Christmas Cheer

My neighbor has taken gaudy lawn ornaments to a new level. Please observe the front garden (= yard, or more aptly described, walled in piece of grass and concrete in front of this "period" house). Every time I look at this picture I notice something new. The giraffe, the lady bug, the chariot, an alien. It's like Where's Waldo, although in England, it's called "Where's Wally". 

The brick walls are even covered with randomly placed figurines, toy trains, books... the look this person must be going for is "trinket shop tornado".

Lawn Ornament Hell

I can't even begin to imagine what the inside of the house looks like and I'm shocked that it appears no one one has stolen anything, although with the plethora at hand, I'm sure they wouldn't notice that anything was awry. Living in a college town, you'd think there would be students shopping for dorm room decorations at this house some time after midnight, but luckily for this neighbor it seems our quiet side street is keeping these treasures in their place.

Aside from this dismal display of gaudiness, I haven't seen many Christmas decorations at homes and certainly no Griswold light displays in the front of houses. The cost of Christmas lights in England is out of control. That Christmas spirit is rarely displayed in the form of lights and cost is probably a big reason. M&S sells icicle lights for 29.50 = $47. For a strand of lights! I've heard the prices are even higher in London.

At least London's Regent Street hasn't skimped on the Christmas Cheer! You're unlikely to find Christmas lights anywhere other than on these shopping streets, and the few skimpy strands thrown on the tree at Trafalgar Square.

I'm enjoying being home for a few weeks so I can enjoy the tacky Christmas spirit in the USA. I can't imagine what my neighbor's house would look like if she got her hands on some good ol' American style lit up Christmas lawn decorations. That would be a sight to see!

It Says It's Not You

Apparently, I should be a criminal.

As part of the UK visa process, applicants are required to have Biometric Data including fingerprints taken at an official site prior to applying. I did this at a designated location in Chicago where officials barked orders at foreigners who didn't have the appropriate paperwork in hand at exactly the right moment and everyone was lined up like at the DMV. They took my photo then I sat and waited in a chair while the man in front of me had all 10 digits done, one by one. It took just a few minutes. When it was my turn, it took a few minutes just to get my right thumb to read. After several failed attempts on each finger, the process seemed to take a half hour until all of them had been accepted by the computer. Two people at the stations next to me came and went as I was helplessly annoying the woman attempting to get a read as she rolled each finger left to right and scolded "don't press too hard".

Passing though UK passport control at Heathrow for the first time, my right thumb and forefinger wouldn't read. The lady looked confused and said, "sorry you seem to have very faint fingerprints." I started to get remotely concerned as we moved on, but after what seemed like hours, a match was found with my ring finger and I got a nice big stamp on my visa admitting entry for the first time.

For the past 6 months my travels have been by train or car only, so I didn't have the opportunity to test this again until December. Last week, I arrived at Heathrow from a business trip to Rome and the border control official frowned after taking my thumb and forefinger and said, "mmmm it says it's not you." Gulp.

That faint sense of panic set in again as he tested the same fingers and once more he said "hmmm. It says its not you again."

Pause.
Pause some more.....

"The good thing is they took your picture when they took your prints and I can see that it is you. I have some level of discretion here. Welcome back to the UK." PHEW.

In those brief seconds of waiting I started to run through scenarios in my head and think of what I would tell my boss about being detained by border control. Do they give you one phone call?!?

4 days later, the same thing happened at Gatwick when returning from Madrid. My first test failed but I suggested to the border control agent that this happens often and she offered to do the left hand and I passed on the first try.

After seeing the movie Gattaca, where the characters switch identities with one of them literally cutting off his fingertips so the other will have his prints, I'm a bit weary of attempting to go up to the border control agent each time I come back to the country saying "only these 4 fingers work please try only these". Ummmm that might raise a few eyebrows. I think I might have to fail once and then make subtle suggestions...

Alas, there could be a solution... next up... attempting to register for IRIS, an option at UK border control for residents and visa holders, where they will identify me with a photo of my eyeballs versus my fingertips. As an added bonus, the line usually only contains a handful of people, and I won't have to go through that hour long "Non-EU passport control" nonsense every single time I fly.

