The Affable Hermit

2004-12-24T08:20:00.000Z

The beginning of the end

As you may have noticed, I've stopped posting to this blog. I've been in the UK long enough now that most of the novelty has worn off. Oh, there's still plenty of surprises: paranoia about electrical appliances, fixation on hovering lawnmowers, and the like. But not enough to warrant this dedicated forum

I'm now posting in a new blog, casting a wider net so to speak. You can take a peek at http://spaces.msn.com/members/jlmalaska .

Thanks for the memories, this webserver will never forget you ;)

2004-06-04T22:36:00.000+01:00

UK Food, Part II

I've touched on the subject of food periodically. After a few months of British Cuisine - with a week-long trip back to the US to really crystalize the differences - I'm finally in a good position to impart my normal dollop of topical wisdom. Stop use immediately if you see visions of badgers or a persistent rash appears.

You've already heard the good from me before:

The UK has incredibly rich desserts in wide variety, available at every supermarket and most convenience stores. Trifle! Mousse! Profitrolle!

Great Indian food! It's different than what I am used to in the states, but man is it good!

Now, before I go into the less-than-good, it's worth setting the stage a bit.

Remember that kid back in fourth grade, Tommy Thugbeater? How he would catch you during recess, after school, or pretty much whenever he felt like it? Remember how he would use the two or three hundred pounds of muscle in his beefy little body to knock you down and rub your face in the sand?

Well, maybe that was just me, but I remember it pretty well. I especially remember the gritty, tasteless texture of the sand. It wasn't bad, mind you: there were a lot worse things Tommy rubbed my face in over the years. But, neither do I go out of my way to fill my mouth with sand.

All that changed once I moved here. If you're not eating ethnic or dessert, there's a basic truth I have yet to see violated: all the food tastes the same, and that taste is sand. Even the chicken tastes like sand. I don't mean there's sand in the food, I don't mean it's gritty. I mean it reminds me of eating fine sand: sure it'll fill you up, but little or no taste. Put salt on your sand, and it'll taste like salt. Pepper? Your sand tastes like pepper. A hint of ANYTHING and it'll taste like that hint rather than sand. But you'll still know it's sand.

This isn't wild speculation. Being a scientist (more or less), I've kept a careful diary of the foods I've eaten here. After filtering out the desserts and indian food, here's what's left.

May 18 - Ate fish and chips, white horse pub. Tastes like sand with scales.
May 20 - Lasagna with meat sauce, queen's head Pub. Greasy sand.
May 21 - Cheeseburger, Hungry horse Pub. Greasy sand with cheese.

The diary goes on like this for some time, but I've already given you the flavor of it: sand, sand, sand.

Nothing happens without a reason, and every curse has its cause. After careful investigation, I found the truth. There's a world-full of bullies out there, thousands upon thousands in every year of american schoolkids. After ten or twelve years of flunking the fifth grade, the overwhelming majority emigrate to the UK, taking jobs as line-cooks in pubs. Sure, they may not be the biggest kids on the block anymore, but they're still rubbing our faces in the sand. Even worse, we're PAYING them (through the pub) for the sand!

Still, I'm careful not to complain (to them). After all, I've got to eat something, and even sand can leave you feeling full. Second, I'd rather have food that tastes like sand, than eat food which tastes like sand someone spit in.

Which brings me to the advice I promised you at the beginning of this missive. Want good food in the UK? Then you have three choices.

Eat ethnic food, such as Indian or Thai

Eat dessert instead of other foods. This is my fallback position, at least until my arms no longer extend far enough out of my bloated torso to pick things up.

Bring a healthy (you know what I mean) supply your own food from the US.

Stay tuned for a future entry where I describe the lengths customs will go to in determining whether or not you've got food someplace besides your suitcase...

Happy trails,
the affable hermit

2004-05-30T08:47:00.000+01:00

Living in UK: The good bits

Recently I returned to the US and met with friends and family. Those who read this blog expressed sympathy for the complicated, substandard life I've relegated myself to. This was quite a surprise to me, as overall life after moving has had equal measure of pro's and con's. Certainly I've had to make adjustments, but many of them mean getting used to a better way of doing things.

I suspect that in presenting my experiences, I've chosen topics with the hope of entertaining, which invariably means picking those involving no small amount of personal frustration or pain.

In this entry, dear reader, I hope to present some of the positives of moving to the UK. Never let it be said that every word to cross my lips is a curse.

There's any number of advantages to living in the UK, compared with the US.

Cheap long distance
I spent the last seven years living fifty miles away from several members of my family, just far enough to incur local long distance. I lived several states away from my brother, and so ironically paid cheaper inter-state rates to speak with him.

If you want to call anyplace outside of the US or Canada from the states, be prepared to pay through the nose. For example, it cost between $0.45 and $2 a minute for my wife to call her family in Egypt from Seattle.

Calling cards are even more plentiful in the UK than in the US. Unlike the US, they give great international rates as well as low rates within the country. How good? Adjusting for currency, I can call any relative in the US from Cambridge for $0.05 a minute, or $3.00 an hour. Even better, my wife can call Egypt for $0.18 a minute.

In general it's cheaper for me to call most anyone by long distance from here than it is to call them from the US. So, if you've got a lot of friends to call around the US, best to book an extra day on a trip to the UK, and spend it on the phone.

Good public transportation
If you've read my earlier entries, you already know this, but it bears repeating: UK Public transportation is outstanding compared to the US. In London the tube makes life incredibly convenient. For the parts of London I've seen, we were never more than a few minutes from a tube stop, and that means never more than a few minutes from anywhere in the city. All without the hassle of parking.

Bus service is also superior to the US. Buses run regularly, are clean, and in general the drivers are polite and the passengers clean and quiet. My only notes of caution: buses tend to be a bit expensive, at least in Cambridge. Also, if you're riding the upper level of a double-decker, remember to make sure you're under six feet tall, or do a lot of slouching. All of this while being grateful for the extra seats two floors of bus provide, of course.

If you're traveling more than a couple miles, train service is a great alternative to driving. I can actually get to downtown London more quickly from my home by going to the train station and catching a train than I can by driving. Trains are frequent, very fast (the London train must do 90 MPH in some stretches), and comfortable.

Ironically the locals bellyache about public transport and how ghastly it is compared to the rest of Europe. They should take a week-long trip to any city in the US (well, maybe not NYC) and try to live without a rental car. That should open their eyes and close their mouths.

Beautiful countryside
The UK - at least as far as I've seen - is sharply partitioned into land set aside for habitation, and that reserved for farming or as parks. Consequently going anywhere in the countryside is a beautiful, relaxing experience. It feels like 95% of the country is farmland, rolling green hills and peacefully grazing animals. The inhabited pieces of land, while admittedly population dense, have a unique flavor to them because of this dichotomy between farmland and living space.

History, history, history!
Everyplace here reeks with history. Most towns are hundreds, even thousands of years old. There are beautiful cathedrals, churches, castles, and myriad other sights pretty much anyplace you go. If you're a history buff, you'll be in heaven looking up the bloody or regal events that took place on any given patch of land. Even if you're not, the buildings are beautiful to look at.

As children in the US we're inundated with nursery rhymes, legends, and ancient stories. Many of these are based around real people and places in the UK. Remeber the man on his way to St. Ives who met a man with seven wives? St. Ives is perhaps a dozen miles from where I sit at this moment, a beautiful medievally founded village. What about Robin Hood? Nottingham isn't just where he scrapped with the evil sherrif, it's a great place for shopping if you're up for a two hour drive from Cambridge. London bridge may have fallen down, but there's plenty of other interesting sights remaining in the UK's showcase city.

Living surrounded by so much history is truly a privilege, one of which I hope to take more advantage.

Easy access to Europe
This only makes sense, as the UK is actually part of Europe. Nevertheless it's worth mentioning explicitly. We're planning our first vacation from Cambridge, a week-long trip to Germany. In the past, that would have needed to be at least a two week trip to let us get over jet lag, and to justify the time and expense of flying 11 hours each direction.

Now, however, every part of Europe can be reached via a flight of less than three hours. Our trip to Germany, for example, will require a 90 minute flight, and cost (including tax) less than $150 round trip. Hotels and rental car will no doubt be expensive, but at least the up-front cost is minimal. Look at http://www.ryanair.com and http://www.easyjet.com for insanely low european airfares.

If you're interested in European travel, it's hard to beat the convenience of starting out on the same continent when setting forth.

Better work-life balance
I have to give a disclaimer here. Better work-life balance doesn't really apply to me as a wage slave in a multi-national corporation, but it does apply to folks living and working in the UK in general.

The regulation work week here is 7.5 hours a day, for a total of 37.5 hours a week. They have slightly more fixed holidays (called "bank holidays") than the US. Retail hours tend to be limited, which means far more people get evenings off.

People also have a great deal more vacation than we're used to in the US. 5-6 weeks of vacation a year seems fairly normal, and even more surprising, it's expected you'll make use of the time you've been given.

