Cymru

We've just returned from a trip up to Wales. Wales is a part of the United Kingdom but is it's own country. The Welsh call their country Cymru. It has it's own language, very ancient and much like Celtic and Gaelic. All the signs are written in both Welsh and English. The Welsh people, in my three day experience, are much more friendly and welcoming than those I've met in England. When you think of going to England and you think, "While I'm there I'll go to the country"... you want to go to Wales. It was absolutely beautiful. Except for the roads.

I rented a car in Aberystwith and drove up to Llandanwg, where we were staying. I've mentioned the narrow roads, right? It was a good thing the family wasn't with me (that's another story in itself) on that first drive because, while I may not have said them out loud, I was thinking some very naughty words as I piloted my Skoda Fabia down the narrow, twisty, mountain roads. I swear I am not joking when I say there were several occasions when the passenger side mirror was slapping the ivy on the rock walls beside the road as I met oncoming traffic. Other times, especially in the villages, cars would be parked on the side of the road effectively making it a single lane. There were signs, I wish I had a picture of this, that said "Oncoming traffic may be in middle of road." There was a tractor parked in the road. The blinkers were on and I suppose the farmer was in the field next to us... but I had to come to a complete stop, look around the tractor and then pass it in the oncoming lane. As you can see in the picture, there were other traffic concerns as well. These were skittish, unpredictable and very vocal.

They don't mark their roads very well, either. Speed limit signs were sporadic, at best. Much more than speed limit signs were the reminder that Speed Cameras were in use. In this country, they don't have a Highway Patrol. They just post some cameras around the roads and take the pictures of anyone speeding and mail them a ticket. The roads are primarily marked at the roundabouts, those infamous circles of death, wherein cars enter from all sides and presumably, exit the circle onto one of the connecting roads. You may be familiar with the American "spaghetti bowl." This condenses that monstrosity down to a 75 foot circle of pavement with two or three entrances/exits. It's a rush.

Wales was magnificent. The mountains. The ocean. The fields of crops and sheep. The occasional castle.

The boys swam in Cardigan Bay despite the bone-chilling temperatures and the threat of jellyfish. They splashed and screamed and threw rocks and drew their names in the wet sand. They collected shells and caught some tiny, soft-shelled crabs that ran around the beach.

The day we left the clouds broke and the sun shone on the ocean and Wales cemented it's position as My Favorite Part of the UK.

Odd bits

A couple of random things since today I spent mainly cleaning and getting ready to be gone for a week.

Overheard on the street last week and never, ever heard on the streets of Abilene: "I sure did fancy that mackerel pate."No lie, I actually heard a woman say this to her friend.

I thought I would find the British to be substantially healthier than Americans, especially in this community where there is alot of walking. Not so. The dish that England is famous for is fish and chips. This is essentially a platter sized serving of the #1 combo at Long John Silvers. Wash it all down with a warm, dark beer... now who feels like getting a little exercise?

I often think of Abilene as a college town and it is in it's own way. There are other college towns, like College Station and Norman, Oklahoma. None compare to Oxford, England. In the Oxford University system there are 59 colleges right here in Oxford. I don't know how many foreign universities maintain a campus here, as ACU does but I've seen shirts from several American universities and I routinely see groups of students speaking Italian, German, Spanish and some asian languages that I am not able to identify. Higher education is the primary industry of this city.

We had fajitas tonight. We imported some seasonings. However, we bought our sour cream here. I thought the food in Iowa was flavor-deficient... these people sell sour cream that has no flavor whatsoever.

I have to give it up for their cheeses, though. They've got some national pride tied to their cheese making and it's well deserved. We've tried several different varieties and been well pleased. They offer a rating system, from 1 to 7 for the intensity of the flavor. For example a slice of double Gloucester (similar to a really creamy American cheese) is a 1. The Red Leicester we have in our fridge is a 2 and tastes like a good, solid cheddar. Stephen Shewmaker bought a cheese rated at a 7 but I don't know if he's gotten up the courage to try it yet. Apparently, the way they make the 7's is to allow the cheese to cure and age for a much longer period of time. I guess it's like the Glenlivet... 12 years in a musty farmhouse before it sees the light of day.

I'm regaining my love for the Land Rover. The divine Mrs. L drove a Discovery for a couple of years and I really liked it alot. It's offroad capability and it's unique design made it very attractive to me. I may have to find myself an old Series 2 or Series 3 Defender when I get back to the States. That is, if I can survive the culinary onslaught.