Perhaps I'm in the wrong line of work. I would be an excellent criminal, able to foil any computer from connecting me to a set of fingerprints.

Poor eyesight, bunions, allergies etc... These are some of those things that people realize they just have to live with, but never would I have ever thought that having a faintly printed epidermis would be a nuisance in this life.

Thanksgiving 2011

I was rather sad to not be celebrating Thanksgiving with my family for the first time in my life. But my lovely new foreign friends were all on board with tackling a turkey and giving me a proper Thanksgiving meal.
 

Pie making!

The first step for me was to learn how to make apple pie from scratch, and I conveniently was able to use my colleagues as guinea pigs. We have a monthly bake off contest for team meetings. One person brings in a cake each month, and it was my turn in November. I requested special permission to bring in a pie as I had to be sure they wouldn't deduct points because it wasn't a cake! We score everyone's culinary contributions 1-10 and keep a running tally of who is winning the bake off. Happy to report that my pies brought me into 1st place! Competition isn't over yet... and I'm not sure we "win" anything other than bragging rights, but its all good fun nonetheless.

After having lasagne in our cafeteria for lunch on actual Thanksgiving, I was ready for the real deal by Friday evening for our planned meal.



Pick me!

 I came up with a menu with some help of my friend Rachel Ray (in case you don't know her, she's a chef famous for making things "easy peasey"!) as well as my grandmother's emails. We took a field trip to buy "Bob" the bird at Sainsbury's on Tuesday, along with all the other fixings we needed.

The meal was prepared at the house of a few co-workers, and thankfully one of them worked from home to do all the prep work during the day. It was a good thing, because our turkey was still slightly frozen in the morning when I popped by.  Not to worry though, all was well by cooking time.

  

We were a bit stressed, but we made it through the cooking process in a small kitchen, with tons of people milling around and Bob the bird was cooked perfectly in the end.

Ready to baste!

Bob came out perfect...

Frenchman vs. Turkey

The finished product

I celebrated my Thanksgiving with 5 Italians, 2 English, 3 Frenchmen, 1 Turkish girl + me the American. Everyone said what they were thankful for and of course, I was thankful I had made some fabulous new friends these past few months!

A success all around. Yet, I'm still thankful that my next turkey will be made by Grandma at Christmas in Chicago. I think once a year is enough for me!

A Very Hardy Groupon Deal

I couldn't resist... Today's national Groupon deal is for Ed Hardy Core t-shirts, available in 13 tattoo inspired styles for men and women. Normally priced at £90 each you can grab them at a steal, £25 a pop. It's a shame I saw this too late in the daily countdown. I could have stocked up for you all.



***For those taking notes, the appropriate name for the clubbing Ed Hardy t-shirt wearers in England is "Chavs". They are much the same as those that might wear the Hardy Core apparel in the USA... same idea, different accent.

Yorkshire Pudding

I don't understand Yorkshire Pudding. Let me explain...

Yorkshire Pudding is cooked by pouring a thin batter made from milk (or water), flour and eggs into oiled then preheated baking pans or muffin tins.

Yorkshire Puddings are a staple of British cuisine and are found frozen in the grocery store and on platters of food at the pub.

But why is it called Pudding? It’s a tall (no less than 4 inches tall), fluffy, yet rather thick and hearty pastry that’s cooked in a muffin tin so it always is the shape of a cup or a bowl with a hallow middle, but you don’t but put anything inside the middle space, so why is it shaped like a bowl? Why not fill the batter in completely and have it be a regular biscuit shape?

The name… Yorkshire. This I understand as self-explanatory, it is from Yorkshire. Pudding… this is a mystery. The Brits often refer to Dessert as Pudding. If you see “Puddings” on the menu, it doesn’t mean what Americans would think of like Jell-o pudding snacks. The term Pudding encompasses all Dessert type foods including a mousse, which is rather pudding like, or a cake, a gelato, a brownie etc….