Look at it this way. In a given year, an average youngish US resident might work the regulation 40 hours a week, receive 2 weeks of discretionary vacation a year, and another 9 days of national holidays. Subtracting out holidays from working time, this is a total of 1928 hours of work over 241 working days.

In the UK they will work 37.5 hours a week, receive 5 weeks of discretionary vacation, and 10 days of national holidays. This is a total of 1688 hours of work over 225 working days.

By these calculations, the UK worker works 12.5% less than the US worker. If the average person is awake for 16 hours a day, the UK worker spends 29% of their waking hours at work, as opposed to the US worker's 33%. 4% doesn't sound like much, until you realize that 4% of a year's waking time is 233 hours, or about an extra hour every working day. What would you do with an extra hour a day?

Even better from the UK perspective, excessive overtime and ignoring vacations looks to be much more common in the US than in the UK. This tilts the scales even further in favor of the UK worker.

I hope this brief ray of sunshine will help convince you that living abroad isn't all blood and misery. Perhaps I'll have more to say about it in a year.

Until then, I remain comfortably ensconced,
the affable hermit

2004-05-11T22:36:00.000+01:00

Plumbing in the UK
I've referred to the differences in plumbing a few times in passing, but now that I'm a hoary old veteran of one month's experience, it seems an ideal time for me to go into some detail.

Like everything else in the UK, the standards of plumbing are quite different from the US. As I explain in excruciating detail, you will no doubt consider what I say to be so outrageous as to seem impossible: I assure you, every word, as always, is true. As a keen observer of the facilities in at least TWO different places, I am uniquely positioned to warn you about what may come.

One odd note before I launch into description of the plumbing proper: most bathrooms here are CARPETED. This means you have to be especially careful about spilling water onto them, stepping out of the shower, etc. Nobody likes a sopping, nasty, moldy carpet.

And now, on to tales of basin faucets, toilets, and showers.

Faucets
For the most part I've only lived in newer areas in the US, such as Seattle and Anchorage. and so I've always taken mixer taps for granted. What is a mixer tap? Much like explaining to your child that people didn't always have cars, I find myself in the odd position of needing to recount the history of innovation. While it's true man has always had hot and cold running water, I'm afraid the mixer tap - at least for wash basins - is a much more recent invention.

"Mixer tap" is a short way of saying "a tap which mixes hot and cold water together." Before the mixer tap, hot and cold running water were delivered by separate spigots, each with its own handle. Skilled craftsmen spent hundreds of hours with primitive flint instruments producing ornate handles, These handles were often shaped from sticks, chipped stones, or -- in special cases -- sparrow bones. Some primitive mixer taps can still be seen at a number of sites in the states, such as the 'prehistoric artifacts' section of the smithsonian natural history museum.

If you don't fancy a trip to the Smithsonian, you can travel to the UK and visit any private or public facility lucky enough to have running water. There you will find two separate taps over a basin, and a rubber or ceramic stopper dangling from a chain. If it's an especially fancy basin, the chain will retract into the base of the spigot - I kid you not.

In the UK, if you want to wash, you have two choices:

Choose a single tap at random, and either scald or freeze your hands - depending upon your choice - by running water over them.
Plug the basin, fill it with water from both taps at the same time, and wash up in it

I usually choose freezing, personally. The second option - filling the basin - really isn't an option at all, in my opinion. You're either in a public washroom, or in a private washroom - perhaps in the house you're staying in - which has plumbing potentially thousands of years old. If it's a public washroom, lord knows what people put into those basins when no one is watching. At best, other people have washed and the detritus which flaked, oozed, or fell off of them is liberally scattered along the surface, waiting for your water to liberate it into solution. At worst, well, use your imagination, or borrow a five-year-old's scatological bent.

If you do happen to find a mixer tap in the UK, think back on this cautionary tale: the mixer taps in the master suite were, in fact, one of the selling points of the house we wound up leasing. After the first day of moving in, a long, sweaty day, I was preparing for bed. I went to wash my face, anticipating this measure of familiar comfort. Imagine my horror as, after I let the water run a while then put my hands underneath, one froze while the other scalded beet red! After much cursing, hand-shaking, and a short sting of the ceremonial "ouchie!" dance, I made a closer examination of the faucet and learned the ugly truth. This so-called MIXER tap is, in fact, two separate spigots running up a single larger casing. Hot water comes out the right side, and cold the left. If you look closely as the water runs, you can see two streams of water coming out, almost but not quite touching.

This says something about the UK, but I'm not sure what: It has to be more difficult and expensive to arrange the taps this way. Extra piping to keep the water streams separate, an extra-weird aerator. I'm tempted to crack the outer casing of the taps open, where I would no doubt find space-age polymer thermos insulation around each tap to keep the cold ice cold, and the hot side piping hot.

Maybe it says the British love their basin stoppers.

Toilets
UK toilets come in a dizzying array of sizes and shapes. Some look much like their american counterparts, at least on the outside. Some have a squat basin on the floor, and a water tank near the ceiling, with a chain descending four feet so short people can flush too. Some have a push-button on the top of the tank. Some have a door-handle style lever you rotate on the front, similar to American toilets but much, much larger. And, some have an oversized light switch you push down to flush.

One attribute these toilets share regardless of design: they're almost impossible to flush. And, in case you're tempted, don't go to a native for sympathy. Compared to the humiliation of potty training, learning to flush a British toilet was probably a walk in the park. As a measure of revenge, I'm tempted to push US legislation which will cause american toilet handles to administer a stiff jolt of electricity when flushed in the distinctly British fashion.

What's different from the American fashion? Take the classic flush, by American standards: You push it down and release, and the toilet flushes, right? Wrong! Try that here, and the toilet gurgles. So you push the handle down and hold it down. The toilet gurgles. You push it down and pull it up in rapid succession, envisioning your activity pumping water into the tank from a well buried beneath the house. The toilet gurgles, gurgles, gurgles, then breaks down in a fit of watery laughter at your naivete.

The secret to these toilets? Flush, but at precisely the right speed, and hold the handle for just the right amount of time before releasing. Do it right, and you're rewarded with a healthy whoosh! and swirl. Otherwise, a gurgle if you're lucky. I recommend bringing a stopwatch with you so you can calibrate the six characteristic measures of handle depression velocity and bottom dwell-time.

Another interesting aspect of the average toilet here: the laughably low water level. In the US most toilet bowls are hemispheres with a hole cut out near the bottom rear for stuff to flush out. Water fills up about half the toilet bowl, so as you *ahem* do your business, you're all but guaranteed to hit water. In the UK, the master flushers must also be crack marksmen (so to speak). The UK toilet bowl is much steeper, shaped more like a funnel than a hemisphere. Water only fills what would be the neck of the toilet, perhaps a tenth of the cross section of the bowl. This makes hitting the water a statistical anomaly. Should you NOT hit the water, you leave your mark in a relatively indelible fashion. The only remedy for this mark - as far as I can make out - is to either master the art of flushing and practice 20 or 30 times, or to break out the omnipresent toilet brush and give a scrub. This, of course, leads to its own problems which for delicacies sake I won't discuss.

After six weeks here, I'm still practicing skills I thought I'd mastered decades ago. Intellectually I recognize that I should be grateful there's any sort of toilet at all. It's far easier to use than the hole in a concrete pad (I kid you not) I've experienced in some places in Egypt, and in Italian train stations. Those things make using a British toilet look like child's play.

Showers
As I've mentioned offhand in the past, I'm a tad on the large size. As in, tall and *ahem* big-boned. Nevertheless, US showers have always fit me well, even when they're relatively small. Relatively small, that is, for an American shower. Moving to the UK has dropped the bottom off the 'small' scale.

Our home has a single shower in the en suite bathroom. As an aside, the en suite itself is laughably small, not uncommon for en-suites, as they're often shoehorned into a space the size of an American closet. The en-suite contains everything you need: a toilet, a basin, and a shower. Unfortunately, they're all crushed together. With the bathroom door shut, there's perhaps four square feet of floorspace spread here and there. The wash basin, for example, is a scant 16 inches from the door, and close enough to the toilet that you had better like it as more than a friend.

Finally, the shower takes up one end of the bathroom. It's nicely appointed, but incredibly small. The height is fine, but at 2.5' by 2.25', space inside the shower is at a real economy.
Worse, the shower door opens inwards rather than outwards. The door is hinged in the middle, When you open it, one end slides in a track at the edge of the door, and the hinged center moves towards the center of the shower as the door folds in half. When it's half-shut, the edge of the door is 14" from the deepest part of the shower. For reference, a typical doorway is 30" wide.

Getting into the shower is of necessity a ballet. First, you close the door most of the way and get the water up to temperature. You dare not shut off the water to get in, because water is demand-heated (a different story), and turning it off for long enough to get into the shower will introduce a 30-second gap where you get nothing but cold water - water you can't escape from, because the shower is too small. So, you try instead to turn the shower head to the side and sneak in, praying water doesn't splash all over the carpet. Once you make it in, you squish as flat as possible against one corner of the shower so you can close the door again.