When in doubt... punt.

We've heard much about punting the Thames. Come to find out the Thames is a nasty river and punting it is such a tourist attraction that punting the Thames is a pricey undertaking. So, spendthrifts that we are... we went punting the Cherwell.

A punt is a flat bottom boat about 16 feet long. It's about three feet wide at the center and tapers to about 20" on the ends. The pole is about 16 feet long as well.

First, there is no racing in punts. This is the slowest method of getting down a river yet invented. If you're reading this and you've never punted you might imagine that it's no big deal... you just push the little boat with the little pole and you float and everyone wears pastel colored pants and says things like, "Spot on, old chap." Not so. You push with the pole and boat turns sideways. You lift the pole up and the aromatic river water runs down your arms and into your armpits. If I hadn't received the off-handed, thirty second tutorial from the young man who worked at the rental office I'd have floundered in embarassing circles right in front of the rental place. As it was, I moved smoothly away from the rental agency and in less than 100 yards, I pretty much had the hang of it.

We went up the river about a mile and then turned around and came back down again. We smelled the fish we never saw. We saw a crawdad... not sure what the Brits call these little things... that might've been the biggest crawdad I've ever seen. We saw geese and ducks. The best moment of all was when a female duck and her ducklings came swimming over to our punt, begging for a handout and one of the ducklings swam under Susan's hand and let her touch it's downy feathers for a second or two. It was a lovely afternoon on the Cherwell.

Still doesn't explain their terrible food

I've decided that one of the key differences between England and the US is a fundamental difference in the efficiency that directs decisions all across both of our cultures.

England is an island nation, 241,000 sq.km... or slightly smaller than the state of Oregon. It is home to 60 million people.

By contrast, the US dominates the North American continent, occupies 9.16 million sq.km and is home to 298 million people.

The US has five times the number of people and 38 times the amount of space. Our two nations, similar in some ways, couldn't be more different in population density. We've got space and they've got none.

So, the underlying efficiency that guides our decisions and our engineering and our strategic planning has been fundamentally different for centuries. The overarching principle of English design and engineering is space. The overarching principle of American design and engineering is time.

There are some cities in the US where space is the premium. New York City is a jumble of high rise buildings where people are stacked on top of each other like shoes in shoeboxes at Academy. In that city I suppose I could find more similarities with this English culture. Where I live (and thank God I do) in west Texas, like most of our great nation, we are more concerned with time.

I find it frustrating to go to the grocery store three or four times a week, as I have to do here because the fridge is tiny, the stove is tiny and more than that... the grocery stores don't sell large packages of anything. I can only do about three socks and a t shirt in each load of laundry because the washer and dryer are made out of stainless steel five gallon buckets.

As I've mentioned, their cars are shockingly small. Most of the vehicles parked on the street in front of this house would honestly fit in the bed of my pickup truck. There are several vehicles that are the same in England and the US so I can give you a good comparison. The Mazda Miata is the same in both countries, except for the driver's seat, and here in England the Miata is a mid-sized, two seater. In the US it's one of the very smallest cars a person can buy. There are four door, four seater cars here that are not as long as the Miata. A Volvo wagon is one of the very largest vehicles on the road here. The roads here would absolutely not accomodate a Suburban or an Expedition.

It's not that either of us are inefficient or wasteful... we simply choose to give precedent to one factor over another.

Did I mention that we walked?

My birthday was Sunday the 16th. I woke up to the sound of seagulls in Dover, England. I went downstairs with the Divine Mrs. L and my boys and ate a traditional English breakfast... one gently fried egg (very runny), toast, tomatoe, potato, coffee, juice, bacon and sausage. If you're ever offered an English breakfast sausage, politely refuse. If you're ever offered bacon, make sure you ask for crispy bacon. Trust me.

