock in the room was stopped at twenty past seven and looked as if it had been stopped that way for a long time. While we were there, we pretty much had the place to ourselves. When we left, we walked by old black and white photographs of people in 1920's outfits eating at the restaurants and bars in the lower floor of the Union. The people were different, but the tables and set up were the same.

Nothing changes in that place, and I was a little creeped out by that.

Stupid English Showers!

Stupid English showers and water heaters! Yesterday, I was taking a shower and the hot water ran out from our hot water tank. Hot water tanks in this country are the size of (AmERican) extra large pumpkins. AmERican hot water tanks are the size of minivans. I ran out of hot water in the middle of my shower yesterday and I started yelling and Matt came over and I made him boil water in the kettle, mix it in a big bowl with cold shower water, stand on the toilet seat, lean over into the shower cubicle and pour the water over my head so I could finish my shower. And the sad thing was, that was the nicest, hotest shower I've had since I got to this country. I miss my long, super-hot showers when it's cold outside that I used to have in the States. Appreciate lots of nice hot water while you have it, before soaring petrol prices render even AmERican showers lukewarm and painfully short!

Halloween Pumpkins

While down in Bournemouth Grace's family bought a little English pumpkin. It was the kind of thing you might put on your mantelpiece - in fact, that's exactly what Grace's family did with it (by the way, that extra arm belongs to Grace's cousin).

But there was something much funnier about the pumpkin. Upon close inspection, you can read the pumpkin's label:


"Extra Large Pumpkin - Ideal for Carving."

It turns out this is a damn big pumpkin in the Queen's country. Big enough to warrant the term EXTRA large. In the United States of course, this pumpkin would easily fit inside a medium pumpkin. When I think of an extra large American pumpkin, I think of something you have to use a wheel barrow to move.

America #1!

Fantasy Congress

Our good friend Andy told us about Fantasy Congress and we signed up. Basically, it's exactly like a fantasy sports league, only it tracks the activities and success of your chosen team, composed of members of Congress. You pick 12 representatives and 4 senators and then... it's on. We highly recommend any interested parties to go to www.fantasycongress.us and join the team, (whose name was decided DEMOCRATICALY through nomination and election) "Iowa. We So Corny". (Give us a comment and we will send you the password for the league.)

Matt's team is called "The Manly Reps" and it is composed of the men of Congress who are hyper-manly.

My team is called "Evilia Domestica" and it is composed of Republicans who are recorded as being relatively active within the last few months. I assume all their actions fall under the description of "Evilia".

In other news, Gareth and Gareth came over for dinner and we discussed the differences between our political systems (British vs. American). It seems that people here don't really understand our government. How can we claim to be a democracy and yet one third of the power in our government is given to nine people who are not even politically accountable for their actions? Gooooood question!

New Photos!!!

London Sunset
Originally uploaded by msclan.

Don't get so excited, it's just five photos of Grace and I in London. And the one at left is one of them, so there's just another four.
But, I rearranged the photos. Now they're divided into between Cambridge photos and trips outside of Cambridge sets. We've been in country for so long that a set of "United Kingdom" photos just isn't enough.

Busy Times

It's been a busy week.

Monday was my Matriculation dinner, and Grace and I stayed out "late" (we went to bed around 1:00). Grace got up the next morning at 4:30 to catch the 5:25 bus to London. That was so early I felt sick.

Grace stayed in London on Tuesday, seeing Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament and the British Museum. I went to class.

The next day Grace went down to Bournemouth, where her mom was staying with family. Wednesday night I went out with the economics people, where I decided to sign up for a Cambridge Radio show (I still have to undergo training).

Thursday I became obsessed with finding A) pants and B) The new Blood Brothers CD. No luck on either front. I was told pants long enough for me are not even sold in Cambridge, but I could order them from the website "High and Mighty.com" (not even joking). I also tried to finally withdraw money from my bank account, which I settled on Tuesday. No luck there, either. I had my first French class on Thursday morning (did I mention I signed up to learn French?) I also bought a bus ticket to Bournemouth.

