My Wild 'n Crazy Friday Night

Nick's out for a 'guy's nights' with some of the boys he works with - they were going out for Man Burgers and a Man Movie (Rambo). I was very graciously invited, but happily declined. I've been ill this week, so it's kind of nice to have a quiet night in, and thought y'all might want to hear about it! I am drinking a glass of red wine, listening to music, and getting caught up with emails/letters/etc - all while I'm wearing the most comfortable bathrobe in the world.

That might sound weird, but seriously, I can't tell you how happy I am about this bathrobe (which I think they call 'dressing gowns' here?). I've been wanting a big, soft bathrobe to curl up in for YEARS, and this year for Christmas my mom got me a big, puffy, soft, pale blue robe that cames down to my ankles - thank you, Mom!

(I almost left that whole part out because I know that guys I work with will read it and make fun of me on Monday - but I thought it was worth some ridicule if I could share my contentment with you!)

One of the things I've caught up on tonight is my Shelfari shelf, which was a fun reminder of all the great books I've read this year. My top recommendation from the last year is Bone People - if you've read it, let me know, if you haven't please do! I've also recently finished The Testament of Gideon Mack and The Shadow of the Wind - are those popular in the States, or are they purely British phenomena?

Other than my crazy night in, we do have an exciting weekend planned. We're going to Chester tomorrow, which according to Lonely Planet is one of the most beautiful towns in England. It's a very adventurous day trip by British standards, a whole 2 hours north of here - I'm sure we'll have some amazing pictures to post soon!

And to give you a taste of posts to come in the near future, below is one of my favourite shots from our weekend in Belgium a couple weeks ago:

Defining the British

Lauren found a great article from the NY Times about Gordon Brown’s recent proposition to formulate a British “statement of values” defining what it means to be British.

“The proposal, part of a package of British-pride-bolstering measures announced by the Prime Minister’s government, raised a host of tricky questions. What does it mean to be British? How do you express it in a country that believes self-promotion to be embarrassing? And how do you deal with a defining trait of the people you are trying to define: their habit of making fun of worthy government proposals?”

Some of the suggestions were:

“Once Mighty Empire, Slightly Used”
“Dipso, Fatso, Bingo, Asbo, Tesco”
“At Least We’re Not French”
“We Apologize for the Inconvenience.”

The winner, favored by 20.9 percent of the readers, was “No Motto Please, We’re British.”

David Bishop, author of the winning motto said:
“The point I was making is, this idea of a statement of Britishness; I cannot think of anything less British than that.”

“Part of the trouble with the whole exercise is that Britain never really began as a country, but rather “just evolved endlessly through time,” said Vernon Bogdanor, a professor of government at Oxford. “In the past, Britain was something that just happened,” he said. “You didn’t have to think about it. No one’s ever sat down and thought about what it means to be British.”

It is funny to live in a country now that just “evolved endlessly through time” and it definitely helps explain why Brits are so bad at celebrating national holidays. I miss American history…we were so decisive: colonize, declare independence, set up successful democracy, and settle down to plan great 4th of July parades.

In a related and doubtless controversial note, the Times had an online contest to find a six word motto for the US with 1300+ entries including:

“Still Using Fahrenheit, Feet, and Gallons”
“Just like Canada, with Better Bacon”
“Hubris: it’s not just for Greeks!”
“We came. We saw. We conquered.”
“Supporting Free Trade since 1776 (sic)”
“Enlightment scientific rationality meets puritan morality”
…and many, more

Driving in our Autocar

After a month or so of driving in the UK I am actually starting to get use to the seemingly-insane roadways and want to write a post about my initial impressions before I’ve been “assimilated”:

The first thing that any American getting into our car would notice is that it’s small…some would say tiny. The driver seat is easy to adjust because I just pull the lever and ram it to the extreme back stop so I can get my knees on either side of the steering wheel and make a decent stab at controlling it.

I’ve found that being small is especially striking at high speeds. When driving to work on the 'Motorway' surrounded by lots of other pod-like cars I get this strange feeling I'm on some highway of the future like in the Jetsons puttering along in my little space-pod. This is all made ever stranger since the highway cuts through some beautiful English countryside where you can see sheep grazing and 2000-year-old hedgerows separating each plot. Ancient bucolic calm is separated from a space-age Active Traffic Management superhighway by a thin fence of metal.

This other-worldly pod-commute is in stark contrast to driving in any urban environment in Britain. Navigating the 500 year-old roads of a city centre, I feel like some sort of rally-car driver fighting for my life among terminally-ill competitors with nothing to loose from a crash. If you’re going to die, they must think, might as well go pulling off some never-before-seen road manoeuvre. Everyone is peeling out, weaving in, and generally in a huge rush to move forward 1 space in the queue (ok, ok line!) at the next light. The roads of Birmingham are literally at capacity most of the time, and Americans could learn a thing or two about real road rage from the Brits.

I’m getting use to it all though, and through the worst of it you can still be warmed by the cheery accent of some BBC radio announcer talking about how it will be mostly overcast with ‘a bit of wet’ for the next 859 days in England.

A UK Superbowl

Televised sporting events sure make the harsh reality of time zones apparent. It never bothered us in the States, but exactly why does the Superbowl have to be on a Sunday night? Sunday afternoon or even any time at all on Saturday would be much better for those tenaciously clinging to their American Sports connections 7 time zones from Arizona.

