Happy Christmas!

“Happy Christmas” is what people say in England in situations where Americans would say “Merry Christmas”, for example, on the last day at school or work before the holiday begins, or on Christmas cards.

At the trivia night party at the Faculty of Education, one question all English people knew the answer to was: “List the three things you leave out for Santa before going to bed Christmas Eve”. The answers are: (1) mince pies, (2) a carrot, (3) a glass of sherry.

Actually I’m not sure the question said “Santa” because the English also often refer to him as “Father Christmas.” At a toy store shopping for Graham, one 3-year-old and his mother were shopping for a present for the kid’s best friend. The child pointed to a rather large present and his mom said “That’s a bit big for us to get for him, I think Father Christmas might be bringing that for him.”

One of the coolest things they have in England that Americans have never heard of are Christmas Crackers. Every person here grew up with them, and they always have them at adult-only dinner parties too (the two that I went to anyway). Too complex to describe but Google it if you like. (Hint: You’re not allowed to have them in your checked luggage or carry-ons although some people manage to sneak them through

This is my last posting on this blog! I’m now safely home and unpacked. It was sad to leave but it’s wonderful to be back with my family. Happy Christmas!

Little Things

Unexpected differences between England and the U.S.:

• The zippers are backwards (zipper pull on the left)
• Everyone uses 24-hour time (“Dinner at 18:30″)
• Date/month are reversed (I return home 19 December)
• Computer keyboards have some swapped characters. I expect that in France, where they need keys for accented e’s and where what we call the QWERTY keyboard is called the AZERTY keyboard. But didn’t expect it in England (@ and ” are reversed, which causes endless problems when sending email). And in Germany, Z and Y are reversed.

Vignettes

Small observations:

1. Arriving for supper at Brown’s restaurant, which is on King’s Parade just opposite King’s College. I look over at the bar and I see a group of about eight students, all wearing suits and formal dresses, and they have the academic robes on–the kind you see at graduation ceremonies. But there is no graduation ceremony this time of year. I inquired: it turns out that at many of the colleges, academic robes must be worn to two or so evening dinners each week called “formal hall”. And when students go out after formal hall for drinks at the bar, they leave the robes on. It’s apparently quite common.

2. A friend took me to a very out of the way pub called St. Radegund’s, tiny with a distinctive wedge shape because it’s on a corner. Near Jesus College. One patron had his large English Sheepdog sitting on the floor.

3. At a fairly working class fish and chips place in Ely (it’s called Petrou) I noticed everyone had green stuff, something like guacamole, on their french fries. So I thought, do as the locals do, and asked for it too. I kind of wish I hadn’t. I’ve since learned it’s called “mashed peas” and that’s exactly what it was.

There’s another story about mashed peas that says a lot about the current election season here in Britain. Gordon Brown, current prime minister of Labour, has fairly low poll numbers but is gaining on his challenger, David Cameron of the Tories. Cameron’s problem is that he is very upper class (Eton, Oxford) and not very good at hiding it, which is a problem because the Tories are historically associated with wealth and privilege whereas Labour is the party of everyone else. And you can’t win an election if only rich people vote for you. Anyway, when I described my experience with mashed peas to a local, I was told a story about David Cameron: not long ago, he went to a local fish and chips place, attempting to show he was just one of the guys. He failed miserably when he said  “And I’ll have some of that guacamole on my chips.” (Of course, I was told this story by a Labour voter.)

Correction: It wasn’t David Cameron, it was Peter Mandelson. This story is even more complicated for a non-U.K. reader than the incorrect one above. Mandelson is solid labour, but is “new labour” (trust me you don’t want a long blog about new and old labour) and actually from a working class background. He is known for cozying up to rich folks and generally acting upper class, for a couple of decades denying his working class roots. He was visiting a town up north (the home of industrial labor in the U.K.) and is said to have asked for “avocado” on his chips. Thus displaying his rejection of his working class roots and his wholesale adoption of upper class attitudes, so the story goes.

A quick Google search suggests that this story is probably false anyway, even though I swear every person I’ve told about my Ely Petrou experience immediately tells me about Mandelson, it could be an urban myth, which would make it even more telling about British political culture:

http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=print_topic;f=101;t=000327

St. Nicholas’ Day

I was in Brussels, Belgium yesterday (Sunday December 6) and I learned that it was a big day in Belgium: St. Nicholas’ Day, when “St. Nicholas” brings presents to all the children in the morning. I heard about this from several people, including an old friend of mine (where I had dinner that night) who has two children who absolutely received St. Nicholas presents that morning.

