Last entry of 2011

Happy Holidays from the UK! Here are some recent photos from the end of 2011.

Langley Moor is a modest village two miles outside of Durham and my new home. The east coast rail line runs intersects the part of town, and the main road runs from Neville’s Cross on the west side of Durham out to Brandon. This place has a community feel, the old ladies on the bus all chat with each other, and the guys go to the pub to watch football. According to Peter the pub owner, we are to support Sunderland (not Newcastle) if we want to drink at his bar. We’ve met a handful of our neighbors now, and all are really friendly.

Here are some photos from the neighborhood to give you a feel for the place:











Also got to visit London last month to see my friend Lori who has just moved there, and Dan, who is in London quite often. We explored some new neighborhoods and walked along the canal. We checked out the markets in Camden and Hackney. And had my first British Sunday roast courtesy of Sarah.






And took in the light-inspired art of Lumiere here in Durham.




One more thing, I contributed to this book, and had a hearty laugh when I saw the cover!



Enjoy your holidays. Wish I were a bit closer, especially at this time of year. Keep in touch!

Who's Lachlan anyway?

So here's the guy that I moved to the UK to be with, the one who just asked me to marry him. We met in Finland, he's from Australia...(which begs the question...)Last week he organized a nice sunny day and surprised me with a boat ride on the River Wear. The proposal was a surprise - was too touched by the boat ride to be prepared for anything else.

For those of you who haven't met Lachlan, he's an engineer from Australia, has worked for quite a while at Nokia, and specializes in 3D displays in a field known as stereoscopy. He's now at Durham University getting going on a PhD. He's sweet and outgoing and has more than his share of joie de vivre. He puts ginger in every dish he cooks, no matter the cuisine. His mom is Dutch. He strongly dislikes Fosters. He's quick to inform you that Adelaide was NOT a penal colony. He snowboards, spins poi, and is a card carrying member of the SCA. He'll try just about anything. He's one of the most positive people I have ever met.

This new situation is sinking in nicely. Don't have any other details to share. But look forward to the future and am grateful for the support we've already received. Thanks!

Class field trip

I am taking a creative writing class at Durham. It's free! And the teacher is great. We went on a field trip to a deer park (an English thing?) and had afternoon tea. Here are some pictures (the fancy ones were taken my a classmate)

Throwin' back

For some reason living here in England has taken me back in time. Way back. Maybe not because I’m in England, or maybe so. I’ll explain in reverse chronological order.

1. Whist card games. (14 years +) I’ve never been good at cards or any other kind of game that requires strategy or patience. As a kid I used to walk out on board games in frustration when I wasn’t winning. (Otherwise I think I was a pretty nice kid). Well, I didn’t even know what a whist game was until this week, and maybe that’s only a term they use in England. I found myself in a place called Pity Me, which is a neighborhood north of Durham. Oh, England and its place names. My landlady, who should be the subject of a separate blog entry, invited me to come along with her to her bridge group. You can’t imagine what I thought this would be like, because I immediately think of my mom and grandfather when I think of bridge, and they aren’t exactly people I associate with a rarin’ good time. Yes, it was a community hall full of old people, but when your town is populated by 18 year olds, it was a nice change. And these were some pretty cool ladies and gents! (I know, I’m also getting old myself). I learned about what northeast England was like back in the day, and though it’s kind of boring around here, I think it’s immeasurably better now without the hundreds of coal mines. This chap’s father was a miner, his cousin was a miner, his uncle was a miner… he is a pensioner now but was high up in the oil world from what I could gather. Maybe we all feel this when we yearn for the old days, but he said that the villages around here have lost their character and sense of community now that the mines are gone. He was at my bridge table, along with Ron from Glasgow, and another nice old man named Alan. We were all in the beginner’s class, and in the first game Ron and I defended well and scored a bunch of points. But I digress. Like I said, I am not a big card player, but all this talk about tricks and trumps brought me back to Eritrea when during training my gals would get me to play Hearts or Spades (I think those were the games) which I never really learned to play and only sort of remember. Next week I get to learn how to bid!