The original plan was that I would leave Friday afternoon, after my last class finished at noon. But those crazy Cambridge people moved a two hour class to Friday at 2, which I missed. They also moved a second two hour class to Monday, so I would get to miss more classes.

Anyway, Friday morning I biked all over town in the rain. I had to get a new mailbox key, so I could open the letter from the bank with my PIN code (did I mention I lost my keys?).

Finally, at 1:45 I embarked on a journey to Bournemouth, by way of Victoria station, London.

Nine o'clock, I arrive and we have a big dinner.

Saturday morning, something like 6 am, the kids wake up and start running around. We were staying in the living room, where the TV is, so we had to get up quickly. We went to an Alice in Wonderland themed amusement park that day. Yes, there was a hedge maze. Yes, it was really muddy and we got completely lost and had to take the emergency exit to get out.

That night Grace's Uncle decided to buy some fireworks. I helped him lit them off and the kids went nuts.
(Interesting side note: in the realm of fireworks, the UK is far less concerned with their citizen's safety than in the US. Everything we lit off would have been illegal in Iowa. Still, they require children to sit in car seats until the age of 12.)

The next day we went to the cinema. We all bought tickets to "Open Season," starring the illustrious Martin Lawrence. Then we all went to eat at KFC's. It was a big deal, because one of the boys had never been there. Everyone sat down, took off their coats and unpacked the strollers. Then they realized KFC's wasn't a good place for vegetarians and they decided they would go to Pizza Hut instead (despite my protests). There was a 20 minute wait to eat at Pizza Hut.

Then we went to see the 2:30 show of Open Season. Grace fell asleep through most of the movie.

That night we tried to get an extra microwave into one of our suitcases. That was stupid.

Grace's family watched old VHS tapes of her two uncles' weddings. It was a cultural learning experience for me (and Grace).

The next day Grace, her mom, and I went to London. The plan was a little half baked, but it worked out. We left our suitcases with the people we know in London. Then we went on a walking tour of London (tangent: if you add two 'g's to the word "London" you can turn it into "Longdong").

Grace's mom took 2 rolls of pictures of Buckingham palace. This would prove to be indicative of her picture taking habits.

Again Grace saw Buckingham Palace, Downing street, Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the Thames and the British Museum. We also saw the temple church which FEATURES PROMINENTLY IN THE DA VINCI CODE.

London is really hectic compared to Cambridge (Grace describes Cambridge as "bustling"). We got on another bus, delayed till 8 o'clock. We rolled into Cambridge around 10:00 and went home.

The next two days I had to scramble to catch up on my homework and classes. I only saw Grace and her mom a few hours, mostly in the evening. I helped them get into King's College for free, which Grace's mom really liked.

Tomorrow, I have French again. And if I have time, I'm going to try and get some pants (trousers).

A Harry Potter Affair

Last night was my Matriculation dinner. All the graduates in the college showed up at 7:10 for sherry. We were dressed in suits and tuxedos with black gowns over top. I biked over in such a gown. Anyway, around 7:30 there was some banging and an unseen guy yelled "Dinner is served!"
The dinner was held in the main hall. Five long tables stretched the length of the hall with a high table (literally on a raised platform) cutting across the front. The tables were decked out with candles, four different glasses (white wine, red wine, water and port), a bunch of silverware and Fitzwilliam china.
At Matriculation dinner you don't pick where you're going to sit. There are name tags for everyone. I was with the economics people. Everyone found their place and stood at their chair, waiting for something. Suddenly there was a massive gong sound and everyone bowed their heads. Someone said grace really quickly and we all took our seats.
From here we were served by waitiers. There was a choice of Fitzwilliam Red Wine or Fitzwilliam White Wine.
We had some kind of diced melon cocktail at first, then a palate cleanser (no kidding!), and the main course. There was a fancy dessert and then mints (which came in Fitzilliam sleeves). We topped everything off with Fitzwilliam port.
Then there was a speech by the Master of the college and the president of MCR (sort of the Fitzwilliam Graduate Body).

Afterwards we retired to the college pub, which was open late, in honor of the occasion, till midnight.