That sounds a lot like what Americans know as Christmas, on December 25, so I asked: and yes, in Brussels they also celebrate December 25 and presents are given that morning, too. St. Nicholas’ Day is only for children to receive presents, but adults too receive presents on Christmas. But historically in this culture, the bigger event is St. Nicholas’ Day.  Wikipedia says that Christmas and Santa Claus are primarily being pushed by merchants as another gift-giving event, and sometimes December 25 is thought of as an American commercial holiday.

I took the Eurostar train from London to Brussels; that’s the train that passes through the Chunnel, the famous tunnel that goes under the English channel. Famous for being an awesome technical accomplishment, and also famous for losing billions of dollars. I recently read that this year, for the first time, it might make a profit. Hard to make money when Ryan Air is offering flights for 2 pounds. By the way, in England there are a lot of global warming activists who think that these discount airline tickets are contributing to global warming, and the prices should be higher to save the planet. My American friends: if you haven’t heard of Copenhagen yet, it’s front page news here and it hasn’t even started yet. In London there have already been organized marches in advance of the climate change summit (the friend I met for dinner in London Saturday night had blue paint on her face, the symbol of the marchers around Parliament, and she came all the way in from Brighton to take part in the march).

Eurostar takes only two hours and I have to say, going by train is far superior than air travel: larger seats, less noise, better air, and quicker security and passport control. Yes, even though it’s a train, and in Europe, you still have to go through a metal detector and a passport check with a customs official. But it’s a lot quicker; laptops stay in your briefcase, shoes and belts stay on. I don’t know why there’s a passport control; when I took the train from Zurich, Switzerland into Konstanz, Germany, no one asked to see my passport. Perhaps because the English don’t think they are part of Europe. You hear a lot of jokes about English Euroskepticism; but this is definitional, they really think that “Europe” refers only to the continent thus excluding the British Isles. I still refer to Britain as “Europe” thus marking me as not being British, I suppose.

The Travellers

Here’s something fascinating that you won’t know about unless you’ve lived in England. “The Travellers.” (Yes, it’s spelled with two “l”s in British English, so spell checker, stop bothering me !) They are groups of nomadic people who live in small trailers and tents and camp, sometimes illegally but not always (see below), on public land. They often move en masse to a new location. “Gypsies” you say? Well, “gypsy” refers to an ethnic group known as Roma that originated in South Asia. There are a few Roma in England, but most of the Travellers are 100 percent English; this is a local English phenomenon.

The best known of the Travellers are called “New Age Travellers” and they are descended from the 1960s hippie era. (You can read about them on Wikipedia.) But Wikipedia says nothing about another group of English Travellers, who are not New Age but who simply live the nomadic lifestyle. (I know about them because I met someone who has one in his extended family.)

Cambridgeshire

I first encountered the term “Travellers” in our local Cambridge newspaper. It turns out that the British government requires each local municipality to provide official land designated for Travellers’ encampments. As John Steward would say, “Wha…?” You mean it’s not illegal to camp without sanitation or electricity or a street address, for years at a time? According to the article, the City of Cambridge was upset because a government agency had determined their official Travellers’ plot was not big enough. Children, of course, are raised in Traveller communities; some families have now been Travellers for several generations. They are eligible for all government services, including public school and health care. And no, they’re not just poor homeless people, either…it’s more complex than that, apparently.

This sounds like the sort of phenomenon you’d be more likely to find in the U.S., with our big open spaces and our tradition of rugged individualism. Not to mention our more recent tradition of New Age spirituality and communal living. But if you tried this in the U.S. your camp would be disbanded by the authorities pretty quickly. And England, which we think of as having a centralized all powerful government, with its nose in every aspect of one’s personal life, officially supports this alternative lifestyle. Now, someone who knows more about England needs to tell me what this means about England: both that Travellers emerged here (but not in the U.S.), and that the lifestyle is officially permitted…

The Traveler Attitude

After living in Europe for a month, traveling to a variety of countries, I’ve developed a certain sense of heightened awareness of cultural difference. I’m always listening and watching, to see those important yet unspoken things that people do that are different from what I would instinctively do in America. It’s strange, to always be examining one’s own instincts to act before acting, but it’s become second nature. I’ll start with two examples, and then tell a story about how this “traveler attitude” can lead you astray.

