Christmas Chuckles

Good ol' Calvin!

Great News!

(Lauren's) Mom, for anyone who may not know, has been battling ovarian cancer since the summer. She completed her regular chemotherapy treatments. The bloodwork and CAT scan came back clear, so she can say that for now she is cancer free! Mom has been accepted into a clinical trial, and there were three possible arms of the study she could be put in: intensive chemotherapy, which would have been similar to the treatment she just completed in intensity and side effects, an experimental drug, or just observation. She is in the experimental arm, so she will get a 20-minute infusion once every four weeks for a year. Mom said that if she could pick which group she was in, it would be this one because it still gives her some of the protection of chemotherapy (which is great because ovarian cancer is particularly aggressive), but without, hopefully, the severity in side effects. If the side effects are too much, she can also quit at any time.

We will continue to post on her health whenever we learn more. Right now we are thankful for the arm of the study she is put in and her improving health. We are saving the big celebration, though, for a year from now when she's really and truly done!

Thanks for your ongoing prayers and support - they really make a world of difference.

What'd you say?

Last night Nick was talking to Duane, who just started a job in New Orleans coordinating volunteers to repair houses. All of a sudden he said, "Oh my gosh! OH MY GOSH!"

What could they possibly be talking about?? I wondered.

"My heart just stopped for a second. Did you just say what I think you said?"

"Did you say BOBCAT??"

It's wonderful that my chief competitions for my husband's attention are bridges and bobcats!

Happy St. Nick's Day!

Yesterday was St. Nick's Day, which is a big deal in Horstmania. We still put out our shoes, and St. Nick comes in the night and fills them with candy and leaves an ornament for each of us. The ornament commemorates some big event of the year. For example, I got a Pitt Santa my freshman year, and a tiny cruise ship the year I went on Semester at Sea.

Despite being an ocean away, my amazing Mama still made sure we celebrated St. Nick's Day right. On the day itself we got a package full of delicious American candy (Reese's peanut butter cups, how I've missed you!), and a wrapped ornament. I filled our shoes and set them out to greet Nick when he got home. Our ornament this year? Appropriately, it is a silver heart that says "Our Christmas Together," for our first Christmas married.

My mom's ankle is healing slowly - there is still a visible fracture but she is allowed to remove her giant boot of a cast to sleep and to drive. She tried to play the sympathy card and convince my dad and brother to fill the boot with candy (which would be A LOT of candy!), but they didn't fall for it!

Skittles: more than delicious colored candies

In our ongoing quest of culture-rustlin’ we joined a group of Nick’s co-workers to participate in the time-honored British pub game of skittles. This game has been played here as long as toothless pub-keeps have been pulling pints. Skittles is a precursor to 10-pin bowling, and involves rolling heavy, medium-sized wooden balls towards 9 wooden pins at the end of an alley. Only a few pubs around still have skittles alleys, because they take up a lot of space, they’re loud, and one can only imagine the liability of people hurling heavy wooden balls as the pints keep emptying.

By the end of the evening, after playing for 3 hours and getting to bowl 4 times, we understood why skittles was a dying game. You have to get your own balls, set the pins back up yourself, and keep score, and there’s just the one lane for a room that holds over 50 people. It quickly became clear that “playing” skittles is more about standing around with a pint talking than actually doing anything. It worked well when most of England’s pubs were quiet places where the neighborhood gathered to socialize and have a pint or two. Unfortunately, in today’s fast-paced, dog-eat-dog world of instant gratification, consumer-driven cell-phone relationships, the olde towne skittles lane(e) is going the way of the neighborhood milkman.

Let the record show that this blog does include actual cultural commentary.

Despite the thrilling competition, the night’s highlight was the ride home with Matt (a lifetime Brum resident) and a co-worker from India named Suds. Matt and Lauren both met Suds about a minute before getting into the car, where Suds’ first words were:

Suds (to us): “you are American, yes?”

Us: “yes”

Suds: “So, what do you find to be the biggest difference between people in America and people here?”

Us: “[Awkward silence] Oh, uh…well…I guess people are more formal here and slower to talk to strangers.”