I addressed some questions about America over the course of dinner:
1) Question: Is it true that most colleges in America do not have gowns and formal dinners?
Answer: Yes.
2) Question: In Europe it seems like you're nobody if you haven't been all over the world by the time you're 21. Is this the case in America?
Answer: No. Why would we want to leave the greatest country in the world? Actually, I didn't say that second part.
3) Question: In the UK, most people apply to either Cambridge or Oxford, in addition to other schools. In America, does everyone apply to Harvard?
Answer: No. In America, we have to pay for the full cost of college (Undergraduate education is subsidized in the UK), so if you can't find the means to afford an education at Harvard, you probably wouldn't bother to apply.

Finally, here are some Harry Potter coincidences (?) for your consideration:
1) We eat in a hall with long tables, a head table and black robes. Plus the ceiling is really high.
2) One of the fellows at the college is a linguistics professor and he wrote the Snake language dialogue which Harry Potter delivers in the film version of Harry Potter and the something II.
3) At lecture today we learned about Granger causality, which is when the future affects the present (for example, people shop for Christmas before it happens). Recall that Hermione Granger has some kind of time-travel device which is used in Harry Potter and the something III. The result is the future affecting the present.

Upcoming Events

Looks like this is going to be an exciting week. Grace's mom is in the UK, staying with family - we're taking a long weekend to visit everyone at the end of this week. Tomorrow night is my Matriculation dinner. It's some kind of Harry Potter dining affair. We all eat together, on long tables, with formal service, while wearing our suits and gowns (gowns as in, black robes we wear over our nice clothes, not fancy dresses). We convene for Sherry at 7:10 and then the meal begins at 7:30. We're all supposed to bring a bottle of wine that we have to drink on our own (I was advised that I shouldn't attempt this with red wine). It's sort of an official "welcome to Cambridge" kind of thing.
The next day Grace heads down to London to visit Mickey and Julia and babysit baby Evan for a few hours. I'll be in class.

Well, I suppose that's really it. The dinner, London, and Grace's mom.

One more unrelated thing.

I think we've met a genuine British snob. It's fascinating. The person in question has already worked into conversations how big his Scholarship here is, how the humanities are not serious subjects, and how the school he went to for Undergraduate was better than other people's. A snob!

Confessions Part II

Guys, I have a confession too. The truth is that I haven't taken very good care of my teeth the last... hm... 22 years. (I blame my mother's almost criminal negligence but she would tell you that I've been an adult for at least 25% of my lifetime so far.)

Before we left to come here to the UK, I went to the dentist for the first time in many years. They were very very nice and didn't yell at me at all. They said my teeth were really healthy and I had good bone support and everything looked good. Then, she said, "But... you're gonna need some major work." Turns out I need about $2000 worth of major dental work! And just a month or so before, Matt and I had decided NOT to spend a $30 to get full dental insurance... That's a lesson to everyone. Get dental insurance. Then it got worse. The dental assistant stayed in the room with me to take more x-rays while the dentist pulled Matt outside to tell him the real story. She told him my teeth are in a really precarious position and may explode in my mouth at any time, she couldn't say if it would be a few months or a few weeks but I am imminently due to be in some serious dental pain. This is what she told Matt, but not me. Matt of course told me afterwards. She didn't think I could handle it! Anyway, then she prescribed me some antibiotics and some seriously powerful narcotics, so even if my teeth explode I have that to look forward to. I have made a dental appointment with a dentistry here, but the first available appointment was November 20th, over a month from now! Hopefully I'll be okay until then.

Pants

So, confession time. I only own four pairs of pants, and only one of them is socially acceptable to wear in public. They are American Eagle Jeans and they're getting eaten by my bike chain. I seriously found bits of denim in the chain today. Like a two inch long piece.

I own another set of jeans, but they've developed massive holes in the crotch. . . for some reason. I'm not going to hazard a guess. Other than that, I have athletic pants, which I wear in emergencies, and flannel pants which are barely acceptable as pajama pants.