Now you're in the shower, heaving a sigh of relief. There's a problem: you still have to wash. If you're my size, you're in real trouble. I can't lift both my arms up at the same time, because of the shower's dimensions. Nor can I move my head out of the stream of water coming from the shower head, so I take a face full of water while I soap my hair. Finally, there are, I am sad to report, places I just can't wash because the shower is so small.

Still, it beats not having a shower at all, and the water pressure is good, a rarity in the UK. In this case I'll count my blessings every time I pirouhette into and out of the stall.

The moral
The moral to this story is, treat British plumbing with a healthy dose of suspicion and respect. Experiment with the facilities before you're in urgent need of them. And finally, don't assume anything based on your American experience. As I've often been told, assumption makes an ass out of "U" and umption.

wearily yours,
The Affable Hermit

2004-04-27T00:16:00.000+01:00

The Wonders of Cable TV in the UK

There are precious few things sociologists require to identify a viable civilization: specialization, language, agriculture, and of course cable (or cable-like) television. What is "cable-like?" I mean, of course, satellite.. satallite, sat - you know what I mean. And, since you know what I mean, assume that "cable" means both cable and that other type of non-broadcast television.

If in your daily life you're used to having a dizzying array of televised crap to choose from, it can be truly enlightening to live a few days without cable. Undoubtedly you've had to do so on vacation, but that's vacation, and doesn't really count, as you're alienated from most things that define your daily life. Television deprivation needs to be in the comfort of your permanent home to really count. That's when it sinks in that you really are responsible for entertaining yourself, and you're going to have to learn to read or garden or make conversation with strangers to keep from going mad. Oh, the humanity!

So far the wife and I have been living in furnished temporary housing, complete with "Sky," the local cable-like provider. As a side note, I can't help but be entertained every time I hear the name. Despite it never having been printed, I have no doubt but that the name is actually "skynet."

One thing I found shocking here: cable coverage hasn't penetrated every nook and cranny, and in fact appears to have missed broad swathes of otherwise civilized land. To my horror, even relatively new housing developments (such as the one we're moving into) sometimes don't have cable. Imagine my distress at being forced to choose between cable television or "over the air." It's like choosing between chocolate or something that looks like chocolate but is less appetizing and doesn't smell nearly as good. In short, not much of a choice at all.

Now that you know the basic choices for media, it seems only fair to tell you a bit about what you'll find on TV here, and the *ahem* uniqueness of dealing with Sky to order TV.

Content
The most obvious thing about UK television is the drastic reduction in commercials. Alright, that's a lie, the most obvious thing is that everyone speaks with a variety of funny accents. The second most obvious thing is the reduction in commercials. Shows which take a half hour to broadcast in the US (20-22 minutes of programming, 8-10 minutes of advertising and credits) require 22-25 minutes here. On the down side, the commercials they show don't have the sheer entertainment value of US commercials. They're on par with the commercials you see on cable made by local fly-by-night operations. Except in the UK, those are the good ones.

Another difference, less obvious but as welcome as a breath of fresh air, is the - for lack of a better phrase - more cosmopolitan nature of some of the programming. By cosmopolitan, I mean of course the sort of nudity or near-nudity you find gracing the pages of "cosmo." During daytime hours it's minor things, a bare bum or chest. Enough to set the censors in the US to frothing at the mouth, but not enough to cause paralysis, blindness, or death in the unwitting, at least judging by the relatively healthy appearance of the local children.

Things get a bit more extreme in the evening. Several of the channels give over from their normal programming to celebrate the needs of lonely asocial men with wads of cash and a real knack for SMS-messaging (typing messages over the keys of their cell phones). Several channels show rather bored-looking women accepting direction from SMS messages happily displayed across the bottom of the screen. For my money this is a lot like going to a strip club: exciting and novel for a few minutes, and monotonous from then on.

There's also a half dozen channels dedicated to those wanting to date, filled with nothing but text ads or the transcripts of people SMS messaging, again in real time. You know, I think there's a real opportunity for someone to introduce the target population to the BBS's we used in the US in the 70's and 80's. A BBS with a 300-baud modem strikes me as a real step forward technologically from SMS messaging.

Ignore the question of whether this content is tacky or obscene: I myself find it refreshing. Society here may be every bit as hypocritical as it is in the US. Where the body is concerned, at least, it's on a bit more even keel. It would be interesting to see what people here think of the controversy which swept the US for weeks, A 3-second flash of Janet Jackson's cleavage, with the naughty bits covered by a pastie fer-cryin-out-loud. But I digress...

Moving on to programming in general, programming here is different from, but at worst of roughly equivalent quality to the US. At best, it's downright entertaining. I was pleased to find my favorite stand-by's, such as Discovery channels, CNN, Bloomberg, Disney, and a ton of American sit-coms on a variety of local channels. "The Simpsons" and "Friends" are especially popular, with probably a dozen episodes of the former and a half dozen of the latter daily. Apparently "too much of a good thing" doesn't apply here.

One topic which is well-covered in local television is housing. This makes sense, given the presence of houses ranging from brand new to five hundred years old. As near as I can tell, the vast majority of television-worthy houses were decorated during the depths of hippy and disco depravity, but that's a story for another day...

Anyways, the housing shows are surprisingly interesting, and cover everything from how to find a house to how to restore a house to how to clean, sell, remodel, or vandalize it. It may sound boring, but the vast majority of these programs are really rather... hypnotic. In fact, this genre has replaced CNN as the type of show requiring a daily fix.

Shopping channels also seem to be very popular here, at least on SkyNet (sorry, Sky). There's probably 30 shopping channels, with a good half dozen dedicated to selling vacation packages. Interesting stuff, really, especially with all the vacation you get at a typical job here (4-6 weeks).

OK, so now you know that cable (and near-cable) is at least as viable here as it is in the US. The real question becomes, what does it take to get service?

Ordering
In some cases you'll be lucky enough to have a choice between a cable or a satellite providers. In other, less happy circumstances, you'll be forced to go with satellite. My experience with trying to obtain this near-cable solution brought me through the whole range of human emotions. I laughed, I cried, I kissed my cash goodbye...

Things started out well enough. I went to the Sky website, hoping to make a simple selection of services. The folks at Sky, however, had other plans for my day.

To start with, their website is extremely confusing. It was incredibly difficult to find out what choices are available for equipment and packages, and how much things cost. And if you're interested in their new "sky+" package, it's five times as bad, requiring you to navigate through a very trendy but poorly organized flash site. After a half hour of browsing, I finally came to the conclusion that there was no way for me to obtain the (relatively low-end) service I wanted short of calling and talking to a human being. They literally refuse to sell it online, reserving online sales for services costing half again as much as the one I wanted.

Fine. I called their automated line, and after a series of touch-tone commands, found the menu for new equipment orders. There were two options. 1) order Skynet+ (their satellite + tivo equivalent, pricey!), or 2) Get their "digital receiver box package" deal. Hmmm, neither sounded like what I wanted, so I hit '0.' In any company wishing to sell product and make money, this gets you a human who will do their best to part you from your hard-earned dosh. Not at Sky. "I'm sorry," came the recorded reply, "but I'm unable to understand what you want. Sorry we can't help you. Goodbye." First a refusal to sell me what I want over their website, then a phone system that disconnects me rather than helping me to buy what I want. Never have I had a company try so hard to keep me from purchasing their product.

Ever the optimist, I called back, navigated my way back to the product menu, and selected (2), since I did want a couple of digital receiver boxes (with certain options). A few seconds later, I was talking to a living, breathing human being with a cool Irish (or perhaps Scottish) accent. Cool, but a little difficult to understand. As I would determine later, the company must be headquartered in either Ireland or Scotland, else it has a remarkable statistical anomaly in call center staff.

Anyways, the operator helped me choose the service option I wanted. Sort of. As it turned out, if I only wanted to get the 20 pounds a month option (no movie or sports channels), I would have to pay a 60 pound installation fee and 100 pounds to purchase the satellite receiver outright, for a grand total of 160 pounds plus 20 pounds a month. Or, lucky man that I am, they had a special where I could sign up for their premium channel selection (40 pounds a month), get a free receiver, and installation for a pound. After a month, I could switch back to the cheaper service I wanted in the first place, saving me 140 pounds. Brilliant! We went through the particulars, and the deal was nearly done. Then *it* happened.

"Oh - I almost forgot - I'd like to get a second receiver." The operator was quiet for a moment, then said apologetically. "You should have told me that at the beginning. You'll have to place a separate call, and pay 100 pounds for the receiver, and 60 pounds for installation." Shocked at the additional installation charge for them to hand me the receiver, and balking at forking out 100 pounds to buy more hardware, I vacillated. Despite my best efforts, there was no way for her to waive the installation fee, even if the receiver showed up at the same time. I whined, wheedled, and begged to no avail. Grumbling, I left the order as it was and hung up.