In America, when eating in a restaurant, if you don’t finish you meal the waiter will ask “Would you like me to wrap that up for you?” Or, you might say “I think I’ll have to take the rest home” and the waiter knows to bring you a box for the leftovers. The portions are smaller in European restaurants so I’ve never failed to finish a meal, until just last week at a restaurant in England with some colleagues. I was quite full and was only half done. The leftovers would have made a wonderful lunch the next day. My American instincts said to ask for a box to take it home, but my traveler instincts reminded me that I had never seen anyone leaving a European restaurant with food. So I turned to the pair of colleagues sitting to my left and asked, “Would it be okay to take this home, do you think?” They almost visibly recoiled, I presume at the horror of such a suggestion; but they know I am American and politely explained, “No, we don’t really do that here.”

It happened again in Germany; I finished my meal, but my colleague had quite a bit of her meal left. When she indicated she was done, the waiter simply took away the plate. No offer to wrap it up. I told her that in the U.S., a person in her situation would have taken the leftovers home. She was puzzled about how this would work; she said, “would the waiter offer, or do you have to ask?”

Here’s a second example of why the traveler’s attitude is necessary. At a small academic conference in Konstanz, Germany, we were each given 30 minutes to give a lecture on our research. After the first lecture ended, I raised my hands to applaud, as is customarily done at all conferences I’ve attended. To my surprise, all of my German colleagues started knocking on the table with their knuckles. I literally stopped my two palms in mid-air as they were about to meet and make my first clap. I assumed that the table knocking served the same function as applause; after all, the talk had been quite good! But I wasn’t sure; so I waited for the second talk to finish, this time prepared to knock if it happened again. Sure enough, again the collective knocking, and this time I joined in. (At the end of the day, I asked about this practice, and was told it is the norm in German academic settings—including lectures to students, where the combined knocking of 300 students is, I was told, something quite impressive.)

But even though it’s absolutely necessary, sometimes the traveler attitude can lead you to the wrong conclusion. I’ll give one last story that has two parts. Part 1: At a hotel in Finland, I had just checked in and entered my room. I turned on the light switches, but no lights came on. I went around the room, trying all of the lights, but none of them worked. So I called down to the front desk and reported that my lights were not working. They said, you just need to put your room card key in the wall slot by the front door. Aha! Sure enough, I quickly found this slot and with the card in, all the lights worked.

So, good enough. Now I knew what to do when the lights wouldn’t come on.

Part 2: A few days later, I entered my office at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education. On all previous days, a co-worked had arrived first and the lights were already on. But this time, I was the first and the lights were off. I looked for the light switch; it wasn’t by the door. Aha, I thought, there must be a trick to getting these lights on. I looked everywhere along the walls; maybe I had to insert my office key somewhere. But there was no keyhole to be found.

Finally, I gave up. I went down to the building maintenance office, expecting to discover some incredibly obvious solution I should have known about. But something different happened: Oh, they said, that’s an architectural design flaw that your office doesn’t have a light switch. Your office was originally thought to be a part of the computer lab next door (a doorway connects our office to the lab) and your lights are on the same circuit with the computer lab. You have to go into the lab and turn on its light switch, and yours will come on too.

Not everything surprising that happens is due to a cultural difference; sometimes it’s just a design flaw.

The Christmas Market

I just returned from a conference at the University of Konstanz. It’s almost like being in Switzerland; you fly into Zurich and then take a train, and Konstanz is just across the border from the Swiss city of  Kreuzlingen. For dinner I had the regional specialty of Rosti, which is in fact a Swiss dish.  It’s several small fried potato pancakes, served with meat and vegetables in a creamy sauce. By the way, speaking of eating, I noticed in the restaurants that most people drink beer with their meal rather than wine.

Konstanz seems such a charming old city; I thought it must not have been bombed in the war. When I asked, I learned that because Konstanz was so close to Kreuzlingen, and because Switzerland was an officially neutral country during World War II, the bombers stayed away because it would have been too hard to target only Konstanz. In the beginning of the bombing raids, U.S. bombers only went at night (because it was then harder for German fighters and anti-aircraft to spot them and shoot them down), and the people of Konstanz kept all of their lights on so that their city would appear to be a part of Kreutzlingen. Everyone in Europe immediately knows why this is notable, but I had to think a minute…and I figured that when you’re being bombed you normally keep all of your lights off at night so that enemy bombers cannot see where they’re supposed to drop their bombs.