We had all day in Dover and we planned to see the white cliffs, the Channel and Dover Castle. First, we walked up the hill to the castle. Dover Castle is astounding first for it's sheer size. It dominates the town. There are very few places in this town where the castle or it's walls cannot be seen. The castle itself stands in the center of an enormous compound surrounded by an outer wall. This outer wall starts at a chalky cliff face, travels for several miles across the hills of Dovershire and returns at last to another white cliff. The wall is 100 feet tall in places and must be 30 or 40 feet thick at the bottom. The castle, the building inhabited at times by Henry the 2nd and Henry the 8th is about seven stories tall. It sits on the highest point inside the castle grounds and provides a view from the towers all the way to France, 12 miles or so across the channel. The walls of the castle withstood a siege by the French in 1216. The kings and queens of England have relied on this castle and it's command of the harbor below for centuries.

We walked through the secret wartime tunnels under the castle grounds. The British military has dug an elaborate series of secret tunnels into the soft chalk. During World War II as many as 2000 soldiers bunked below the ground. Churchill visited several times. Admiral Ramsey is said to have saved the British Army by organizing a retreat from the advancing German army in the earliest days of the second world war. He moved 338,000 soldiers from France across to Dover in nine days by employing every boat and every able body in the port of Dover. The tunnels also housed the most powerful, state of the art radio equipment available at the time. The system in the tunnels could amplify a radio signal and send it all the way to the United States, at a time when most amplifiers had a range of 10 miles. It was crucial that Hitler not know that Britain had this capability and the tunnels provided the necessary hiding place.

After lunch on the grounds of the castle we walked down the hill into the town to let the boys enjoy a bit of time on the beach. The sun was hot, we'd sweated our way through about 47,000 steps up and down the hill and we were pretty excited about the opportunity to walk down the beach and be refreshed by the cool waters of the north Atlantic. If you've ever, at any point in your life, been to a beach... you've been to a better beach than Dover's. Dover beach was stocked with smooth gravel, heated to a low bake by the sun, bordered inland by a concrete seawall and descending rapidly into a frigid ocean. Not exactly what I'm looking for when I think beach... but that thin slice of fatty ham wasn't what I was looking for when I ordered bacon, either... it's a British thing, I guess. What surprised me most were the flocks of people gathered on the beach and swimming in the water. I have a new respect for the strength of the British populace.

After a brief dip in the chilly water we put our shoes back on and walked another mile or two down the cliffs. Susan has taken up a project of photographing the very fuzzy, very gentle British bumble bees. It's a worthy undertaking as they hustle and bustle and seldom pause for more than a fraction of a second on any given bloom. She likes a challenge though and since she's put the doctoral journey behind her, I suppose she's seeking a new outlet for her energies. So, as we walked up the path she tried in vain to capture the digital image of one of these energetic little bees. We got some pictures of her standing in front of the white cliffs, though, and that's what she really wanted. She has now stood on the very cliffs that have been the unofficial symbol for the English homeland for centuries.

Finally, we walked back to the room, gathered our backpacks, and walked back through town to the train. We rode the train back to London, grabbed a bite of bread and cheese at a grocery store and walked to our bus stop... or a bus stop near our bus stop, where it turns out we were able to see our bus loading up half a block away. Then we ran to our actual bus stop and boarded where another hour and a half ride got us back to Oxford and our house on Canterbury Road.

We greet the locals...

We found Dover at the end of a couple hours of train riding. The trains were pleasant enough. Rocking gently along the English countryside, sitting in a "suite" of six seats facing each other with a small table, we talked, played games, watched the pastoral scenes of horses, sheep and wheat fields gliding by and dozed.

Dover itself turned out to be something like Dodge City, KS. It's got a tiny little bit of "touristy" things but mostly it's just the locals trying to eke out a living. And while they're eking, they're not bathing too often or reading their copies of Ms. Manners or any other books of etiquette. We arrived around 6:45pm. We walked through the center of town and over to our B&B. We checked in, dropped our backpacks and walked back into town. The wind was chilly and the gulls were crying. Lots of the shops and restaurants were closed already. We saw several groups of local teens sitting on fences, smoking cigarettes, trying to impress the members of the opposite sex. We ate some dinner at a place called Eight Bells. Didn't hear any bells.

After the fine meal we strolled up to the castle gates and then down to the seawall. We were again greeted by the locals... a shirtless man, accompanied by two women of sturdy build, all three of whom we'd seen in the city's center earlier, walking at a pace that suggested they were late for a meeting with the Queen, though I imagine it more likely they were scheduled for a full debriefing with some lager, an amorous couple who were swimming, completely nude in the frigid English Channel, a pair of fisherman with giant fishing poles and hip waders, and a smattering of strolling older folks, who seemed content to remain clothed and dry... thank goodness.