I used to have more pants, but they slowly have gotten too small or too destroyed. When it came time to pack for the UK, I only had two suitcases, so I figured I wouldn't bring bad pants. That's why I have so few now. And with the wretched $2 = 1 pound exchange rate, I haven't been excited about shopping for more.

So, I was at a pub last night with our English mates explaining my dilemma. I said something like this:

"I don't know if I should say this, but I actually only own two pairs of pants that I can wear right now - and one has big holes in the crotch."

They were totally shocked. Eyes wide, mouths gaping. They asked, "So what do you do? Turn them inside out every other day?"

I explained that I just switch them around, but I really need to get some new ones. I bent down to show them what the bike chain had done to my pants.

They started freaking out.

It turns out pants, in the English vernacular, means underwear.

New Photos

Will Relaxing
Originally uploaded by msclan.

We've put up some more photos. Again, they're in the "United Kingdom" photoset, at the end. Click on the photo to get to the website.

Cambridge Celebrity Sightings

So far we have seen three "celebrities" here in Cambridge. Well maybe. There is some skeptisism over our first one. The second and third happened today when Matt saw a huge crowd gathered around Great St. Mary's Church and the old Senate buildings down on King's Parade. Yesterday we had noticed that they were setting up big tents there on the green so we knew some event was happening. Matt asked someone what was going on. Turns out the Prime Minister of India, Monmohan Singh, was being conferred with an honorary degree from Cambridge. And in attendance was the Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, His Royal Highness Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh. If you don't know your English royal lineages, that's the husband of Her Majesty, Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith (as she is known here).








So those were the second and third sightings. Not insignificant. More importantly they did not involve either of us embarassing ourselves, unlike in previous celebrity sighting situations. The first is still a point of controvercy because I saw them but Matt didn't. We were biking over to Fitzies and it was kind of dusky but I swear I saw Bill Gates walking on the footpath with his wife. Gates is a huge contributer to the University of Cambridge (for some reason) and a building that bears his name was not a quarter mile from the spot he was walking. Also, he was wearing a sweater with a dress shirt and tie under it, and who wears stuff like that other than Bill Gates? He was also smiling, which is such a Bill Gates thing, right? Smiling for no reason? I mean, I guess he's got like a trillion dollars, so that's a good reason to smile. Also, people don't just walk along those footpaths unless they know exactly where they're going, or they're wandering around because they're tourists and aren't from Cambridge.



In other news we went punting! Matt really liked it. It was really nice and it was a great day to do it. Some of the best views of the college can only been seen from a punt. We didn't get a chance to do it, but you can rent punts from a certain point in the River Cam where you can punt all the way down to the next village, Grantchester, stop in at the pub and come back. We want to try that sometime too.

Our first visitor!

Yesterday, we went to start of term party at Fitzies, and it was a good laugh. We got there at 10 and the next thing we knew it was almost 2AM. I love when nights fly by like that. You're having a great time and all of a sudden you feel dead tired, look at your watch thinking it's just midnight or half midnight, but it's much later. Then we had a short, swift moonlit ride down dark footpaths back to our flat. It was pretty creepy because it's a residential area, but it's pitch dark in some places and there's always a rustling going on in the trees and brush. It's probably rabbits and stuff, but then you start thinking how easy it would be for a crazy person or a robber to attack you in the dark, or make you crash your bike and then ambush you. I don't think things like that happen in Cambridge, I think we're reasonably safe. But... okay, after a few drinks and with a muddled sleepy head, these thoughts pop up.

Matt and I had the good fortune over the last two weeks or so to check out and watch the entire BBC the Office series, including the Christmas specials! We are both huge fans of the American Office (we got the season pass from iTunes, which automatically downloads new episodes from this season as they become available, for an initial discounted rate). But the nice thing about the British Office is that is it entirely self-contained within 12 regular episodes and 2 hour length Christmas special episodes. When it's done, it's done and you know they won't be coming back for another, whereas the US one is ongoing and we don't know when it will end. Nor do we know where it's going because although the first few episodes were virtual remakes of the British Office episodes, it has really diverged far away from it and has become it's own show. We have spent the last fews days really analyzing the differences between the shows and we think that even if you've seen the British Office and can't stand the thought of a remake, give it a try, it really is a good show and has merits of its own, with the added benefit of being ongoing.