I’m struck by how present in memory these stories are. For me, past wars are ancient history, something I learned about in school. Here everyone seems to know where the bombs fell, and that everyone kept the lights off at night.

As I walked from the train station I passed through a street where wooden stalls were being constructed. It was something like a U.S. art fair, but rather than canvas tents these were all wood huts, some of them fully enclosed with windows and doors. I later learned that this is the town’s Christmas fair; temporary stalls are built every year in the old town, where the streets are narrow and cobblestone and largely off limits to automobiles. I’ve been told about other small town Christmas markets, like the one in Bath, England (which I’ll miss because it’s closing down before I get there on December 16. Can you imagine an American Christmas market closing down any time before December 25? No way.) The Christmas market is a standard custom in smaller European cities. The one in Konstanz seemed so lovely, I wondered why can’t we bring this custom to the U.S.? And then I realized, this could only work in a town where your primary mode of transportation is walking and taking the train.  So pretty much everyone is constantly walking to the train station, thereby passing through the Christmas market on their way home from work. In the U.S., where no one ever walks anywhere, you’d have to put the market in the middle of a big parking lot and then do a big advertising campaign to get people to drive to your market and shop there. And we already have that: it’s called a mall. Unfortunately malls have none of the charm of a Christmas market!

A taste of what travel is like in Europe: Getting from Cambridge to Konstanz:

1. Walk from house to Cambridge rail station: 10 minutes
2. Express train Cambridge to London Kings Cross Rail Station: 50 minutes, trains every thirty minutes
3. London Underground to Paddington Rail Station: variable, typically 15 minutes. (Circle Line or Hammersmith Line)
4. Heathrow Express, Paddington to Heathrow Terminal 5: 25 minutes, trains every 15 minutes
5. Flight from Heathrow to Zurich: 2 hours
6. Express train from Zurich to Konstanz: 63 minutes, trains every 30 minutes. (Nice views of the Alps!)
7. Walk from Konstanz rail station to hotel: 10 minutes

Total transit time, approximately 8 hours.

Eggs

This past week, three trips out of town kept me quite busy. Now, it’s Saturday morning and I have the whole weekend with nothing planned. The weather is good for Cambridge: rather warm and not raining, even though it’s completely overcast and it feels like you’re walking through a cloud. But no rain means I’ll be able to ride the bike.

Living in England is like living in a cloud. The roads are always wet as if it’s been raining, even if it hasn’t rained in days. The grass is always wet, too. A few days ago it was blue sky and clear all day long, and the roads still never dried. (You notice this when you’re riding a bike with no fenders; the water splashes up onto your back from the rear tire.)

I overheard one older professor saying that she had several old books by her long-deceased father. The books were quite special to her, so she chose not to keep them in her house; mold from the dampness would damage the books. So she stores them off-site.

It’s so damp here that homes are constructed with a “damp barrier”. It used to be sheets of slate (that’s what this house has and sometimes the barrier fails; at my home here, they’re in the middle of tearing out the wallpaper in the living room because it’s damp due to such a failure). Newer homes have sheets of plastic or something like that.

I couldn’t find eggs at the grocery store this morning. I asked at the cash register and they said “Down aisle 2″ which puzzled me because there’s no refrigeration down that aisle. I found the eggs in between the potato chips and the magazines, at room temperature. Back at the register, I commented that I had been looking for them in the refrigerated section and the clerk said “Eggs don’t have to be refrigerated, it’s just a matter of preference whether you like them cold or not.”  In the U.S. I heard the same thing from people who grew up on farms but I never believed them…

A Pilgrimage

I was shopping in Cambridge’s city center on Saturday, November 7th and I noticed that in front of many shops, there were women selling tiny red flowers on portable tables. I overheard someone refer to them as “poppies” and I had a vague memory of November 11 being Armistice Day, the end of World War I; and another vague memory of a poem about the poppies of Flanders Field. So I asked one of these poppy sellers, and she told me that people wear the poppies on Remembrance Sunday, which would be the next day, November 8th.

Poppies and Crosses at Exeter Cathedral; the strings separate the wars

I attended Cambridge’s Unitarian Church at 10:30 that Sunday morning and the service was quite somber. At 11:00 we heard a single gun shot, fired in a large central park nearby, and the service stopped.  All stood up, and stood in silence; the service resumed when a second gun was fired two minutes later. This tradition honors the memory of those who died in wars.