We got a candy bar at a BP (how local is that?) and walked back to our room. We slept well, despite the seagull convention outside our B&B and the alarming amount of automotive traffic on the street in front of our little house.

Pillaging Pays

Quite a bit's happened since last update. I've got a couple of days to write about so here goes...

Saturday morning we woke early enough to pack up and leave our "home" at #10 Canterbury, Oxford at 7:15. We walked downtown and caught the bus to London. We rode the double decker for about an hour and a half and were let off on a bustling sidewalk. We promptly caught a cab and were off for a 10 minute ride to the British Library. We weren't there to get library cards (as Marx and Trotsky did) but to view their treasures. The British Library hosts the original Magna Carta. This document was the first agreement between a king and his subjects wherein a king acknowledged (rather grudgingly) that his subjects had some rights. This Great Charter was the beginning of freedoms and rights for ordinary individuals in England. This document was the beginning of the end of absolute and arbitrary rule by a monarch. It is a crucial document, an idealogical patriarch of sorts, whose descendants include our own Constitution, Bill of Rights and ironically, our Declaration of Independence from England. I stood mere inches away from the very document, complete with the King's seal which are partially responsible for the freedoms that I hold dear. There are many other valuable documents and books and texts which the Library offers for display but none compare to that masterwork.

In the afternoon we walked to the British Museum. If you're unfamiliar with British history you may not know that this tiny island once held control over or strong influence in most of the world's continents. Britian mercilessly pillaged these countries and stocked their castles and museums with artifacts from these unfortunate nations. Consequently, they have some terrific exhibits. I saw the Rosetta Stone. I saw marble carvings of Alexander the Great, Aphrodite, Socrates. I saw the remnants of a statue of a Grecian king. The crowned head alone is 20 feet tall. I saw mummies and Egyptian sarcophagi. Just like the state fair, where bored workers bread all kinds of bizarre foods and then drop them in the fryer, the Egyptians did the same with mummification, apparently. I saw a mummified babboon, mummified cats, a mummified bull and a mummified eel! The British Museum is staggering in the sheer size and depth of it's collections. I didn't begin to see all that the museum has to offer.

That evening, we hopped a train to Dover.

Bird watching, England style

I made a comment yesterday about not seeing many birds here. There are trees and shrubs everywhere but not many birds. Then I began looking in earnest for the birds that I imagined must be living here and so, I began seeing them.

There is a bird in our backyard that looks like a hybrid of a crow and a pigeon. The head is dark black, shiny with a crow's eyes and beak. The body then changes to white with a plump breast and short legs followed by a smear of blue feathers ending finally with a black tail. This conglomerated bird stalked around the yard all morning eating something out of the grass.

The second bird I noticed looked like a dove on steroids. It's just a bit smaller than a seagull. This bird is the soft gray of a west Texas mourning dove with a white band around it's throat and maybe, maybe I saw a bit of darker gray on the wings or the tail. It's flight is not anything like a dove. It coasts quite a bit, unlike doves and pigeons which seem to flap their wings almost constantly in flight.

I'll watch more carefully today to see if I can find any other interesting birds.

The dog ate my homework

I wrote an entry last night on the couch and the battery warning came on so I plugged the computer in and left it till this morning. I got up this morning and finished my writing and hit the Publish Post button... and just like that, it was all gone. I can assure you that had that blog entry survived... the writing was so brilliant and lucid that women would have fainted, children would have been quiet and still and grown men would have cried. But I lost it and all you're going to get now is the following...

Walked all over Oxford yesterday. The boys and I went down to an open air market. It sounded really promising but when we got there, it was less "farmer" and more "flea" on the scale of markets. We bought some tomatoes and some fresh bread. We then walked on to a sports store that we'd been told had some cheap soccer jerseys. Ethan had his mind set on one and he bought himself an England sleeveless jersey. As soon as we got back to the house he tore the tags off and wore it the rest of the day.

I walked a mile or so north yesterday afternoon and visited an area of the city called Summertown. They've got a couple of good grocery stores up there and we bought the goods to fix hamburgers on the grill last night. Stephen walked me past the house where JRR Tolkien lived while he wrote Lord of the Rings. Funny thing is there's nothing to it, really. There's a 14 inch plaque on the front of the house and that's all. There's no tour. There's no LOTR society meetings. Nothing but the plaque.