Thanks to the most American of our British friends we made the most of the Superbowl here, sitting down in front of a flat-screen TV to a feast of dominos pizza, nacho dip, Budweiser brews and even Oreos imported from the Motherland itself. Other than the late hour (kickoff at 11:10pm) we had a wonderfully American Superbowl 42 viewing. Of course seeing adds for British car insurance instead of the classic Superbowl ones was a bit of a downer, but at least you don’t worry about missing anything when you get up to go to the bathroom.

It was also funny how the commentators had to sort of explain a little about how the game works whenever they weighed in on it, and apparently last year there was actually a 20 minute lesson on how American Football is played before the game. This year from the TV menu you could select either British or “American” announcers, as well as a segment to learn the rules of the game, for those just tuning in to this strange American pastime =).

The worst part of the experience was actually just how good a game it ended up being, and our initial plans to leave at the 1:00am half-time show had to be changed due to ferocity of contest. Unfortunately we called it quits at 2:30, just moments before the epic 4th quarter carried the Giants to victory. In retrospect this was a major error in judgement, and we kind of feel like bad Americans for not watching all of our national sport’s championship game. Oh well, I guess there is something to be said for semi-coherence in the workplace, and it will make for a more dramatic letter to the NFL asking to change the game time next year.

What a game! What a country .

Anniversary Zwei

To celebrate 2 amazing, international years of marriage last weekend we made our first trip to 'the continent' since August with a holiday in Berlin! We had heard the German capital has some great architecture, history, and is the happening-est city in Europe, so we packed the most European clothing we own and hopped on a plane to try and go blend in. We figured on the dance floor of an all night underground techno-rave no one would even suspect we aren't locals…

Ok, we actually decided to give the techno raves a miss but were able to enjoy the numerous other highlights of the city in stead. We got in late Friday night to find out that our hotel had given our room away the first night, BUT they put us up at this amazing 5 star place across the street with an espresso machine in the room, then we got to go back to our original hotel the next night where they apologized with a room (or rather, apartment) that was definitely larger than our flat in England! All in all we did very well with Berlin accommodations, and learned how nice it is to have hotels trying to 'make it up to you'.

Leaving the comfort of our posh room for the rainy streets on Saturday morning, our first stop was the Kaiser Wihelm Church also called the "hollow tooth". The original church was badly bombed during the war, but its bell tower has been preserved and a strange hexagonal modern church built around it. There we saw pictures of Berlin in 1945 which showed neat rows of rubble, with about 70% of the buildings in the city destroyed or seriously damaged. You got a sense too for the world of fantasy the government was living in reading official press reports about this “temporary inconvenience” and how the church would be rebuilt even more grandly as soon as the Germans win the war.

After a quick lunch at the American Embassy (Starbucks), we took the U-Bahn (underground) to the eastern side of the city where most of the historic buildings are located. We spent most of the afternoon in the Jewish Museum, which had some unusual symbolic architecture representing the broken shards of Jewish life in Germany and Europe in the 20th century. Many of the exhibits were very moving and well-done, and the volume of information was extensive, tracing the presence of the Jewish people in Germany since the Middle Ages.

The next stop on a real but pretty depressing tour of German history was the Checkpoint Charlie museum featuring the history of the division of Berlin by Soviet forces following WWII and the terrible realities of life in a divided city. The museum was filled with stories of people flying, swimming, tunnelling, and driving trucks through the Berlin Wall to get out of the East, many of whom did not survive. The wall really evolved, beginning as coils of barbed wire that were laid out on the street, dividing neighbourhoods, shops, and even homes. As more and more people fled the east though, the fortifications increased, and by the 1990s the Berlin wall was actually two 10ft solid concrete walls with a "kill zone" between them patrolled by guards and dogs. By the end of the exhibits you got a bit of the sense of how momentous the fall of the wall must have been. The pictures of thousands of people just tearing the wall apart when the border was opened were moving.

Saturday night was had dinner in a traditional German pub from the 1600's and were pleased to see that no one was speaking English—just us and the locals. I think other than our terrible German pronunciation, clothes, and the 6 or 7 attempts to take a picture of us with our food, we did a pretty good job seeming like locals too. For 3 hours after dinner we had the only dry weather of the weekend, and we got to walk along Unter den Linden Strasse to the Brandenburger Gate seeing the significant buildings remaining in former East Berlin.

Sunday our flight out wasn't until 10pm so we decided to see something a little more cheery from before the rather depressing 20th century. Just on the edge of Berlin we visited the impressively royal and pleasantly opulent Charlottenburgh Palace, summer home of the first Kind and Queen of Prussia. The palace was as lavish and over-the-top as you would expect, but also had some beautiful gardens and lots of windows, which gave it a nicer contemporary feel.

In a final blitz-tour of sites, we ate pretzels at a bakery, took the U-Bahn to Potsdamer Platz which was a square of rubble during the Cold War but is now the Times Square of Berlin and has some very impressive architecture. We then walked up by the Brandenburg Gate again, and waited in line for the Reichstag (Parliament Building) in the pouring rain. Just before trenchfoot set in, we made it into the warm and dry interior, only to learn that we then had to go back out onto the roof to experience the new Norman-Foster-designed dome (1995). Though a bit cold on rainy January days, the glass dome that crowns the ancient building is really impressive and offers some amazing views of the city.

The Reichstag was a great capstone to our Berlin experience, and after a quick dinner at this great serve-yourself Italian place we visited our first night (why risk a poor last meal?) we took the S-Bahn to the airport. By 1am we were back in bed a time zone away in Birmingham, having crammed quite a bit into an amazing anniversary weekend!

Yeah Pictures!!