And this is why I live in the city

I have been out in the wilderness of New England this week, experiencing what has (to me) become fondly known as “science summer camp for grown-ups” — a conference at a remote location, where a medium (100 to somewhat less than 200) people camp out in college student dormitory rooms together and spend a week immersed in a single topic of scientific inquiry. The brilliant thing about this format is that the science bits are in the morning and evening thus leaving the afternoons free for other forms of entertainment. Which sounds lovely, except that this week has been more of an adventure than I bargained for.

The science bits were great, I should start with that. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed myself and written more than 20 pages of A4 notes. Which is amazing in and of itself–I’m sufficiently old and jaded that I don’t often have that much to write down. One of the afternoon social events was brilliant, it was a beer tasting at a local swanky brew-pub complete with a hilarious brewmaster with a sharp wit, an English degree, and lots of audience participation. There were lots of shot-glass-sized beers to drink, and everyone left happy but not sloppy. But Tuesday we went hiking, and had a spectacular time. Except it was hard going. And I’m clearly not as young as I used to be.

Step back, the group was two of us “senior” colleagues (at all of mid-thirty-something) and two very junior (young twenties) colleagues. We older folks (ugh) were scrambling to keep up with the two youngsters. And it was not pretty. I got my foot caught in a gap in the rocks and I’m pretty sure my left pinky toe is busted (again… it’s happened many times before) and my compatriot experienced some sort of bout of food poisoning and was rushing down from the summit while I was limping. I was literally doing the bridal half-step except leading with my right foot every time I had to descend vertically, such that the pressure would not be on the left pinky toe. Fun. But the views at the top were awesome.

I thought this particular hike (fun and picturesque as it was) was but a distant memory, until I woke up this morning, aware that what I thought was just a mosquito bite on my leg was actually sort of strange in shape and appearance, looking nothing like a normal mosquito bite on closer examination. Fast forward a few hours, and the thing just kept growing and growing, until it was about 3″ across by the last scientific session of the evening. At that point, I had noticed steady growth in the thing over the last few hours especially (not to mention the itching) and realized I had to do something about it. So I left the last scientific session of the evening mid-way and went to the tiny-town New England ER because I had the background to realize it might be serious, and at least worth a look by someone more qualified than me in the medical milieu. I spent a lovely hour as the only patient in the ER of a tiny town New England hospital, chatting with the lovely doctor, who happens to have a son studying for a PhD in my field. I could have predicted what the doctor would recommend (broad-spectrum antibiotics for a longer-than-usual time) which he did, but at least it was a pleasant medical experience.

I now have to get up early in the morning to get an antibiotics prescription filled in the local pharmacy before heading out to my next meetings in Boston. I have a disgusting bulls-eye rash on my right shin, and I can scare people with it. There’s a medical bill careening towards my parents’ house in Minneapolis, because that was the easiest way to handle the emergency non-resident healthcare scenario. I was happy, I was treated. I had a triage EMT, a nice nurse and a chatty MD. I got a first dose of anti-biotics and a prescription for 2 more weeks, which is a big deal when faced with this sort of skin penetrating rash. But I have no idea what it cost, and I will be eagerly anticipating the numbers. I did not need as much time as they gave me, or as much high-level effort as they gave me. I have an obvious rash with an obvious cause.

Travel tales are strange

I’m coming to the end of my Singapore experience for this year; I can say that with great confidence because I’ll be back in just over a year’s time for another key conference in my research field. This has been my second trip to Singapore and it has been a far superior experience compared with my first trip. I was based, on my first trip, at NUS (a lovely university but far off the beaten track) and this trip has been centered in the city centre. But my location on this trip has proved to be excellent.

I took a cheaper hotel in Little India, on Arab Street, rather than the hotels associated with the large conference centre. It was a short walk into town or a very short trip on the MRT (1 stop) but totally convenient and worth the 1/2 price compared with the conference hotels. I quite enjoyed the MRT and mall experience to get to the Suntec center. Or centre. I don’t recall which is correct.

Given this slightly distant location, I was isolated from the usual sorts of hotel restaurants and bars. I found that there was a place, Mietta’s, across the street from my hotel, where there was good food and good wine (a necessity when travelling). This is a chef-driven, relatively new restaurant, in the bohemian area of Arab Street, and I quite enjoyed the place on the three times that I happened (or chose!) to visit there. It has that air of a gentrifying neighborhood where things are all mixed up, and I happen to like that. I went out to Orchard Road earlier on this trip and I hated it, there was nothing that I saw to distinguish one shopping mall from another.