So… why do they call this bowl shaped biscuit served with the traditional Sunday roast lunch a “Pudding”?

Brussels, Brugge and Amsterdam

 

A few weeks ago, I met up with my friend Amanda from Chicago along with her mother and grandmother in Belgium. They were kind enough to let me join them for a few days of their Eurotrip and it was good to see some familiar faces. My housemate even remarked that my accent had gotten stronger after spending 3 days with Chicagoans!

I left my place at 5am, hopped a train to London, transferred to the Eurostar for a 2 hour train ride over land and under the sea to Brusssels to meet them arriving from Paris. It was my first time in the Chunnel and I barely even noticed we were underground. The train moved so fast your ears pop and then before you know it you're back in the daylight and you're in France.

  We wasted no time and were on a city tour of Brussels and saw a chocolate making demonstration that afternoon. That night we had an amazing meal, enjoyed some mussles in Brussels (ok, I just tried 2), drank some Belgian beers and bought lots of Belgian chocolates.

 

The next day we were off early to take a train to Amsterdam for the day. We took the hop on, hop off canal boat, which was a bust, because we got on the wrong line and had to wait around for a long time to get to where we wanted. We saw most of Amsterdam by boat, nonetheless.

Amanda and I headed along the canaled streets to the Anne Frank House & Museum for the afternoon. Being a rainy Wednesday in October we were happy the line wasn't too long as I'd heard some stories about waiting for multiple hours to get in the house.  I have always wanted to see Anne's home and with only a few hours on my first trip to Amsterdam, I was happy we were able to squeeze this in!

I've read Anne Frank's Diary at least twice but it's been years... it all came back to me rather quickly. The house is empty of furniture, the Nazis took all of the belongings.  Otto, Anne's father and the sole survivor, wanted it to stay empty, although at one point they did re-create the furnishings with Otto's detailed descriptions and direction. So they now have models and photographs of the secret annex furnished just the way it was when they were living there that you can look at while making your way through the empty rooms.



After navigating through the front of the building where Otto Frank's business had been run, you can climb a ladder like staircase and then it's there. The bookcase concealed entrance to the secret annex. They've posted this quote on the wall next to it:

Now our Secret Annex has truly become secret.  Mr. Kugler thought it would be better to have a bookcase built in front of the entrance to our hiding place.  Now whenever we want to go downstairs we have to duck and then jump.

Anne Frank, August 21, 1942

It was reading that quote that gave me the chills... Reading those words and seeing the threshold to the annex, I was rather overwhelmed comprehending how she had to duck and jump out of the annex, through the door in front of me. I ducked and climbed up through the narrow entrance. The step behind the bookcase is about a foot and a half up, and the opening no more than 5 ft high. Knowing she had passed through this, and seeing her words describe it, was my first taste of that diary coming to life.

The Secret Annex

Inside, you walk into the empty living area with kitchen with a sink and small stove. This is where they congregated and passed most of their days and the Van Pels slept at night. On the walls, the original wallpaper throughout the house had to be redone in the same print due to deterioration, but they have preserved the original in some places. You can see the pencil markings measuring Anne and Margot's height on the wall and the map of Normandy where Otto tracked the movement of the alliance. In Anne's room, they've preserved the majority of the walls behind glass where Anne had posted some postcards to liven the dreary space.

Our little room looked very bare at first with nothing on the walls, but thanks to Daddy who had brought my film-star collection and picture postcards on beforehand, and with the aid of a paste pot and brush, I have transformed the walls into on gigantic picture.  This makes it look much more cheerful.

Ann Frank, July 11, 1942

Overall, it was amazing to see this place. I wished I could have been there without the crowds, but ultimately, the more people that see these historical locations and remember what happened to so many innocent lives, the better.

After Anne Frank's house we took off to the center of the city and did some souvenir shopping and ended the day with a walk back towards the train station through the Red Light district area... yup, everything you've heard is true.