We grilled the burgers and walked over to University Parks. The park is owned by the University (hence the clever name) and is an oasis in the midst of this city. The Cherwell river runs along one side of the park. The immense grassy fields are smooth and soft. The park maintains at least one tree of every species native to England so there are plenty of interesting trees. The ducks and geese love to be fed, and as Susan can attest, if you don't feed them they're likely to sneak up behind you and have a nibble on your finger. We kicked the soccer ball around till we were all tired then we walked back to the house.

I'm still not exactly on the English time as midnight can roll past and I feel just fine... and then have a bit of trouble getting up in the mornings. I'm sure that just about the time we get ready to fly home I'll have made the adjustment. Now, I've gotta go and get some laundry done. Maybe, someday I'll tell you about the washing machine... it's apparently made on the same scale as the automobiles.

Across the Pond

If you've read or re-read any of the old posts you know that I spent a bit of electronic space writing primarily about political things. I stopped writing when I got a promotion at my old job and haven't had the time to pick up the "quill" since. Now, I've got five weeks to spend with wife and family in merry old England (and Germany, France and Wales) and I'm looking forward to recording some of that great experience in this blog. So, if you're still interested... read on.

First, the travel. British Airways loaded us into the next to the last row of a very large jet. Overhead storage on this jet was fantastic. No joke... I could've put Barrett and Ethan in the overhead locker. I didn't, but I could have. The seat in front of the Divine Mrs. L was occupied by a slim, asian girl and apparently was broken. Her seat leaned back so far it appeared as if Susan were her dentist. I'm certain that if the back of the seat hadn't been crushing my wife's kneecaps she could've easily leaned forward over the asian girl and had a quick conversation with her about her flossing habits and her need for more frequent cleanings. The staff were very attentive and brought a bag of candy to the boys. They brought us tiny cans of Diet Coke. They were fairly pushy however, when I attempted to use the lav while the fasten seat belt sign was lit. I wanted to tell the attendant that I was more comfortable taking the risk of being out of my seatbelt over the north Atlantic than I was sitting... needing to get rid of some of those tiny cans of Diet Coke. Thankfully for me and the next person to sit in that seat the seatbelt sign was turned off pretty soon after that.

A couple of quick observations of England... the cars are small and funny looking, the motorways are narrow... like anorexically narrow, the people who are not being paid to be friendly... are not friendly, and lots of them mumble as if pronouncing the words the wrong way wasn't hard enough on us tourists. They also call some things the wrong name altogether. Pants means underwear. Trousers means pants. It's just wrong.

Gas is about $8 a gallon here so they make these extaordinarily small cars presumably to save fuel. It's not that these cars get such great mileage it's that full-sized people are miserable when they're inside the car and the car looks so silly no one wants to be seen in it. I wondered how it is that they've maintained these 800 year old buildings that sit less than five feet from the motorway. I thought to myself, surely, over the course of the past 800 years, someone who's enjoyed a bit too much ale has careened from the motorway and smashed through the irreplacable stonework. What I know now is that some intoxicated pub patron has indeed careened from the motorway but their car weighs only 174 pounds and so it doesn't really do any damage to the heavy rock wall.

The boys each had a memorable and humorous comment yesterday that I feel it appropriate to share. Barrett said, as we pushed through damp streets full of other people who had been walking around as much as we had, "Oxford smells like the fair." The smell of sweaty people is the same whether you're at the West Texas Fair and Rodeo or on a cobble stone street in England. Then Ethan, after we'd visited Christ's Church, an enormous compound of buidings where they filmed the dining hall scenes in the Harry Potter movies, asked "Are we still at Hogwart's?" That's a whole lot of castle wall for one little boy to look at and I admit, they all started to look alike after awhile.

So begins a five week immersion in a culture other than my own. I've not seen one man in cowboy boots. I've not seen one pickup truck with a dog in the bed. I've not seen a single "mesquite smoked" sign anywhere. I've seen men in suits riding bicycles through town. I've seen a grocery store the size of my garage. I've seen a lot of buildings that were old and worn before Columbus got any ideas about the New World. I've seen a TV show called Only Fools on Horses... and that's pretty much all it was. Now, the bells just chimed 11 so I need to get some sleep and you, gentle reader, need to close up the office and go home for the night.