Tonight I went to Mietta’s after dinner hours, because they were advertising a jazz feel in the upstairs bar. When I arrived, the waitstaff seemed confused, although the website advertises an upstairs bar they seemed to not have had many requests for it. Cut to the chase, and I sat quite happily in the upstairs something (bar is not the obvious word) with live music playing just to me, from a time before they were really ready to open, they let me in for the soundcheck. I read the cookbooks of Jaime Oliver and Nobu and joked with the chef about reading his secret stash. As a foodie, I was ecstatic. As a bar/club patron, I felt bad for the singer/guitarist who was singing solely to me, both in the soundcheck and in the “performance” (indistinguishable from the soundcheck). But I’m not complaining. And I hope that if you are in Singapore you visit Mietta’s. I saw the chef each of the three times I was there, which took me back to a day and place in Minnesota when I used to frequent a chef-driven restaurant in the middle of nowhere, the Bayport Cookery (which apparently does not exist anymore). I want chef-driven restaurants to thrive, which is probably why I “happened” into Mietta’s on three occasions on this trip.

The American, the FOI Act and MPs’ Expenses

For the last eight days in Britain, it has been as though news has completely ceased to exist with one exception: the slowly trickling out details of the expenses claims that House of Commons MPs have made in recent years. Almost no high-ranking official in any party has been spared (although admittedly Labour has taken it hardest) and the claims have been eye-rolling at best, jaw-dropping at worst. It was not, however, until today that I caught wind of the mechanism by which the information had been obtained, or at least part of the story. Some of the details are in today’s Guardian, in a commentary piece written by Heather Brooke, a campaigner for transparency. Look at most stories mentioning her name this week and you will see “London-based journalist and Freedom of Information campaigner… ” and not see “born and raised in America” as part of her bio. And really, you have to dig pretty deep to find information about her at all, an ironic twist in this story.

I was only made aware of her because of an interview I saw with an Associated Press (AP) chief, who was being asked about the reaction to the MP expenses scandal in countries outside Britain, and he noted that the story was big in America because of her roots there. And also that no one in America could believe that (a) this information had been secret in the first place (held close to the Commons on the usual political grounds of “Security” and “Privacy”) and (b) it had taken so long and such extensive efforts for the details to come to light. It was only the case by Brooke, an independent journalist, fighting it all the way to the high court that started to unlock the doors to bogus claims of residency in illogical second homes, husband and wife MPs claiming different residences, evidence of “flipping” properties to avoid capital gains taxes… the list goes on and the details are not so important here. What IS important is transparency, of rules that make sense (more on that in a mo’) and of government officials who do not think that they are above the law.

The AP chief did note that while this had been an interesting story in America, and on front pages of newspapers with international interests on more than one occasion, the reaction in Britain has been (as usual for the British press) completely disproportionate. I have to agree. Seeing interview after interview with Joe-on-the-street types who want to banish all MPs gets old after a while, as does the occasional call for the Queen to disband parliament and take over. Hopefully not in my time here. What has been quite amusing, however, are the non-apologies, along the lines of “I am very sorry that the people in my constituency have been let down by my making perfectly legal expense claims that were approved fully by the fees committee. I see now that I should not have claimed for x.” The classic non-apology; I don’t apologise for what I did, but I do feel badly that you are upset by my actions (please vote for me again). The AP chief also noted that the way the information has been trickling out this week has been a masterful marketing plan on the part of the newspaper(s) (?) doing the leaking, and I have to agree. There’s another big name in the headlines every day, and heads are starting to roll.

Now I admit, I have one additional point on this subject. And yes, it is a matter of personal preference, but I don’t bother to go through the effort of claiming back every single allowable reimburse-able expense that I incur. There’s a tradeoff there for time (and paperwork) versus money that would definitely have led me to not claim some of the items that could have been claimed. (There’s a nice picture-slideshow thing here that shows some of the more silly items.) I like it when there is a sensible per diem benefit for eating in foreign locations, because if I have to turn in the receipts, I’ll probably never get around to it. I’d have to eat at home too, and the burden of paperwork definitely does not become worth my while for a bagel and coffee at Bruegger’s when in the states for a conference. But maybe that’s just me. Sensible rules help, and I’m actually with Gordon Brown (for once!) in suggesting a flat allowance for MPs and not all of this mortgage and second home funny-business.

Now that brings to the forefront a significant difference between me and the MPs, they have staff members who are the ones actually filling out the paperwork. Yes, at the end of the day it is the MPs who have to sign off on the claims (the wording of which has been floating around today) but there is an additional large group of people who have participated in this little bit of creative accounting, and about whom I have heard nothing. Do you really think Clare Short is preparing her own forms for submission to the rules office? Do you think Hazel Blears is the one sending emails to the fees committees to see whether a line item on some claim fits within the letter of the law? Sure, they sign off and thus have something akin to fiduciary responsibility. BUT where are the rest of the parties who participated in this little charade?