2. Hanging flyers (19 years) I am really needing money and something productive to do, so I’m trying to find some students. There are heaps of international students here, and many would be able to spare a few quid for English lessons. But I can’t figure out how to advertise in a 21st century manner, so I’m walking all around campus (which is all around town) hanging flyers. This activity, along with many other aspects of college town life, take me right back to Tufts and undergraduate life. There were always flyers everywhere, and chalk messages – they told you everything you needed to know – no e-newsletters, no webpages, NO FACEBOOK!

3. Fencing (20 years +) I started getting a craving to fence again when I was in Portland, but the options were prohibitively expensive. I guess the training center in Beaverton gets to charge a lot when it produces Olympians. Anyway, desperate for things to do and with the university as the main source for organized activities, I emailed the coach and he invited me to a club training session. It was great fun, and my muscles still had memories. We did the familiar warm-ups, but when we plugged in, we fenced épée, which was entirely new to me. Unlike foil fencing, with épée you can hit anywhere on the body. How barbaric. It was quite a lot more like sword fighting than foil, which is elegant and precise. The coach encouraged me not to attack so much, because I kept getting hit on the arm, something I have no idea how to defend against because in foil a hit on the arm doesn’t count. On balance, I had a lot of hits, but this was because I was being aggressive and I have that awfully long reach.

4. Seeing someone I haven't seen since middle school (23 years or so?) Met up with Thom Brooks at a pub in Newcastle. He and I went to Adams Middle School together, and I really don’t know if I’ve seen him since. Thanks to Facebook, I saw that he lives in Newcastle, and I looked him up. Since we didn’t have many shared memories, we talked about Guilford (and how hard it is to get a visa in the UK). Speaking of Guilford, I don’t think I realized that the last time I was there would be the last…I can’t remember how many years it’s been. I miss it. Since my brother is the only one who reads this blog, maybe he can help me out? When was the last time I was there?

5. Corresponding with my 5th grade teacher (27 years) My fifth grade teacher googled me just before I left for England and we've been writing. What a total trip to catch up with her, and remember the kinds of things that were going through my head when I was 10. She was an awesome teacher, and I can tell she has had a fantastic teaching career. Reached a lot of kids, I'm flattered that she remembers me. She also gave me the update on the other teachers and staff from good old Calvin Leete Elementary School. Here's a teaser: Mrs. Seseske still sells flowers out of her roadside stand on Rt. 1.

What a flood of memories.

Back in Durham

Greetings once again from Durham. I learned yesterday that scenes from the Harry Potter movies were shot in Durham cathedral. The cathedral is magnificent, enormous, and really really old. I need to visit again. It’s a World Heritage Site, and at the visitor’s center I failed to pay close attention to the facts and figures displayed because I knew I’d have a chance to return. Instead I played a game of giant Jenga. In town, there are twisted corridors between the buildings and cobblestones and many many students. Outside of town there are ugly brick housing developments, terrible sidewalks, and a lack of lighting. Further out still (where I live) there are fields and horses and villages scattered along the horizon, each with a church in the center. It reminds me of rural Eritrea.


The River Wear


I’m off to a slow start, which was what I expected. I’m looking for things to do at the same time I look for work, and so far I’m finding nothing. You need to be a student to get along in this town it seems. So yesterday I spend a couple of hours in my landlady’s garden engaged in the futile task of raking as the wind blew more and more leaves from the trees. Those two hours resulted in £10 reduction in next month’s rent. Then I headed to town to see what was happening at the Durham University student union. It was Fresher’s fair and very reminiscent of the beginning of the year at Tufts, with poster sales and students groups trying to get you to sign up. I don’t know if I’ll be thrown out once they realize I’m not a student, but I signed email lists for the African drumming group and a couple of others that I can’t remember. Lachlan had a successful day signing folks up for his new Durham chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronism. Evidently there are no active creative anachronists in northern England. There are plenty of LARPers, but according to Lachlan, they are “geeky.”