The final day, we took a tour to Ghent and Brugge north of Brussels. Ghent is a sleepy yet quaint town, and Brugge has beautiful canals, lots of horse drawn carriages and a large square that was made much more lively with the hundreds of British Birmingham football fans having a rowdy rally in preparation for the Brugge vs. Birmingham football game that night.

 

We took a boat tour on the canal and saw the rest of the city with a very entertaining boat driver. I'll have to check out the movie "In Brugge", with all the places they filmed pointed out to us throughout the day...

It was a whirlwind 3 days but I was so happy to see a friend from home and go to 3 places I've never been. A few checks off my bucket list!

Chicago Bears @ Wembley

Bears. London. America.

As I've said to many friends here in the UK, I've never been to a Bears game in Chicago for various reasons... the tickets are super expensive because there are so few games in a season, they're hard to come by, the weather at the end of the season is a gamble as you might be sitting in sub-zero wind chill with the breeze coming off the lake.... The fact there are only 7 home games in an American football regular season was mind boggling to my football (soccer) loving friends.

Over the past 6 years living in the city, I routinely gathered with friends to watch Sunday football but I never actually made it to Soldier Field. Never mind, they conveniently came to me and the tickets were easy to obtain!

Last weekend I attended the Chicago Bears vs. Tampa Bay Bucaneers NFL game at London's Wembley Stadium with some friends and it was bloody brilliant. 

Because your home is in London but your heart is in Chicago

Entering the tailgate, it was apparent that this was a celebration of American football for any fan, as we saw pretty much every NFL team's jersey represented and of course the cheese heads were out in full force (I had to explain this costume). The crowds were taking in football throwing "festival like" games, the Chicago Bears drumline performed, there were competions for fans to win prizes, an NFL apparel store, foot long hot dogs, and..... Budweiser. I haven't had a Bud Light in months but being a Miller Light fan, it sufficed and definitely felt like a taste of home. I steered clear of the hot dogs however, I didn't want to be disappointed!

On to the best part of the tailgate... WGN news was wandering nearby and I said "oh, that's a Chicago TV station". That's all it took to get dragged over to see if they'd talk to us. We made it in the segment on the 9pm Chicago news that night. My 30 seconds of fame! Too bad they cut me off mid-sentence and didn't air much of what we said, but it was good enough! My parents were super excited to see me on TV at home.

The Goo Goo Dolls randomly played, the "Star Spangled Banner" and "God Save the Queen" was sung and then the game began. Aside from the streaker that stormed the field and took his shirt off running around like a mad man high-fiving players before getting tackled by security, the crowd was relatively tame and the stadium was pretty quiet! I know the football (soccer) matches aren't like this though. It seemed like a lot of people weren't rooting for a particular team and waved their free Tampa Bay flags every time the jumbotron told them to.

 
Bears won 24-18. The only thing that was missing was the Chicago Bears song at the end!

T as in Tango...

Kilo Romeo India Sierra Tango India November

This is how you spell my name in the NATO/ ICAO phonetic alphabet.  

Americans know some of these are military, air traffic control or police codes thanks to the movie industry, but the Brits have cleverly adopted these abbreviations into every day life. Ask one, and they'll probably be able to tell you most of them.

Ordering take-away Chinese food? Giving your license plate number over the phone? Calling an airline? Spell it with the phonetic alphabet.

My American friend pointed this out to me and said that when her English husband witnessed her order food on the phone one time, he was bewildered and puzzled to hear her fumble to come up with words on the fly.

It just makes sense! With the prevalence of outsourcing help desks, customer service lines etc... its has become even harder to communicate without having to spell everything. With the phonetic alphabet you don't have to worry that word you've just come up with will be misunderstood. Not much rhymes with "Sierra" and so that "S" can't be mistaken. Since it was brought to my attention I've noticed that my company's help desk people in India have been trained to spell with this same alphabet too...

If you've ever had to give the name of your street to the customer service line for your cable company, you know the process:

"M?"

"No, 'N' as in ummm...... "Nun."

"Mum?"

Sigh.