To my lovely waiter:

To the nice chap that waited on me at Pizza Express tonight,

Thank you for your prompt service. Thank you for taking my order less than 5 minutes after I sat down. Thank you for brining my glass of chilled white within a few seconds of when I ordered it. Thank you for helping me to get my food fast and clearing it promptly when I was done. Thank you for noticing that I was alone and clearly did not want to dawdle. Thank you for getting me in and out after only 35 minutes in your restaurant.

The 20% tip? No, not because I’m American, as I’m sure you could tell from my Barclay’s debit card that I do live here and thus I’m likely to know the local customs. No, that was for flirting with me even though my lipstick was almost entirely gone and I must have looked haggard after 11 hours in the office. You made my day in the way that sometimes only a nice member of the opposite sex can do.

NFAH

On class

There have been a few recent articles in the BBC magazine about class, this was the latest one and this was last month’s version. I just finished re-reading Kate Fox’s “Watching the English” (an excellent book) and so I was probably more sensitive to the whole class thing than I would have been had I not just re-read it…

One who has read the Kate Fox book is supposed to be able to identify class differences by word choice, accent, clothes, choice of flower in the garden, the method by which one eats peas, and any number of other things. So far it’s completely escaped me. I have to confess, I don’t really get it. I’ve never been at a dinner where peas were served to see if I could identify clear differences, usually people are only eating mange tout. I never hear words like “serviette” and it seems like everyone I’ve met says “lounge” for living room.

I don’t know that you could make these sorts of “class” distinctions in the US. Or at least I never noticed them. I went to high school with people from a wide range of socio-economic groups, but I never thought of people as being from different classes. Unless you meant the Algebra versus Calculus type of class. My wealthy relatives live in the south and love Nascar. They sound southern because they live in the south, and that sounds different from, say, Boston but it indicates geography, not class. I drove a clunker because my white-collar family was thrifty; my best friend whose father was a butcher had a brand new sports car because she had an inheritance. We went to junior high and high school together and then went off to the same University and same graduate school. There is a wonderful neutralizing effect of state schools and universities in the US; perhaps there’s a bigger difference on the East Coast, but in the midwest (where there is no Ivy League) it all seemed about the same.

At the end of the day, does any of this distinction claimed for the difference between upper-working and lower-middle class in the UK mean anything? Where is the boundary? Kate Fox claims that current monetary status and class in the UK do not go together, and that unlike the US there is no real upward mobility within class. I find the whole concept confusing. And really, unnecessary. Does it not just reinforce these unimportant boundaries to detail them in modern books? Isn’t it time to drop the artificial distinctions and stop worrying about “class”?

To drive or not to drive…

That is the question. For various reasons, the question of getting a car has suddenly cemented itself on my brain. This is something I had been avoiding in my time in England thus far; circumstances are such that my walk between home and work is a pleasant 15 minutes and I’m even closer to a wide variety of shops and restaurants, including a Sainsbury’s at two blocks away and a John Lewis about three blocks away. So you could argue that I really do have everything I need quite close, and my longest jaunts are off to the health club which is about 20 minutes’ walk away. However, what I don’t have much of in this little urban bubble is a social life. I’ve been really fortunate to make a couple of friends recently, but in both instances a car would be really handy for getting out of town to their villages (although I admit in both instances there are buses, so it’s not a completely lost cause without a car). In some ways, I really don’t miss the fuss of owning a car, paying for a car, keeping a car insured and paying all associated taxes. Without all of this, my life is quite simple.

But I confess, I’m an American girl who has always been a road-tripper. Every time I return to the states I rent a car, and sometimes drive longer distances than is truly necessary just because I love the feel of the open road. It was instilled in me as a child to be a road-tripper, we did lots of driving between the family homeland in Minnesota and the east coast where we lived for a time, and while east we also drove all the way south to Florida and north to I can’t even remember how far. When my sister and I were both based on the east coast as adults, we did a memorable jaunt into NYC as well as a bittersweet trip back to MN when I abandoned my post in Virginia for what would eventually be my job here.

I have lots of travel coming up, so this is not necessarily something I would do until after my summer trips to other continents, but starting to try and understand the UK rules of the road might come up in about September. I’ll have to take lessons and pass a test here, and obviously save up some money and look for some wheels. And finally, I’d have to sort out a place to park the thing in my urban environs, making a very small car (Smart! Mini!) look appealing. But it’s starting to really tempt me… so I’m going to have to do some serious soul-searching on the whole car vs. public transport question not to mention the “oh dear, this would really be sticking down roots in England” issue… thoughts?

A preemptive strike

O to be in England now that April’s (t)here… I had heard that poem for many years but only on this, my third April in the UK, do I see that it might just be the best month. The sun is out. The flowers are blooming and the gardens are fabulous. The days are long and light, and recently, mostly sunny. April really has been the loveliest month in each of the years I’ve lived here.