I’m loving Newcastle. It’s a real city, walkable, funky, with character and charm. I visited on Tuesday to meet up with an old school mate who teaches philosophy at Newcastle University. My memory is so terrible, he was a friend of my brother’s, in his class, and went to a Catholic high school so that must mean I haven’t seen him for 23 years. Is that even possible??? He regaled me with stories of how difficult it was for him to get resident status here in Britain, how inefficient bureaucracies are here, and recommended that I write a book and see the sights in the UK rather than bother to fin a real job. Today I found my way to a little village in outer Newcastle to visit a primary school that has an opening I applied for (Incidentally, the trip on public transport took two and a half hours and cost about £10, what I earned doing two hours of gardening). It was a gorgeous new school with a nice, small population of 200 students. The headmaster gave us a tour and it was a chance to see a British school for the first time. We are worlds away from Finland now, back to schools with tight security, heavy handed accountability schemes, packaged curriculum, and an approach to education where student performance deficiencies are addressed with disconnected instructional “treatments.” Students are grouped and leveled by results of assessments and it is not clear to me when they get to be in their heterogeneous classrooms. Class sizes are big here: 28-32 at this primary school. I nodded and pretended that I knew all of the terms and acronyms that were thrown around during the visit which I really need to learn.

Photos from Newcastle

...and the answer is:

thanks for playing along. A texter is - a marker. Only I goofed up and misheard him (of course) and found out it's really "texta." Here's the text-a from wikipedia:

Australia
In Australia, the term "marker" usually refers only to large-tip markers, and the terms "felt-tip" and "felt pen" usually refers only to fine-tip markers. Markers in Australia are sometimes called "texta". "Texta" is a brand name of a type of permanent marker, which is sometimes used generically. They are also known as Sharpies and Thick Black Texta.

Last night we were playing Go and I made a decent move and he responded by saying, "Good on ya." What the heck? That means good job or something. Later we watched "Priscilla Queen of the Desert" to continue my education.

Tampere

I've found myself in Finland again already...I expected to be back here, but not so soon. It's pouring rain today and everyone has their *brollies.* Love that word, just learned it today. Not Finnish of course, but shared vocabulary between Lachlan and our British host. Precious.

What went down was this: I arrived last Wednesday in Durham, slept off my jetlag and got oriented. We are boarding in a draft old farmhouse owned by an elderly woman who is sweet but a bit intimidating to me. Lachlan's been trying to charm her so he can bring over his cats later on and so he can get her to pay for some supplies to insulate the house better. So besides taking a couple of walks into town and checking out the very impressive Durham cathedral, we've been insulating windows. Home improvement has brought up a couple of communication difficulties. I'm having to measure things in cm and mm, which is easy enough, I just have a terrible sense of how long 970mm is, so it's easy for me to write down 97mm by mistake and that will result in a very small storm window. Lachlan doesn't understand what I mean when I talk about weather stripping and at one point he asked me to bring him a texter and even with all of my contextual clues, I had no idea what the heck that was. It took a few exchanges and descriptions to figure it out. Anyone? anyone? I guess I'll be able to see if anyone reads this blog if I receive any guesses.

Friday morning he got an email from the Dutch embassy in Finland inviting him to Helsinki to receive his Dutch citizenship, something he's been waiting for for a year. He rushed to get us flights and accommodations in Tampere, and Saturday night we were on out way to Edinburgh to catch an early Sunday morning Ryanair flight to Tampere. To get to Tampere directly from the north of the UK, you must take the train to Newcastle (just a ten minute ride) and take the 11pm bus up to Edinburgh. You arrive in Edinburgh at 2am, and walk around the city until 5 or so, then catch the airport shuttle for your 640am flight. You arrive exhausted because you’ve wandered around Edinburgh all night and you can’t sleep on planes. But in Tampere, you are greeted with fresh air, leaves starting to change colors, and the promise of a nice sauna and swim in the lake.

Well rested after Sunday night’s sauna and a decent nice sleep, we readied ourselves to head to Helsinki for the big day. A quick morning check of email to find the details about the ceremony revealed some important information – that the ceremony is scheduled for the 19th of October, not the 19th of September. I defrocked and mulled all this over. The plan was to stay in Finland for two weeks for the ceremony and the time it would take for L to get his new passport. But “mistakes were made” and we’re still trying to answer the question, “Now what?” My logically minded Lachlan created a spreadsheet of costs and impacts and we’re still not sure if we’ll return to the UK and come back or just bide our time here.

Here are a couple of pictures from my very short time in the UK.