We were talking to a guy last night who is watching The X-Files DVDs and he has watched up to the 5th season, but hasn't seen any other episodes and hasn't seen the movie yet, which I think requires some real discipline, not to consume it all at once. Last night, we were talking all about it and didn't want to tell him that in fact the seasons that he is watching right now are the best seasons and it's essentially all downhill from there. He is at that show's peak and it's a long, slow, excruciating descent after that and I should know. I used to watch that show religiously (Sunday nights) until it really started to suck.

We are expecting our first visitor tomorrow. A friend of Matt's family who graduated three or four years after us from West (god how depressing is that?) is traveling Europe and is making a stop in Cambridge, so we're very excited about that. We're going to try to take him punting, if he wants. We have yet to go so it should be fun. He is coming tomorrow so we need to pick up the flat.

Bike Stories

As you can see in the photo, Grace has a wicker basket for her bike. She can hit a button on the handlebars and it detaches so she can carry it around the market and load it up with baguettes for when she bike home. It sounds wonderful, but there's a fear that comes with it. It can be stolen easily, if she doesn't take it with her.

Theft isn't just paranoia. Within a week of buying her bike Grace had her front light and her rear mudguard stolen. We can understand the light, but the mudguard? They didn't even take the part that lets it attach to a bike frame - they just took the guard. So someone out there has a large piece of black plastic.

But the wicker basket has been OK. We've also thought of a way to lock it to the bike, if we need to.

Grace and I both have brake issues. Grace's brake problem is a lot more annoying. They squeak, really loudly. You could hear her braking a block away. It's gotten better in the past few days, because now only one of the two brakes, the front, squeals. So Grace avoids using it. My brakes on the other hand, are whisper quiet, but largely ineffective when it rains. You have to make an advance plan for when you're going to stop, because the brakes need a few seconds to get the water off them, before they actually kick in.

And it does rain a lot. Yesterday, when I finished class, it was overcast and I called Grace up to meet me at Fitzwilliam College for lunch. About five minutes into biking it started to rain. Fortunately, I got to college just before it really started to pour. Not so for Grace. She was miserably soaked. Then, on the way back, also through thick rain, her bike chain came off twice. Grace doesn't like the rain.

Because Grace's front light was stolen, and because legally, you have to have a front light to bike at night, Grace bought a replacement light. From the package, she said it looked pretty good. It had measurements of distance and lumens - not that either of us would have known what was a good rating - so she bought it. I borrowed it one night to bike over to college in the dark. The thing was completely worthless as a device to illuminate. It probably helped other people see us, but it did nothing to help me see where I was going. I had to get off and walk my bike through a footpath that had no lighting.

But, enough ragging on bikes. They do make getting around town much, much easier. Most things are only ten minutes away now, at an easy pace. The movie theatre is only a 15-20 minute ride, whereas it took us 50+ minutes to walk there. So, when all is said in done, we like the bikes. It's very practical for an area with minimal snow and ice.

Europe's Thoughts on America and Stuff

So, I'm afraid this post is going to be kind of disjointed since there are a couple random things going on.

First of all, I changed the comments section because I just figured out that you have to sign up to make a comment. Who knows if that has anything to do with the zero comments, but anyway, you can comment now if you ever want to.

So, class is going forward. We've been getting a crash course in statistics the last two days. The best part was when the professor said, offhand, that 75% of Americans think they have a book in them, but only 20% of Americans have read a book in the last year. I'm the only American in the class. After class, I was told that everyone was checking out my reaction (stone faced). I couldn't think of anyone I knew who hadn't read a book in the last year. I guess because I'm in school, and so are most people I know.

That's not the only time I've gotten the vibe that the UK, and the rest of the world, is sort of amazed (horrified?) at America. One of the guys we met at Fitzwilliam asked a lot about this show he had seen that explored American subcultures: UFO's, survivalists, porn industry, etc. I was talking to another guy, in my Economics class, about how in America, I think there's a sort of crisis about the truth's importance (think about it - "A Million Little Pieces," teaching intelligent design side by side with evolution and letting students decide their own truth, the whole history of why we invaded Iraq and how the war is going, Fox news, etc). His response was, "Yeah, the rest of the world is sort of watching you guys in horror."