Upon reflection, I thought about five minutes of legalese the operator had read to me in her sweet but think accent. A typical excerpt went something like this: "brishabrasha the service brouda ha und dar felza toda enda." Have you seen Brad Pitt in "Snatch?" It wasn't quite that bad, but not so far off. Fortunately I caught one part in the middle which would dictate the course of much of the rest of my day: "you can cancel any time before installation."

I decided to cancel the order and try again, so I could at the very least get rid of the second installation charge. And, if I was going to have to pay 160 pounds for the second receiver, why not just take advantage of their Sky+ (tivo-like) deal for 200 pounds that gets me two receivers anyways, one of which is a tivo?

Steeling my nerves, I rang up their order line again. It was a tangled path I walked, talking to a succession of people, each of whom apologetically told me in their charming Irish / Scottish accent that they couldn't help me, but knew just the person who could, and they would transfer me. By the way, if you're offended by my inability to tell the difference between Irish and Scottish accents, I do apologize. Once I'm a little more broadly traveled, I will know. In any case, after a third person confirmed that I really DID want to cancel, they passed me on to a fourth person who they assured me could help.

"Help" may be a bit misleading, much like "pet" is a euphemistic way of saying "beat with a lead pipe." It's far more accurate to say instead that I was passed to a fourth person who had the power to cancel my request.

Like the others before him, operator #4 had a strong Scottish accent. So strong, in fact, that an image taken from some movie seen in childhood materialized in my mind, solidifying until it was impossible for me to listen without picturing exactly what operator #4 looked like. I could see him, mid-sixties in a conservative woolen suit, thick rimless glasses and a ready smile, and a plaid hat perched upon his head.

"Whudyawanna cancel fer, now?" was his first question. A small digression here. In writing class, I was taught that it's absolutely ineffective to try and capture slang and accents with ungrammatical dialogue. Rather, you should stick to grammatically correct statements, and rely upon interspersed narrative to give the reader a feel for the voice of the speaker. I don't have the talent to make that happen. I'll instead rely upon my old standby, paraphrasing. To start again:

"Are you insane?" he asked me. "Why would you turn down a deal like this? Why do you want to cancel?"
I explained that I wasn't used to paying for the equipment to receive cable (or even cable-like TV), and that $275 (that's 160 pounds sterling, give or take) seemed like a lot of money to me.
"But look what you get! Great TV! What other choice do you have?"
I pointed out that there are some broadcast digital services available for free (counter-intuitively named 'freecast', and that though the channel selection is limited, it's got most of what I care about.
"You ARE insane! Freecast has nothing but shows selling travel packages."
This last, sadly, is less of a paraphrase than you might hope. I informed him that though there are shopping channels, I was pretty sure freecast also had the occasional news blurb or television show.
"But their receiver costs money, and ours is almost free! But, if you really want to cancel, fine. I can do that for you, hold on."
Satisfied, I waited expectantly. The initial pause became a delay. The delay, a pregnant pause. The pregnant pause was rudely interrupted before it could become an extended delay, as my 60-something tartaned operator spoke up again.
"I just don't understand it. It doesn't make any sense."
At this point, the combination of the ridiculous business rules, the image I had of this kindly Scottish professor / gentleman, and his accent began to get to me. A stab of guilt strikes me as I think how similar his accent is to, oddly enough, Americans pretending to have Scottish or Irish accents in comedy skits. Except he's doing a really, really good job of it. This makes his accent even funnier.
"Why not just get this? You get a box for free, and free installation. What have you got to lose."
My god - his deadpan delivery, beautiful! I grin like a maniac and my eyes tear up, as I do my level best not to laugh aloud. Somehow I don't think he'd understand. Instead, I retreat into the safe haven of mathematics, trying to explain that outright buying the hardware to support a service I have to pay for is more expensive than getting the hardware for free.
"Nutter, why would we give you the hardware for free? It costs money."
Rather than pointing out the free-receiver free-installation offer he's trying to talk me into, I decide to cut my losses. I bite my tongue and continue to insist I just want to cancel the order. A few minutes later he acquiesced, and the order was cancelled. The irony of all of this, of course, is that if they'd just waved the installation fee - which I can make happen by simply mentioning I want a second box when I start my order - then I probably would have purchased Sky. C'est la vie...

Now I'm stuck in a moral quandary: should I buy this satellite service, paying perhaps $1,000 for a year of service, or should I suck it up and spend the time broadening my horizons (in other words browsing the web and playing Battlefield 1942)? Only time will tell.

In any case, there are several morals you can learn from my painful experience.

Don't assume you can get broadband, cable, and / or satellite everywhere if you move to the UK. Check carefully before you sign a rental agreement, if these things are important to you.

Inquire carefully about all the costs involved in obtaining these services. Vendor websites range from adequate to incredibly confusing, so you might have to actually talk to a human to get the straight dope. Now, if only the accents weren't incredibly confusing...

Remember, accents are not always intended as a comedy device. May I never have to receive bad news from someone who speaks with an Irish or Scottish accent. After this experience, I don't think I could keep a straight face, and I don't think I would survive the beating my inappropriate mirth would earn me.

Paraphrasing instead of transliterating regional dialect isn't nearly as entertaining as you might hope. Consider recording sound samples instead, should you find yourself in my unenviable shoes.

Bombastically yours,
the affable hermit

2004-04-14T19:59:00.000+01:00

Getting a bank account in the UK

One of the sternest warnings issued by the expatriate community to new arrivals (such as myself) is this: be prepared for an uphill battle when trying to obtain a bank account. Unlike the US, you can't just walk into a bank, wave a sweaty wad of cash, and be granted a bank account. Instead, you must have appropriate documentation. Lots of appropriate documentation.

The basics for any bank include:

A letter of recommendation from someone they trust, such as your UK workplace (*if* they have a previous agreement), the pope, or Jim Carrey. A letter from your US bank definitely will not work.

If your workplace vouches for you, you must provide a signed work contract showing that not only will your workplace vouch for you, but they're contractually obligated to pay you.

A signed tenancy agreement (or lease) proving that you have a place of residence, and listing the address.

A vial of dragon's blood, preferably 13th or 14th century

Mind, you can't just walk into the bank, present these documents, and get an account. I had to call the bank up and make an appointment for a few days in the future. The day of the appointment I showed up and presented the items listed above. Then we spent a half hour filling out several pages of paperwork specifying what type of accounts I wanted, whether I need house or car insurance, how I like to invest, and three of my favorite polka bands.

Let me interject something here: the bank officer who helped me is an extremely nice, friendly, reasonable lady. She knows the rules are odd to an American, but she also knows they have to be followed. You don't lightly ignore financial regulations, after all.

A half hour after starting the appointment, I was done. The bank officer shook my hand and informed me I'd find out whether I can get a bank account in 5-10 business days.

Less than two weeks later, I got a call from someone I shall call Mr. X, as I’d never heard of him. Mr. X informed me he was with the bank I applied for an account with, and I had indeed been granted the privilege of banking there. He proceeded to ask me a number of intimate questions. How much worth of investments do I have? How much in savings? Retirement? What type of retirement? Am I going to play the markets in the UK? How much do I make a year (also on the application, by the way)? How much do I expect to deposit a year? I grudgingly answered these questions, unsure whether failing to do so would cancel my account.

After 15 minutes of uncomfortable financial grilling, he gave me my bank account numbers, and a "60-day savings" account. Neither the original bank officer I worked with nor myself are quite sure why I have this account. Apparently I need to put 10,000 pounds into it (ha! Ha-ha!) to even use it. We can only assume that Mr. X found my financial details exciting enough to give me the account, and it’s up to me to make enough to find out what it is. Perhaps I'll look it up some day for novelty's sake.

With my bank numbers firmly in hand, I retrieved my first paycheck from work, and wandered to the local bank branch to deposit it and withdraw some cash. I’d been spending from US accounts and the exchange rate sucks right now, so I was very much looking forward to getting to spend money earned as pounds instead. The check was drawn on a London bank (45 minutes away if you've read my other logs), but I was informed by the teller that it will take 5 business days for the draft to clear. If it had been a local check drawn from the bank I was transacting at, it could have cleared as quickly as the end of the day. Based on the clearing delay, I can only surmise that London is to Cambridge as New Jersey is to Washington State. Either that, or someone at the bank gets cash the instant anyone deposits a London check, takes it back to their flat, and rolls in it cackling with greedy glee.

Adding your spouse to your bank account
Despite my disappointment at being unable to actually TOUCH any of my paycheck yet, the wife and I decided – foolishly – to try to add her to my bank account. I'd been sternly warned by my work that trying to create the account with my wife’s name could result in a delay of a month or even longer, so I hadn’t even tried.

We were feeling cocky: I had my account numbers, and what would someday be my money was in a cackling madman’s house, waiting its five days before it could rejoin me. We saw a personal banker sitting quietly at her desk by the bank door, and asked if we could add my wife to my account. She told us we needed an appointment (of course) to do it. However, she must have gotten bored, because when we asked again a few minutes later, she agreed to help us out.