That said, there’s a dark side to the loveliness. You’ve got it, the windows are open and that means flying insects in my living room, and me missing American windows with bug screens. However, after my ode to a favorite American baked good went horribly awry in the last few days, I’m not feeling much like saying anything more that could result in my being on the end of comments that are really at times outside the spirit of community that one would hope to have in the world of expat blogs. So I thought maybe I should try to guess and say these things myself, rather than wait for the comments, thus acting in the manner of a preemptive strike. Here we go.

• I’m a spoiled American prissy for expecting to live free of insects buzzing around my living room, and I should buck up and learn to live with nature.
• I must have poor hygiene and/or live in a hovel, or there wouldn’t be flies in my flat.
• I’m clearly not appreciating the historic British architecture and thus I don’t respect how the visual appeal of the listed buildings would be damaged by fly screens on the window.
• [I should] Go home. (ed. That’s always my absolute favorite, really.)
• How dare I be complaining about the flies in my comfortable Western flat when there are children in the third world with more serious problems.

Now here’s where we get serious. World malaria day was only a few days ago, and a net to put over a child’s bed is effective in preventing this deadly infection. So, enough about me and my whinges about flying insects and my dreams of fly screens, how about you all join me in doing something much more useful, and make a donation to Nothing But Nets. From their website:

In the poorest parts of the world, where effective window screens are lacking, insecticide-treated bed nets are arguably the most cost-effective way to prevent malaria transmission. One bed net costs just $10 to buy and deliver to individuals in need. One bed net can safely last a family for about four years, thanks to a long-lasting insecticide woven into the net fabric.

And don’t bother to make any derogatory comments about me and the flies. Believe me, I’ve heard it all already.

A 21st century girl in a 19th century world

This week I had some frustrating adventures when I had to:

• Visit the bank in person to deposit money
• Stand in a 10-deep queue at the post office to mail 2 letters
• Log the need for my radiators to stop leaking on a piece of paper in a 3-ring binder two blocks from where I live
• Obtain a pin-pad for my computer to be able to make online payments

Instead of:

• Depositing a check at the ATM
• Using a vending machine to buy stamps
• Filling in a web-form or sending a text to request maintenance
• Using PayPal to authorize web-transactions of all magnitudes

For anyone considering a move to the UK from the US let me just say, yes you may have more vacation time, but you’ll need it after spending so much time doing things that would have taken no time at all in the US. Although I admit my local drugstore and grocery store have both added self-checkout, merely 4 years after they became standard in the states.

What a Croc!

I am really, really enamoured of my new shoes. And slightly embarassed to admit the are Crocs. One of my very good friends lives near Boulder where they are made. She absolutely hates the things. I was mortified to confess to her when I got my first pair, but I had the excuse that they were a gift so I was not to be blamed. I did tell her how ridiculously comfortable they were, and what perfect beach shoes they were. But now I’ve done the indefensible thing of buying not one, but two new pairs of Crocs. But again, in my defense they are really cute and low profile, they don’t actually scream “plastic shoes!” and although I got these to wear around the house (note the matching pajama pants, and no Brits I simply cannot say pajama trousers, not only do you lose the alliteration but it sounds dumb–what on earth would you call them?) I’m now contemplating a black pair for work. Again, in my defense, I have arthritis in my feet after a childhood spent ballet dancing (badly! I was never the most graceful or coordinated kid!) so comfortable shoes are a necessity. So watch out England, I am entirely likely to soon be walking your streets in cheap plastic shoes! How very American of me!!!

I need a tip…

…about tipping etiquette in the UK. Yesterday I managed to get my hair(s) cut for the first time since August (hollah!) and the guy was excellent. He not only gave me a good haircut but taught me some tricks about bringing out the natural wave in my hair, something I’ve been embracing in the last few months after 3 or 4 years spent as a slave to a flatiron. As I paid my bill and prepared to leave, I realized that I had no idea if there was a way to give him a tip. It was only the third time I’ve had a haircut in the UK–it’s one of those things that I strangely only seem to find time for when I’m back “home” in the states–and the previous two had not left me thrilled. So I had not worried about it previously, but now I’m curious. In the states, there were usually a few obvious and easy ways to leave a tip post-haircut, either on the credit card slip (like you can in a restaurant) or with the little envelopes on the desk for which you could put cash, the name of the cutter and your name and leave them with the receptionist. You could also just toss some cash over the counter and say “see that Brian gets this from me” and the receptionist would know what to do. None of these options were obvious to me yesterday. Furthermore, the guy who cut my hair was lurking about, making me a bit uncomfortable (for some reason the tipping ritual in this context in the states was always done in the absence of the person to whom the tip was addressed…) Any ideas or advice?