When I was moving to the UK, I had set up movers to come help move me out of my condo. When I called back to check on some things they had no record of my appointment. After much back and forth and time wasted we figured out that the reason the lady couldn't find my appointment is because the person who took my call the first time put my last name down as "Dunker". Serves me right for not taking the time to spell it out as I usually do!

Do yourself a favor, memorize the chart and next time you're talking to a help desk in Bangalore, you might just save some major frustration.

The Parental Visit

My parents made it to England last month for a short, yet action packed visit. We made the most of the days and did a ton of walking so I think I may have wore them out but they were troopers and post knee surgery Dad made it through.

The first full day, we took a quick loop on the open air bus sightseeing Oxford tour because my parents had some free tickets from their hotel.  For lunch, I brought them to one of the most famous and oldest pubs in Oxford, the 13th century Turf Tavern.   For Americans, this pub is etched in infamy as the place where Bill Clinton supposedly/maybe/possibly "Did not inhale". That's right, the Turf Tavern, down a discrete alleyway, nestled in between centuries old university buildings and the original city wall is where Clinton may have done a little experimenting in his Rhodes Scholar days.
 
After that city and pub orientation, we decided to hop on a bus to London for a bite to eat and a show. Rock of Ages won out over the others, and we had fantastic seats.  It was a really fun, energetic show and I was glad we picked it (even though Mom and Dad had already seen it.)  ;-)

After getting home very late from London, we were up early again to drive to Stonehenge and Bath for the day. Stonehenge really is right off the road in the middle of nowhere. I have to say from the pictures I've seen, I thought it would be much bigger, but it was impressive nonetheless.

In Bath, I had purchased a package with the Roman Bath tour, Pump Room lunch and Thermae Bath Spa 2 hour admission.  A perfect way to spend the afternoon. After lunch, we toured the Roman Baths where the 2,000 year old ruins have been preserved fantastically, and you really get a sense of walking in their footsteps.

After the tour, we soaked in the Thermae Bath Spa for a few hours. The roof top view was amazing and there were several pools to chose from, scented steam rooms and waterfall type jets to sit under. I think I need to go back sometime soon...

I had decided Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Winston Churchill, just outside of Oxford should be on our itinerary long before my parents came. I was happy to find out however, that the weekend they were here was the Blenheim International Horse Trials.

A decidedly English event, we headed to the palace to see the cross-country horse trials and take in a new sport. The spectator uniform was clear: we weren't wearing tweed coats and wellies, and we forgot to bring our dogs along, but we did have a good time checking out the competition. For some countries, this was a London 2012 Olympic qualifying event and it was interesting to watch the jockeys in action.

Blenheim Palace's grounds are massive and after a few hours of watching the trials, we headed over to the palace to see the Winston Churchill rooms and take in the grandeur. They have a deal with the ticket purchase that you can enter the grounds for 12 months after buying a day pass and people will bring bikes and picnics and go for runs and walks around the lake on the palace grounds when the weather is nice. I'm hoping to get back there sometime soon and take advantage.

That night, we were back in Oxford for Bill Spectre's Ghost Trails tour. This guy was entertaining and quite the story teller with a few tricks up his sleeve (literally). Highly recommend his ghost tour, you won't be let down!



The last day we took in Oxford Castle, and took advantage of Oxford Open Doors. Once a year, Oxford opens up its doors to the public with a weekend of activities and free tours and access to the historic buildings. With some colleges and activities only available at certain times, we were only able to see a few things on Sunday but it was a nice leisurely end to our long weekend. We also were able to see some gymnastics and fencing demos (Dad loved this one) at Oxford Town hall. Most colleges are open where you would normally pay to visit, and others are open that are otherwise always closed to the public. It was nice to see beyond the street front of some of these colleges, as most have hidden gardens and courtyards that you can't see from the front of the building.  I learned that not only does Oxford have an open doors weekend, but there is also English Heritage Open Days country wide, which I'll have to keep in mind for next year.

   

It was a great visit! Two months until I'll see everyone again at the holidays. Anyone else want to hop a plane to England?