The first thing she asked was whether my wife is working, and how much she makes. My wife isn’t working yet, as we've just moved. This was apparently not a very good answer. Next, the personal banker wanted a utility bill with both my and my wife's names on it, along with the bank account’s address. Unfortunately the utilities are established in my name, since my wife couldn’t set them up under her name without income.

We wheedled and begged. What about our passports as proof of our relationship? My work visa is in both, will that work? Nope. US drivers licenses with us both at the same address? Not good enough. Marriage certificate? Not relevant. It has to be a utility bill with both our names, and the address of the account.

I'm just glad I didn't get a post office box as I'd originally planned. I doubt my wife would fit.

Anyways, the banker was apologetic and acknowledged the rules must seem very odd to us (they did, at the time). But, she simply couldn't do anything. With a sigh (and the occasional muttering) we left.

As it turns out, there is good reason for this precise rule. A little research on the internet revealed that the bank we're dealing with is over 300 years old! That's a lot of time for process to be established and obsoleted (but never removed). There is a logical historical basis for this very rule.

In 1738 Elsa and Anthony Grammer lived at 15 White Horse lane, in London. Through a postal misadventure, Elsa discovered there was another Anthony Grammer (let’s call him Tony) also in London. Elsa, being of dubious background, decided to see if she could help herself to Tony’s money. She learned Tony’s account number and branch, then showed the relevant bank manager a marriage certificate – listing herself and Anthony Grammer - as proof she should be on the account. A few weeks and several hundred pounds sterling later, Tony was outraged to discover his hard-earned wages had been siphoned by a wife he’d never even slept with. In a fit of rage Tony challenged the bank manager to a duel at the edge of the Thames, which he subsequently won.

To protect the savings of their clientele and the lives of their managers, the bank has since that day required definitive proof from a trusted third party of a person's name and address before adding them as additional parties on an account. This rule makes it harder for incorrigibles such as Elsa to abuse the system, and usually results in a utility manager rather than a bank manager being shot (as happened in 1748 and again in 1751) should something go wrong.

Filled with a new appreciation for the bank's concern for my savings and for the health of the banking community at large, my wife happily called the utility company and added herself to the account. The utility company was unphased by her different last name, and made her a co-owner of the account without any proof of identity whatsoever. She should be able to steal the next statement from my mailbox and add herself to the bank account in no time.

And, when I finally get my money from my account and my wife is added to it, I fully expect the bank to be playing all three polka’s specified on my application.

epilogue
Despite my sometimes questionable narrative above, you should take the difficulty of getting a UK bank account seriously. Consult with your work before relocating to find out the best way to get a bank account. If they don't have a prior arrangement with a specific bank officer (as my work did), then a simple letter of introduction may not be sufficient.

Bemusedly yours,
the affable hermit

2004-04-12T09:53:00.000+01:00

Easter Weekend in London

This weekend was Easter weekend, a four-day weekend in the UK. From what I've seen on television, Easter is to UK travel what Thanksgiving is to US travel: one of the busiest times of the year.

Our original plan was to take advantage of the weekend to travel to someplace by air. If you've ever tried to book Thanksgiving travel the week of Thanksgiving, you probably already know how successful we were. Fortunately there was one trip available with little or no advance notice: a train ride into London.

The Train
Last week I wrote about the adventure of driving into London. We planned to stay for three days this visit, and so opted for the train to minimize concerns about parking a car for multiple days in the city. A London-bound train leaves Cambridge three times an hour in the morning. Return (round-trip) tickets were reasonable, at 21 pounds per person. They work on any train bound for the appropriate destination. Within a few minutes of buying the tickets, we were comfortably ensconced on the train, heading for London.

The train was quite comfortable, the non-stop train a little more so than the regional which makes several stops along the way. Each car is a single compartment with a mix of forward and backwards facing seats. Bathrooms are available, and on the express train someone actually came through vending tea and snacks. There are luggage racks above the seats, large enough to hold backpacks, coats, and small carry-on suitcases.

The train was quiet, comfortable, and fast. I was truly shocked at how quickly the countryside streaked by: we must have been doing at least 90 MPH at times. At other times the train slowed down, making its way around curves in the small towns scattered along the way. Even with stops, the trip takes less than an hour.

While a little more expensive than the drive-and-park option, the train is still a great deal in my opinion, and probably the way we'll opt to get into London from now on unless we're going to Costco.

The underground
I've already raved a bit about the tube in earlier entries. I'm happy to say that this trip only reinforced my positive perspective on the underground. It's an incredibly convenient way to get pretty much anywhere in London, at least the places tourists such as myself are interested in going.

The underground cars are clean, though there's a wide variety in ages. The platforms and corridors are also tidy. Depending upon the size of the station, there's a variety of shops available, ranging from news stands to food to pub's. For many of the stations you need to walk at least some stairs, but for any significant changes in elevation there are usually escallators available.

For the most part, the different underground lines are clearly posted on the corridors leading to them. Likewise, the trains themselves have the line name painted on the side, to help in the rare case when a single platform services multiple underground lines. Walls in each station are painted with the name of the station (easily seen from the cars), and a partial route map starting with the current stop, and showing subsequent stops.

Even inside the underground cars, they've got the route maps painted. Sometimes they have an automated voice announcement and a scrolling LED display stating the next stop and / or final destination for the train. Out of perhaps two dozen trips we only got on the wrong underground train once, and even then all the signs, etc, helped us realize it immediately, and we were able to switch to the opposite direction train at the next platform.

If you find yourself on an eastbound platform and want to go westbound, it's usually a simple matter of walking through a five meter connecting passage to the opposite direction. If you want to switch routes in a station, you will usually need to walk through a series of corridors to reach the other platforms, but the way is always well-signed. Or, if you just want to exit, follow the signs which read "way out."

The underground trains come frequently, but not so often that you won't be waiting a few minutes from time to time. Also, depending upon the line and the time there can be large crowds when you enter a platform. The crowds usually get smaller the further you walk from the platform entrance. Making the extra effort to walk down the platform before the train shows up is often the difference between standing or sitting on your journey.

Overall the tube is a great way to get around. It's worth mentioning, though, that the walking to get a station, from the station entrance to the platform, and then out again on the other side does add up. Going from the London Eye to Soho, for example, took us almost 30 minutes: 10 minute walk to the platform, 3 minute wait for the train, 5-10 minute train ride, and then walking on the other end. Make sure you take this into account when you're planning trips.

One nice thing about the tube vs. Driving: You don't have to take the same route to and from a destination. For example, we took a tube to one end of Portobello Market (mentioned later), walked the market, and then caught a tube out at the other end. It was much more pleasant than having to fight our way back to a car through a busy crowd past shops we'd already seen.

Buying underground tickets
Tickets can be bought for a variety of purposes. A single trip will cost you a pound or two. If you're planning on taking several trains, you can buy day passes, weekend passes, weekly, and monthly passes, or even family passes.

In addition to knowing how long you want tickets for, you'll also need to say what parts of the city you're planning on visiting.

The city is divided into concentric zones. Zones 1 and 2 are the city center, and 3-6 range further and further out. We got weekend passes for zone 1 & 2 for around 6 pounds per person. These let us go everywhere of interest for this trip, including all the major museums and Notting Hill.

Interesting sights
We saw a lot of great stuff this trip. Unfortunately the holiday weekend ensured that most sights were too crowded to be very enjoyable. Some of the sites we wanted to see were unavailable because of the holiday weekend.

Big Ben, Parliament, Westminster Abbey
We saw the outside of the Parliament building (and consequently Big Ben), as well as Westminster Abbey. At first I thought Parliament was the abbey, until signage told us otherwise. I just don't know enough about European architecture to discern the difference, even when it's patently obvious (in retrospect). If you visit, the Parliament building is attached to Big Ben and visible from the Thames. Westminster is a white building past the Parliament building. Unfortunately I believe both the Parliament and Westminster were closed to tourists because it was Good Friday.

Cabinet War Rooms
This is a set of underground rooms beneath a nondescript government ministry. Much of world war II was directed from this small set of underground bunkers. Entry cost 7.50 apiece, including a free audio guide. The guide adds a lot to a tour of the rooms, so make sure you pick it up. The single most shocking thing to me was how small everything was. It's hard to imagine the prime minister and the war cabinet working in these tiny, cramped rooms.

In a few of the rooms, maps and charts from the period underscore the impact of the war on the UK. Having lived in the US my whole life and been spared having any war affect my home, it's hard to imagine how difficult life must have been for everyone in London. The audio tour was interesting and didn't take long (45 minutes).

Still, there's a number of other museums I would recommend over this one, if you've got a limited time to spend in London.

Portobello Market
This is a well-established market road in Notting hill, just off the main drag. According to my wife, it's got two THOUSAND booths on the weekends. This is in addition to the thousands of shops already lining the road and some of the side-streets.