Cambridge memorial on 11 November

 

My house is quite close to the Cambridge war memorial monument. On Tuesday 11 November, I walked over to pay my respects as part of the service, again at 11:00am. The monument is in the middle of Hills Road, one of the busiest in Cambridge, but traffic was stopped ten minutes before. The service was very moving, especially the large groups of uniformed school children from nearby schools.

Cambridge American Cemetery

The Saturday after Armistice Day, I made a pilgrimage on my bicycle to The American Cemetery, the only U.S. military cemetery in England, with the bodies of 3,810 Americans. The names of many more Americans, those whose bodies were never recovered, are etched on a long marble wall. And by “long” I mean it seems like it’s half a mile long. The cemetery is three miles outside of Cambridge, past miles of farm fields, and near the town of Maddingley, high on a ridge overlooking tilled fields. During the war, many more than 3,810 American dead were buried in temporary cemeteries in England. After the war the military’s policy was that the family could decide either to repatriate the body, or to allow the body to remain in the theater of combat. This was a quite personal decision but a significant number of families chose to allow their warrior to remain in England, and a permanent cemetery was built outside of Cambridge. I read in the paper that the Veteran’s Day observation at the Cambridge American Cemetery this November 11 was the largest in the world outside of America.

I took the above photo on my pilgrimage. The photo from Exeter I took on November 10th when I was giving a lecture at the University of Exeter.

A superficial difference between the U.S. and Britain is that we honor our war dead on Memorial Day in May. Americans also recognize 11 November as Veteran’s Day of course, but it seems like Memorial Day is the bigger event. That’s the day every year when my family attends the procession to the cemetery in the small Illinois town of Jerseyville, and then visits the grave of my wife’s brother who was killed in Vietnam. The British take November 11 very seriously. There are strong memories of the suffering during and after World War II; in my short time here I’ve heard many very personal stories about this. The Exeter Cathedral was damaged by bombing; years after the war ended, food was rationed, and people my parents’ age can remember being hungry. At 11am on Remembrance Sunday, and again on Armistice Day, no matter where you are, even if you’re in your own home–when you hear the gun you stand in silence for two minutes.

Guy Fawkes Day

When do British people light fireworks? Yes, on New Year’s Eve, just like Americans. But, surprise: they don’t celebrate the fourth of July—the American celebration of independence from Britain. (Of course, I knew that. But with so many things about being in England, even though you “know” it, you still have that feeling of sudden disorientation when you actually encounter the reality of it.) So in Britain, are there fireworks only on New Year’s Eve?

The answer is no. My first week in Britain, the first week of November, was filled with fireworks every night, leading up to the celebration of Guy Fawkes Day on November 5. And with November 5 falling on a Thursday, the fireworks continued on Friday and Saturday nights as well.

Guy Fawkes was a historical figure back in the time with England saw battles between Catholics and Protestants. A Protestant King James I was in power, and Guy Fawkes believed the Catholics were being oppressed. When the King made plans to visit the Parliament Building and speak to Parliament, a group of Catholics made plans to blow it up, killing the King and the entire Parliament in one horrific act of terrorism. This is the now famous “Gunpowder Plot” of 1605. The plot was discovered on 4 November, when 20 barrels of gunpowder were found in the cellars of Parliament, and Guy Fawkes was arrested (and later executed).

It makes sense to celebrate the failure of the Gunpowder Plot, but I’m not sure why the English would simulate, with fireworks, the destruction of Parliament that actually never occurred, which would have been a horrible tragedy. But then, after all, Americans on the Fourth of July light fireworks in simulation of a British naval bombardment of Baltimore’s Fort McHenry. I guess the message here is that fireworks are fun and not many people think about the historical symbolism anyway. (Be honest: Did you think about Fort McHenry the last July 4th fireworks celebration?) Another custom that is celebrated along with the fireworks is that bonfires are lit and then effigies of Guy Fawkes, made of old clothes and rags, are burned on the fire. And I always thought that Americans invented Burning Man!

Trivia tidbit: The word “guy” that we use to refer to a “man” or a “person” is derived from Guy Fawkes’ name. According to Merriam Webster, the rag doll effigies that got tossed on the bonfire were called “guys.” The word gradually came to mean “a person of grotesque appearance or dress” and then somehow, in the U.S. in the 19^th century, these negative connotations were lost and “guy” means any guy.