And another question I got asked that was really wierd. Apparently in UK cinemas there are these public service announcements before the movie starts. They're about how pirating movies is bad and how it ruins the experience of the movie. For that part, they show an American film audience stand up at the end of a movie and applaud. This guy wanted to know if Americans really did that. I said sure, sometimes at openings, or if the movie was really good, or if it was something like "Snakes on a Plane." No one could understand why we did this - they kept asking, who are you clapping for? Somebody even said it seemed like a waste of emotion.

Well, who cares?! America #1!

So, earlier I talked about how things take a long time in Europe. Over a week ago I applied online for an international student bank account. I had gone to the branch earlier, but you can only apply for a new account online. Yesterday I got the documents I need in the mail. I went to the branch with the documents and the proof I need that I am who I said I was online. Everything moved smoothly (after I got redirected to another branch, which I couldn't find for 20 minutes). The banker photocopied my documents and told me I was done! My account would be opened up in . . . 7 days. Then I could come in and make my first deposit. Since our deposits are Foriegn Drafts (the only way to move money internationally without carrying cash or wiring it electronically) they'll take five business days to clear when we deposit them. So, in two weeks, I should have some money! To pay for college, which is asking for the money in a week! I have to talk to them about that.

New topic. Here's an observation about moving to a new city, particularly a tourist-ey city, like Cambridge or DC. Both times I've done so, I've had a similar experience. After you're in the new place for a few weeks, you start to feel really cocky, particularly when you see tourists. You think, "these guys are just passing through - but I live here!" I had the same feeling on the DC subways after I had been there a month or so. Anyway, by the eighth month I had been in DC, I didn't have that feeling at all anymore. I did have a newfound fear for my safety at night though. I think the reason I felt so confident in DC, and now in Cambridge, is because I haven't been here long enough to really think of this as the place I live. I'm much more like a super tourist - the kind of person who takes a year off to travel, and so can spend a whole month exploring Paris, instead of breezing through it in a week. But, on top of that, I can say to myself, "I LIVE here," which is another feather in my cap. After you've been in a place long enough though, you lose the tourist feeling and you're just a guy living in a place. But for now, I'm a super tourist, who has really explored Cambridge to an extent the day tripper can not.

One more new topic. We're getting a lot of talk about how difficult this year is going to be. Some of it is pretty ridiculous actually. The mild warning came in the official handbook about the course. It reads, "At the end of the acadmeic year, Diploma students are assessed using the same criteria as those taking the degree in economics. . . to achieve this end, Diploma students need to (and are expected to) work very hard - significantly harder than the average undergraduate student."

The hysterical, hyperbolic warning, comes from our statisics professor. He said something like this:

"Basically, taking the course is like hanging onto the back of a speedboat. As the boat goes farther and farther, it get harder and harder to hang on, and eventually, you won't be able to bear it and you'll let go, say in March or so, and you'll see the boat just take off and leave you in the dust. At that point you'll be totally lost. Fortunately, then you can just review a lot and make it through the exam. Because remember, you don't actually have to know the material - you just have to answer the test questions in such a way that the examiner believes you understand the material. And you can do that by practicing a lot of old test questions, since they're bound to be similar. I mean, examiners only have a limited amount of creativity."

Or today:

"The key is, you have to work hard to keep up with the lectures. Once you fall behind, you can never catch up. You'll just show up to lecture and you won't understand a word of it, and you'll collect the notes and try to work through them after class, but the class will just keep charging ahead. If that happens to you, you'll be in trouble."

So, now everyone in the course is gathering around to frighten each other even more, by saying how worried they are, and how much they're going to have to study - which is better than everyone pretending it's going to be a breeze - but it still annoys me. I always kind of liked it when the prof tells you you're going to have a monstrous amount of work ahead of you. When I think I can do it, I feel like George Bush in the early days of the Iraq war - "Bring it on."