The market was absolutely swamped when we were there. Imagine a 1-1/2 mile road in your favorite town. Now fill 1/3 of its width with booths, and 2/3 (plus sidewalks and the interior of most of the interesting shops) with shoulder-to-shoulder people. I can only compare the crush of people to what I've experienced at rock concerts or popular festivals such as The Taste of Seattle. It was truly amazing how packed the place was, there must have been at LEAST tens of thousands of people.

The market is mostly antiques, but also includes fresh produce, clothes, and the sort of crap (luggage, trinkets, etc.) you normally find at swapmeets. In addition to the booths, there were tons of shops, some subdivided into dozens of tiny antiques stalls.

Before visiting the Portobello Antique market ("the biggest in the world"), I'd entertained notions of starting to collect antiques. Those thoughts are pretty much gone now: there's just too much crap out there, and too much to know. I have no idea how to tell the good from the bad. Still, it was a lot of fun (though overwhelming) to look through. Among the things I found the most interesting:

Old hand-tools, including measures, drills, clamps, saws, etc. Some looked well over a hundred years old!

Armor and weapons. I couldn't tell how the pieces were, but there were a lot of rusted and battered swords, and pieces of armor such as shin-guards, gauntlets, and helmets. Ah, if only I could tell the difference between an old, rusted replica and an old, rusted authentic piece of armor...

Old books and lithographs. There were first editions of Dickens books, The history of Napoleon (while he was still alive), and many older intact books. There were also stalls that specialized in taking 200-400 year old books, cutting off the binding, and matting individual pages for sale. Many of the lithographs caught my eye, but I avoided spending the 30-40 pounds they were asking for each.

Jewelry - LOTS of unique jewelry. If you have a sweetie (or buy jewelry for yourself) you could get stuff here that you would never see anywhere else. In many booths they had a bin filled with earrings, pendants, and necklaces, your choice for five pounds

We're planning on going back sometime, preferably on a weekday where we can check out the shops without the distraction of the street booths, and hopefully with enough room to turn around without knocking someone over. I have to say, Portobello market is pretty high on my list of cool places to see.

The Natural History museum
Like most of the places we visited, the museum was overrun by people on holiday. Nevertheless, what we saw of it was amazing! We will definitely make a full day trip back just to get a better look. The building alone is cool enough that I took more pictures of its exterior than any other single site in London, including the Tower of London. There's lots of interesting detail, including carved columns and different types of stone animals sitting above and below windows. There's more detail in the walls than I've seen in any building save perhaps a cathedral.

And inside? Forget it! The place would take several days to fully explore. We looked at some of the dinosaur exhibits in the entry hall (a mixture of skeleton replicas and real skeletons), and walked through an exhibit on human biology (with some very - egads! - explicit statues describing human fertilization). It's my favorite museum so far in London, which is saying something.

Shows
We saw two shows while we were in town, Blood Brothers and Stomp. Both shows were great, ten times better than watching a movie (or a tape of a Stomp performance). Both times we got our tickets from a place called Tkts in Leicester (pronounced "lester") square. There's a bunch of half-price ticket places around there, but this one (in the square proper) has the best reputation, and reasonable service fees (2.50 per ticket).

Blood Brothers was a musical drama about twins who just don't seem to get a break in their funny / depressing lives. It was a little under three hours, and for impatient me felt a little long even with the intermission. Still, the story was great, the acting outstanding, and the singing amazing. It's definitely the best musical I've ever seen, though all I have to compare it with are shows I've seen in Anchorage and Fairbanks. I guess there's something to be said for the quality of theater in a town big enough to draw talented actors internationally...

Stomp was great. I've seen a couple taped performances from them, but could never sit through more than 20 minutes at a go. The difference seeing a Stomp troop in person is remarkable: I was grinning all the way through the performance, and really enjoyed the feel of the music, as well as the personality of the cast. The Performance lasted a little under two hours, and I would have been happy to sit through more.

Public Manners
People often say the British are cold or haughty. My experience has been just the opposite: in the right setting people have been friendlier to strangers than in the US. On this trip two different sets of people approached us and struck up conversations, once on a train and once in a queue. In this regard, people are friendlier and more approachable than in the US, without being annoying.

On the other hand, some of the social conventions here are considered downright rude where I'm from. This is my problem, since I'm not from HERE. I saw enough of this so-called rude behavior to realize it's the just expected here. The strongest single example is in respecting personal spaces and the "don't touch me" rule. I was jostled several times - sometimes sharply - by people in passing. Likewise, if I wasn't obviously in queue for something, people have no hesitation to leap past you into the queue. They don't ask you, or say sorry if they've hit you. In fact, they seem determined to avoid eye contact.

In the parts of the US I've lived in this is a fairly direct way of asking for an ass-kicking, but here it seems to be business as usual. I can only speculate that this is because you can't help jostling people when you're in a city with this kind of population density, and nobody wants to spend their entire life saying "sorry - excuse me!"

BUT, if you aren't prepared for this, you could easily come away with the perception that the Brits are a rude lot who hate you because you're foreign. As the friendly folks who approached us show, the average population seems a little nicer and friendlier than folks in the US. It's just different social conventions. Now, to keep telling myself this every time I'm in public and someone is rude to me :)

Whew! That was a marathon session. I hope at least parts of it are useful or interesting to you. Please let me know what you find interesting / boring, so I can tune (and trim) future entries.

Wearily yours,
the affable hermit

2004-04-05T16:44:00.000+01:00

Driving in Cambridge and London

Communications and specialization are widely acknowledged as the basis for human civilization. Nowhere is the validity of this assertion more evident than the task of navigating in foreign environs.

We rented a car on Friday evening, with the intention of driving into London. As it turned out, driving the 1.5 miles between Enterprise rentals and our temporary flat was an epic challenge. Nevermind getting to London!

Side-note: According to sundry websites, Cambridge was founded by the Romans. Cambridge University started in the 12th or 13th century, so the city itself is at least 800 years old. Like many old cities, its city plan is wheel-and-spoke rather than a grid. The city is centered around a small market. Roads go concentrically out from there, with seldom a straight line. In fact, the straightest thing in the old part of the city is the river, which is bad news for lovers of simple navigation. Here's a map so you can see for yourself. Now, imagine that a random smattering of roads are either one-way, or have retractable roadblocks preventing unapproved cars from passing through.

My wife does all our driving. Why? Because the Brits drive on the WRONG side of the road. I'm used to American driving: right side. This is English driving: left side. My wife has an advantage because in addition to American driving, she's also used to Egyptian driving: every side. For that matter, Egyptian driving includes sidewalks, dirt paths, firmly packed sand, and staircases if the grade isn't too steep. But I digress.

After carefully calculating a route through Cambridge from the car rental place, we diligentlyigintly in our specialized capacities, my wife driving, and myself tracing a map with my finger, shrieking useful suggestions such as "turn, back there!" Nevertheless, we managed to make it to our home with only a few detours. Our journey was augmented by subtle things such as:

Roads which almost meet. Sure, they look like they intersect on the map - and they do. You just can't drive over the curb and one foot of grass separating the streets. Well, my wife probably could, but doesn't out of deference to my nervous nature.
Pedestrian roads. These used to be driveable roads, but now they're reserved for bicycles and pedestrians. Sometimes these have posts in the middle of the road to allow bicycles but not cars. Sometimes the posts are mechanically actuated and move up and down under the watchful eye of a camera. Someone in a control room watches the space before the post, and lowers the it if you're allowed to go through (busses and taxis). I've heard horror stories of these posts being raised again under cars which try to sneak in after a bus, totalling the car by ripping the undercarriage up.

After a good night's sleep, we felt up to tackling a more aggressive goal: driving to Costco on the northern outskirts of London, and then to an underground station. When I say outskirts, what I really mean is "only a few miles into London proper." It's not quite as confusing as driving in Cambridge, but the sheer scale of the city makes navigation a much more intimidating proposition. Add to that the lack of visible landmarks, the haphazard posting of street signs, and the maniacal / homicidal nature of most big-city drivers, and you've got a recipe for fun times.

Did I mention the streets are signed inconsistently? No nice little poles with names as in the US. No, on the somewhat rare occasion a street sign is posted for a given street, it's bolted in a random position on the side of a building. It certainly adds a splash of adventure to any navigational trip, as there's only so much of a building's wall you can visually scan before you pass it.

We left Cambridge on the M11 (a nice highway) to get to London. After 45 miles of leisurely driving, it was time to take the plunge onto the ring road around London. We made it on alright, but the exits were confusing. We exited at the right spot, and then had no idea which way we needed to go, or for that matter, which way we were going. After a lot of confusion, we did manage to find Costco. Then again, Costco is big enough to be its own navigation landmark. Despite that, I still managed to guid us through a few mis-turns. Chalk one up for the navigator!