Suds: “Yes! This is so true. In my country you can walk up to anyone at a train station and talk about the cricket scores. Here they look at you like you are crazy. What else?”

Us: “Hm…..well, people seem to be closer to their families. I think because they still live close to them, really, wherever they move in the country, so they can see them more often.”

Suds: “This is interesting what you say! Matt, is this true? Are you closer to your family and less friendly?”

Matt: “(laughing)…I don’t know, I’ve never been to America.”

Suds: “humm, yes, (back to us) Have you found that people don’t like you for being American? Personally, I really like America because we just signed a great nuclear treaty with them, but I wonder what others think.”
…

He just kept going - it was like being grilled on the Larry King Show! Suds was really digging deep for a near-stranger, and we were squirming under interrogation. He lives down the street so we are going to try to have him over for dinner sometime for more of his hard-hitting cultural dialogue!

It’s Christmas Time in the City

Though we are not going to be here for Christmas (hooray USA!), for the months of November and December, it is pretty hard to miss the Christmas build-up. Because the Brits don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, after their August Bank Holiday (a seemingly-meaningless convention for having a random 3-day weekend) they have nothing to look forward to until Christmas. For this reason, Christmas here seems to last for months, with most of the fall devoted to Christmas preparations.

When we first got here (mid August) we were amazed to see pubs and restaurants encouraging companies to hurry and book their Christmas parties there. Being a good documenter of culture, Lauren noted that OCTOBER 24th was the day that the Christmas exhibit selling Christmas cards and gifts went up outside the library downtown. Ever since then, it’s been full-tilt on the decorations, music, and shopping. The whole thing seems like Christmas overload to us, and, as if we needed another reason to love Thanksgiving, it serves the valuable purpose in the US of delaying the Christmas shopping madness a full month compared with here.

We spent yesterday (Saturday) in the Birmingham city center doing a little bit of shopping, and immediately felt like we were back in the States fighting through crowded malls. The only real difference is that the shopping center we went to, the Bullring, began in 1154 as a cattle and food market. This was just a few years before the King of Prussia mall had its first customer. We posted some pictures of the Bullring, an Arup-designed building completed in 2003 on our photo album here. Most of these photos were actually taken when we came out for Nick’s interview in early December, 2005, but everything looks about the same as last year. They give a good feel for the Birmingham city centre, and the small suburb of Solihull where Nick works.

Another Brum (Birmingham) Christmas tradition is the German market. There are rides, and stalls selling traditional German crafts and kitsch, and plenty of sausages and beer stands that line the city’s main thoroughfare. We feasted on fried cheese and warm pretzels last night, so good! This sort of outdoor market wouldn’t work as well in the snowy States, but the weather here is perfect – just cold enough to make you appreciate the crowds of people pushing against you.

The flower shop across the street from us has been selling Christmas trees for weeks now, and as convenient as this is, we’re glad we won’t be needing one. It’s been culturally interesting to see all this build-up, but we really just can’t wait to get on a plane and come back to America for the holidays. Just 13 days!

International 'Bond'ing

We finally saw the new James Bond, after hearing the hype for weeks. They love them their double-O. We had heard Casino Royale was the best Bond movie ever, and Daniel Craig the best Bond, possibly second only to Connery himself! It seemed that everyone in this country had or was planning on seeing the film.

Surprisingly, it lived up to all the hype. I was clutching Nick's arm most of the movie, and I kept talking out loud to the film (I wasn't as annoying as I sound - no one could hear me over the massively loud sound effects). One of our friends said that James Bond and Jack Bauer must be related, and that there's something about stern, blonde-haired, blue-eyed men saving the world that is utterly believable!

The best part of the night, though, was the international nature of the company. We saw the movie with about 10 of Nick's co-workers, and the following countries were represented:

• England (a given)
• United States (also a given)
• Poland
• China
• Canada
• Spain
• Malaysia

Arup is like England's melting pot - we've also met some people from India. It's really interesting to meet people from all over. We're having the guys from Poland and Malaysia over for dinner next week, so there should be some good stories to tell.

(A note on the corny title: I suggested it, and Nick said, "Alright, Norm Horstman." So we do turn into our parents as we get older, bad puns and all!)