Anyway, tonight there's a pub crawl. Hopefully it won't rain too bad.

Work Begins

I've finally begun lectures. On Monday we were introduced to the course and to each other. There are 18 people in my course. Again, it's really international - UK, Ireland, Turkey, Greece, Canada, Lithuania. The entire course is graded on two things: performance in the three hour final exams and the final project essays we have to write. We have homework due each week, but it's designed to help us make sure we know the material. It doesn't count for our grade.

We had a three hour lecture yesterday and we have another one today. Once the first week is over we'll have a little bit lighter class load acturally - 1 hour on Mondays, 4 hours on Tuesday, 2 hours on Wednesday, 1 or 2 hours on Thursday and 3 hours on Friday - until November, when we only have 1 hour on Friday. The year is divided into three terms, but we take the same three classes all year - they run continuously. Since this course is designed to count as an Undergraduate course in Economics, we actually take most of our classes with undergraduates. We haven't had any such lectures yet though.

John Maynard Keynes taught at Cambridge, so already I've heard a lot about Keynesian economics. We actually had our lecture in the Keynes room, with a photo of the guy hanging on the wall. And our lecturer said he was taught by Keynes' colleagues. Our lecturer also presented criticisms of Keynesian economics by prefacing it with, "Now I personally think Keynes was 100% right, but many people say. . ."

We also had the societies fair yesterday. It was a really big ordeal, held in a sports complex. The place was so packed that they only let people in as fair goers exited, like being in a night club or something. Inside the place was so packed you couldn't move forward. There were societies of every type. Every major religion, and then some was represented (the Athiest club was right next to the pro-life club, which I thought was interesting - the pro life guy was on his own, but the athiests were attracting quite a crowd. Every political party was there. There were a whole slew of role playing/medieval combat/live-action role playing clubs to join. There were something like eight clubs relating to international development. There were a lot of musical societies - choruses, orchestras, jazz enthusiasts, indie rockers, death metal, you name it.

On Sunday we took a walking tour of Cambridge with Fitzwilliam college. We went inside King's College Chapel, which is basically a Cathedral without wings. It was very tall, very gothic. We also learned that Cambridge University's main library is a copyright library, which means it has a copy of every book ever published in England. I went in to check it out yesterday and yes, they pretty much have every single book there is - but no DVD's, which is what I was really hoping for.

Anyway, I don't have class till this afternoon, so I'm going to try and find some new Jeans. My bike chain has eaten one of the two pairs I brought over.

Fitzwilliam College

Things are starting to happen at the college now. On Friday night we went over to the college pub and met my fellow Fitzwilliam Graduates. The next day there was a brief orientation followed by Tea. Last night there was a sort of house party for the Fitzwilliam Graduates.

The way the University of Cambridge is set up is there are something like 30 colleges within the University. Your life at the University is split between your department and your college. Your department is where your intellectual life centers - it's where you take classes, tests, and work on your degree. Your college is where the rest of your college life occurs. They provide accomodation, handle the billing, arrange social activities, provide you with grants etc.

I'm in Fitzwilliam college, a relatively young college, compared to some of the medieval ones. There are 200 graduates in the college and 112 of those are new, like me. Grace and I have been going through endless meet and greets. The progression of questions is always:
1) What is your name?
2) Where are you from?
3) What are you studying?

From there, you have to try and improvise. What we've found so far is that the student body is really international. Probably 2/3 of the people we met are not from England. There are people from the US, from China, France, Norway, Germany, South Africa, Greece, Hong Kong, Trinidad and Tobago. And most of them are in hard sciences - a lot of Chemical Engineers and Physicists in particular.

There are at least two other Economists, but both are pursuing a masters degree. In fact, I've been told there are only 12 people in my program, so we're probably spread across the colleges. I've heard a wide range of opinion about the course. Some people have said, "Oh, if you're coming from a math background, this is going to be the easiest year of your life." Others have said, "That's going to be a really intense course, since they teach a three year degree in just one year."