After finishing at Costco (more on that another day), we departed in search of a particular tube (subway) station. Our plan was to park near it a particular station, then make a laid-back trip into the heart of London. I'd carefully plotted a course through the myriad sidestreets on my AtoZ, and had high hopes of making the 2-mile trip to our tube station without getting lost.

AtoZ, by the way, is a very popular brand for road maps here. They're not great, but they're not bad either. if you're in the UK and need a reliable map, it's not a bad choice.

My carefully plotted course went awry at the very first turn. Exits off motorways (such as the ring road) are a bit confusing to foreigners such as myself, so we missed the exit we wanted and instead took the next one. I frantically whipped through the map to figure out where we were, trying in vain to keep up with the realtime demand of navigating us toward an alternate tube station. With only five or six mistaken turns, we managed to find one (as we were driving past). Grumbling, we decided moving on to a third station would be easier than trying to turn around.

On our way to the third station, we found a parking lot, and parked with the expectation of having to walk a ways. Walking a mile is, after all, easier than turning around without getting lost. Parking was shockingly cheap, 2 pounds sterling for 24 hours. The station turned out to be directly across the street from the parking lot, and we were able to get on the subway with no problem. The tube was, delightfully, every bit as straightforward and relaxing as we'd hoped.

When our time sightseeing had expired, we grabbed a tube back to the station by our car. We made it out of London with very few problems: in coming to this third station, we'd nearly made our way back to Costco (in a round-about fashion), and were very close to (relatively) familiar territory.

I'll tell you more about London (awesome!) and the tube (very convenient!) in another episode. This one's already way too long. But, if you are to take anything away from this cautionary tale of navigation, try to remember:

Driving in UK cities is difficult because they weren't originally intended for driving. The roads aren't straight, there are parts reserved solely for pedestrians, etc. I should also mention that buildings are numbered sequentially up one side of the road, and then back down on the other. So on a road that goes from 1 to 100, 1 and 100 will be right across the street from each other - maybe! Good luck finding 73 High Street :)
You'll be best off with a navigator. So, bring a friend, and cut them some slack if they're American. The average UK city map is confusing enough to be in a cartography GRE.
Remind yourself: you're not getting lost, you're experiencing the historical diversity of the city's transportation grid. This will make the detours a little more palatable. No, really!
Bring enough food and water to survive several days in case you get REALLY lost. No, scratch that: it's hard to go anywhere without tripping across a pub. Bring enough money for several days of heavy drinking to drown your navigational sorrows instead.

If you're used to driving in an area which has visible landmarks (such as mountains), I recommend a small compass like the one I'm going to buy. You'd be shocked at just how difficult it is to tell which direction you're driving, and how easy it is to get lost.

More in the future,
The affable hermit

2004-03-31T10:43:00.000+01:00

Living in Cambridge: the first days

I'm now a resident of Cambridge, exciting stuff! We arrived in the City in mid-afternoon on Friday, and it's now Wednesday of the following week. It's been an eventful few days, though quieter than I expected. This entry will be fairly discontinuous, owing to the variety of things experienced.

Shopping is expensive and time-compressed

As new arrivals, we've been wandering around trying to get a feel for good places to get food and sundries. We've come across some universal truths, part from our experience, and part from the advice of people who live here.

1. Stuff is expensive. It's true. Cambridge prices are about the same as London prices, from what I've been told. If you want cheaper stuff, you need to go further away from London. Manchester and Nottingham were both suggested as good places to go if you have significant amounts of shopping to do. I'm also looking forward to a visit to Costco (near London) this weekend. It'll be interesting to see how their prices compare to what I've seen in Kirkland (US).

2. Stuff is expensive. While foodstuffs aren't ridiculously priced, some of my staples (CD's, DVD's, electronics) are. CD's seem to range from 5 pounds to 14 pounds. DVD's range from 5 pounds ($9) to 25 pounds ($45). Today the pound is worth about $1.83, so that's a pretty hefty tax. I need shoes, so I also found out sneakers cost in pounds about what they would be in dollars in the US. Likewise, electronics vary between being a little more expensive than the US (2400 pounds for a $4000 plasma TV), and being the same in pounds what it would cost in dollars. For example, I'm seeing Dell computers for 500 pounds that I could get for a little under $500 in the US. Scary!

3. Mail order is still cheaper. This is true in the UK as well as the US. Friends have recommended that we shop for CD's and DVD's via mail order, and expect to pay about the same as the US. I'll have to check this out for myself before I can comment for certain.

4. Retail hours are short. I've been spoiled by US shopping hours. For example, the malls I like are generally open 9-9 six days a week, and 11-7 the seventh. Hours for most places in Cambridge (including malls!) are more like 9:30 - 5:30. We went for a walk at 6pm on Tuesday, and the only shops still open were SOME of the restaurants, pubs, and mini-marts. I guess most people in the UK have a life, and enjoy leisurely evenings and weekends. This is great for their quality of life, but a little inconvenient if you work and want to get any shopping done.

Indian food is good, desserts are yummy

We've eaten at a few indian places since arriving. The food is quite good, and cheap for the UK, though still more expensive than the US. For example, we had a bare-bones indian dinner last night with two chicken curries, one order of boiled rice, and one piece of Nan for about 12 pounds, or about $20. Note that you're getting less of each item than you would in the US: portions are much more reasonable.

The desserts are incredible! They have lots of pastries, rich chocolate cakes, mousses -- the list goes on and on. I've always been a little on the heavy side, but given the delectable desserts, my new goal is to turn my shape perfectly spherical. Sure it'll suck being larger, but the fun I'll have getting there!

If you don't want to go to a restaurant, you can always buy prepared foods - the equivalent of US TV dinners. These are much better in the UK, and available from many supermarkets, such as Marks & Spencers, ASDA, and Tesco. The prepared foods appear to be fresh and then refrigerated, not frozen. They are IMO just as good as eating out at a restaurant, and much cheaper. You can get a good prepared indian dinner for a couple of pounds. Yummy!

Cambridge is bicycle-friendly

On our second day here, I stopped at the local bike shop (Mike's Bikes) and rented a mountain bike, lights, and lock for 10 pounds for a week. It's really been a blast to be able to bicycle to work in 10 or 15 minutes. A lot of the streets in the city center are off-limits to cars, but fine for pedestrians and bicycles. In addition there are footpaths leading through Cambridge and on to outlying villages, intended for pedestrians and bicycles. It's a great way to get around without risking the inadvertent wrath of an inattentive driver.

There are bicycles *everywhere* here. You can ride anywhere cars go, and a lot of places they don't. One thing I really enjoyed seeing was the variety of folks cycling. I've seen sixty and seventy-year old people riding bicycles to get around. Very cool!

Cities are noisy

Our temporary housing is off Warkworth street, near Parker's piece in the heart of the city. It's a Victorian row house which has been converted to a set of to-hire apartments called the Warkworth Villa's. They're pretty nice, though a little small by American standards. Nevertheless, if you come with your sweetie and don't have four huge suitcases, you'll probably be very comfortable there.

The neighborhood we're in -- and most neighborhoods around the city center, for that matter -- has quite a bit of student housing. The row-house across from us looks like it used to be a single home, but has now been converted to nine apartments. This leads to a lot of traffic (mostly on foot or cycle) on these little side-streets.

The noise isn't unusual for an urban environment - it's certainly less than I bumped into living off the market street in Shadyside, Pittsburgh. But, it's a lot more than I'm used to from living in a house in Woodinville.

Pubs let out around 11pm. You can definitely tell, because there's a noisy influx of people in the neighborhood around 11:30pm. I'm a little frightened because I was told that school is not in session right now. It'll be interesting to see how things work once the students are back in town.

Living in town is incredible for the convenience. We can walk to the local mall (the Grafton Center), the bus depot, and to a variety of food and shops. A little noise is the price you pay, but it's well worth it for short stints.

Enough for now. I've got to get some work done!

happily yours,
the affable hermit

2004-03-20T16:37:00.000Z

Driving in Cambridge

Driving in the UK is interesting, and a fair bit different from driving in the US. The most obvious thing is the requirement of driving on the left side of the road rather than the right, and consequent reversal of the steering wheel in the car.

If you think about it a little more, you'll realize this means the gear shifter needs to be worked with the left hand rather than the right, since it remains in the center of the car. My left-handed wife assures me this is no problem, but until I have to do it myself, I remain skeptical. Fortunately the pedals remain in the same relative position, clutch-brake-gas from left to right.

There's another, less obvious implication: all of your driving instincts from the US are wrong in the UK. OK, not all of them: "stop for stoplights" for example still holds true, at least when you bump into a stoplight rather than a round-about (more on them later). And, 'never run over a badger' remains a solid guideline. Other things are less obvious.

For example, you pull out to take a right turn. In the US you look left at oncoming traffic to make sure you've got enough space to get up to speed. In the UK (because of that other-side-of-the-road thing) you need to look left at oncoming traffic to make sure you've got enough time to get up to speed, and right to make sure that you're not going to get clobbered while you're crossing the road. Sound easy? I beg to differ. Among other things, if you don't watch for long enough, you'll mistake oncoming vs. leaving traffic because of the sides of the road. You'll have to try it yourself.