We seem to be the only married couple at Fitzwilliam, which surprised me. There are a lot of people who are working on PhD's after being away from school for a few years, so they're in their late 20's. There are some girlfriends, but we haven't met any other married couples. There are rumors of a married couple with a baby though.

We've been getting along really well with two guys, both named Gareth. We hit it off when Grace went on a long rant against Bill Bryson, the beloved English travel writer. He grew up in Des Moines and said some unkind and untrue things about Iowa. One of the Gareths looks a lot like Ron from Harry Potter, which is a really good sign I think.

Matt's got a bike!

Matt's got a bike now. It's red, just like mine so now we can be THAT couple that rides around town with matching bikes, wearing matching outfits, with uncovered baguettes in our wicker bike baskets.

In other news, the hot water system in Europe is utter crap. The way our water heater works is that it only warms water between the hours of midnight and seven, so that hot water is ready when you want to take a shower in the morning. Unfortunately, it's only enough water for about 7/8 a shower and once you use it all up, you're just out of luck for the rest of the day when it comes to things like washing dishes. Oh, there is this mid-day "boost" button you can use, but it takes forever and only makes up about half a tank of water and we frankly don't even know how to work it.

Tonight we are going to a drink meet-and-greet with Matt's college, Fitzwilliam College. (Cambridge is split into departments, which organize classes, exams, etc. and colleges, which handle accomodation and all the sort of social aspects of school. They kind of have varying levels of prestige, kind of like universities themselves.) Fitzies is supposed to be the most friendly college and they're supposed to be the most open to people from all walks of life.... I think that translates to, "Even if your dad isn't an MP (senator) or a wealthy alumnus of Cambridge, we'll still take you. That means you Americans. And all you Asians too." I'm just kidding. I really don't know if Cambridge is run like the American ivies. Here's hoping not, but they say class is more entrenched in British thinking than even the US.

Today we got a little card in the mail saying, "You got a package in the mail but it didn't have enough postage so we're not giving it to you until you give us the 30 pence in missing postage... Plus a one pound handling fee. Oh and you have to bike all the way across town to pick it up yourself." We went to pick up the package and it was---our lease, which the accomodations office said it would post to us immediately, since we need it to open a bank account!

Matt bought a gown today, not a ballgown, a formal robe to wear to important university events. Imagine wearing your graduation robe to go out to eat. It's got weird sleeves where the sleeve goes all the way down but the arms stick out of holes cut at the elbow and there's just a huge flap of fabric underneath. I think Matt was a little disappointed in the robe purchasing because he was really looking forward to having all those trappings and embellishments, like in Harry Potter. But it turned out to be just a black gown with no other details at all, so he was a little bummed. But mostly I think it was because he couldn't buy a wand or the newest broomstick. Poor guy, he wishes he could say this was all like Harry-Potter-esque and magical, but more accurately, it's exactly like Harry Potter without the magic and mysteries--leave in all the going to school and taking classes and working hard stuff and that's what it's like.

In more visceral news, we are slowly building up our pantry, which is a very satisfying thing. It's so nice to go to the cupboard and actually be able to cook and eat something without having to drag your butt all the way into town just for a sandwich and a Coke (well, it's worth it for the Coke). We are working on finding a wine rack so we can build a small collection for daily consumption. European wines are so much less expensive here, but considering the distance, the Californian wines make a good showing. In fact, it's possible that some wine shops are dominated by Californian wines, which is too bad, because we were trying to get away from that. Matt and I love wine. It does to food the same thing that Coke does, kind of enhances the experience. But wine feels and tastes more luxurious and suits a meal that you worked long and hard on. Coke, when you eat it with a meal, oftentimes ends up being a centerpiece in and of itself. That's not a problem.

Matt says I talk about Coke too much, but I know he agrees with everything I'm saying about it.

Matt and I saw the movie "The Children of Men" here last week--ha ha it's not even out in the states yet!!! That being said, it isn't that good. We are looking forward to seeing "The Queen" with Helen Mirren. It's got a 93 on Metacritic! Lord of the Rings Return of the King only got a 90, so this is going to be AMAZING.