The best rule of thumb: do NOT drive on mental autopilot for your first month. Think carefully about every single thing you do, no matter how trivial it seems. Watch out for nasty curbs that can grind your tires. Learn your car's outside edges from your new seat. Get used to incredibly narrow roads. Always allow yourself more time than you think you need to pull out into traffic. Don't take chances.

And of course, get used to round-abouts.

What is a round-about? It's the European answer to traffic lights in many cases. Imagine you have a four-way intersection with a traffic light. Now, get rid of the traffic light, and center a 50' diameter circle on the intersection. Put a road going around the edge of the circle, and fill the middle in with grass. If you want to turn left, you turn left and drive around 1/4 of the circle to your street. If you want to go straight, 1/2 the circle. If you want to turn right, you first turn left, then drive around 3/4 of the circle, then exit on the street you want.

The rule for a round-about is easy: always yield to your right. If you see a car coming in the segment of the circle immediately to your right, wait. Otherwise, take a left into the circle.

It sounds confusing, but after seeing these babies in action, I must confess a certain admiration for their devious elegance. : in many cases you simply slow down to pass through the circle, rather than having to stop. And even when you stop, it's seldom for long. Compare this to sitting on your butt for two minutes watching an empty intersection in the states.

There are certainly still stoplights here and there, but for the most part, the traffic circles are used (at least around Cambridge) and work great.

There is one tricky bit to mention. Sometimes the circles aren't really circles. In these cases, the intersection is just a little larger than a typical 4-way intersection with a light. Rather than having a traffic circle with grass in the middle, it has a circle a couple of feet in diameter painted in the middle of the road, which people largely drive over anyways. However, these still seem to function very well.

It's also worth mentioning that circles can be used for 3-way, 5-way, and who knows how-many-way intersections as well as 4-way intersections.

Stay tuned for the next episode, when I describe how UK cars violate the laws of space by being larger inside than they are outside...

the affable hermit

2004-03-14T03:30:00.000Z

House-hunting in Cambridge

I just returned from a week-long trip to Cambridge to house-hunt. It was a remarkable experience, facilitated by Relocation East Anglia, and in particular an extremely friendly and helpful fellow named Paul Eaton.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am being relocated by my company from Seattle, Washington to Cambridge, UK. They're paying a number of the costs associated with the move, including consultants to help with house-hunting, etc. Relocation East Anglia is the firm which helped us find a new place to live.

Today I live in a reasonably sized house in Woodinville, Washington: 3 bedrooms, about 2,000 square feet. It's just the wife and I, and we don't have what I feel to be a lot of furniture. I foolishly hoped to find a similar property in Cambridge for about what I pay here.

The house-hunting trip was a real education. A couple of things I hold true:

English houses are, for the most part, much smaller than their American counterparts

English houses are, for the most part, much more expensive than their American counterparts.

The reason is simple: tight regulation of land when it comes to building new housing. It looks to be much more difficult for builders to obtain permission to convert open land (such as farmland) to housing tracts than it is in the states. Consequently builders seek to maximize the amount of housing they can squeeze into the plots they get permission to build. One side effect of this policy is a remarkable difference in appearance between Cambridge and the US. In Cambridge and the surrounding villages, there's a binary transition from the town to fields, from city to farmland. The cities and villages are densely packed clusters of houses and shops, surrounded by beautiful fields and pastures.

In the US, on the other hand, houses seem to slowly taper off as you leave the center of population. For the parts I've seen (west coast, Midwest, east coast), there's no such solid demarcation between inhabited and uninhabited lands.

Anyways, the ultimate effect is that housing is very expensive. I imagine my current house, if magically transported to a village near Cambridge, would probably cost at least 400,000 pounds. I assure you it's worth nothing near that in its present location :). My budget is much smaller than that, so we really had to struggle to find a place to live in the UK.

Paul Eaton did a great job of setting our expectations before we showed up. "Do you really need more than one bathroom?" "Do you really need a garage? Dedicated parking?" "Do you really need a third bedroom?" "Are two receptions [living room and family room, I thought, but actually living room and dining room] a requirement?" Good lord. I thought we were prepared to pay a fairly handsome amount of money, but it turns out that the money is more like handsome chicken feed. If you want a reasonably modern 3-bedroom in Cambridge, be prepared to pay at least 900 pounds a month, and potentially quite a bit more, depending upon where it's located.

Once in Cambridge, we were shown about 40 different properties, ranging from a fantastic "grade II listed" cottage (meaning it's old and basically an historic building) to brand new townhouses being built perhaps 10 miles outside of Cambridge.

An interesting things about looking for a place to rent in Cambridge: You usually talk to 'estate agents' who will show you the property. I understand they tend to be 9-to-5 M-F folks, unlike US real estate folks who will happily show you properties morning, noon or night any day of the week. I'm unsure whether this is a UK-wide phenomena, or localized to Cambridge.

Anyways, we did finally find a place that is within our budget, and also within Cambridge city limits. It has most everything we were looking for, including a powder room ("cloak room") downstairs, an upstairs bathroom ("family bath"), and a bathroom off the master bedroom ("en suite"). It has three (smallish) bedrooms, a family room, a dining room, and a kitchen.

Things that would strike you about this (and most modern) house, if you were used to US houses.

It's small. It starts out small, and gets smaller because of differences from American bedrooms.

Bedrooms can be classified as double (holds at least a double bed, e.g. 8'x10') or single (good luck fitting even a small bed in, seen them as small as 6'x7')

Most bedrooms don't have *any* closets. You have to buy wardrobes to put in the room, which will make it even smaller.

It's heated with radiators. Virtually all houses and flats are heated with radiators. They're much more compact than what you might be used to seeing from college, but they still take up space. There's a lot of complaining about houses always being cold during the winter, I have yet to see if this is true.

Kitchens are often tiny. Even if they're not tiny, the number of appliances they have sequestered in a typical kitchen (built-in dishwasher, clothes washer, fridge, freezer, oven/stove) leaves remarkably little cupboard space, even when there's a lot of floor space. Refrigerators are MUCH smaller, and often are divided into separate built-in freezer and built-in fridge snugged into less space than a dishwasher (each) under the counter. We'll have to get used to keeping much less food in the house.

Garages - if you have one - are incredibly small. Some are so small that most cars won't fit inside them. You certainly can't store anything in an average garage if you're intended to park in it.

Lawns are usually small. They can be incredibly small, or just small. Though sometimes they're long and narrow. I saw a couple houses on plots of land that looked to be about a quarter as wide as they are deep.

Bathrooms are carpeted. I don't know why, but it seems to be pretty typical. It must be nasty when a shower leaks or a toilet overflows.

Carpet colors can be *ahem* creative. It wasn't uncommon at all to see a mixture of carpet colors within a house. For example, one large house we liked had dark blue carpet in the bedrooms, reddish-pink carpet in the family room, and green carpet in the corridors. Egads!

Houses are small. Sure I said it before, but it bears repeating...

Anyways, at the end of our house-hunting trip we did manage to put in an application to rent the house we like. Hopefully the land-lord will say yes, and soon: we are applying for our visa (required for long-term workers like me, even from the US) on Monday, and one of the requirements is a residence address in the UK.

In summary, houses are on average smaller in the UK, and have an emphasis on different things than we expected based on our experience in the US. If you're house-hunting, think carefully about what you MUST have, rather than what you're used to having. There's a pretty big difference between the two in most cases.

More to come...
the affable hermit

2004-03-14T03:18:00.000Z

The Beginning

Why am I writing this? A better question is, why are you reading it? Maybe I pointed you here, and out of pity or guilt you decided to at least check it out. Maybe you google'd a term like "American expatriate in Cambridge UK" and tripped across it. Maybe your cat sat on the keyboard and hit precisely the right/wrong sequence of keys to bring you here.

OK, enough about you.

I'm a software developer for a multinational software company. A few months ago I saw a job posting for what looks like my dream job: working on productizing research from the research branch of the company. Just one problem -- the job is in Cambridge, UK. I'm in Seattle, Washinton (USA). And, of course, I just bought a house.

To make a long story short, the job was so interesting that I decided it would be worth the effort of relocating to give it a shot. I accepted the position a few weeks ago, and will be relocating to Cambridge (along with my very forgiving wife) in another two weeks.

This blog will largely be dedicated to explaining the in's and out's of relocating from the US to Cambridge from my perspective. We found the musings of other invaluable while considering this move, and so I hope to contribute a bit back to the community.

Being a natural-born windbag, I'm sure I'll be unable to refrain from commenting on other topics ranging from the latest computing fads to the lingering death of extended family as a cultural staple. Lucky you, it's incredibly easy to skip forward when I bore you.

In any case, welcome, and I hope you find useful information in what will come, or are at least entertained. Please let me know what you think...

Slovenly yours, the affable hermit