Glamourgeek

The longer I live here in the UK, the more I am expected to speak ‘correctly’. As mentioned in an earlier post, there are different terms and words for things in the UK vs. the US. In that vein, I am documenting a few more translations for those who prefer to be understood when visiting the UK.

AMERICAN TERM …………… ENGLISH TERM
Sweater …………… Jumper
Garbage …………… Rubbish
Prawns …………… Shrimp
Tiny Shrimp …………… Prawns
Eggplant …………… Aubergine
Zuccini …………… Courgette
Cell phone …………… Mobile
Truck …………… Lorry
Bicycle …………… Pushbike
Sprite or 7 Up …………… Lemonade
Idiot …………… Tosser
Candy …………… Sweets
Wrench …………… Spanner
Apartment …………… Flat
Pharmacy …………… Chemists

Yesterday I actually said ‘rubbish bin’ to mom, then had to correct myself and say ‘garbage can’. That earned my grins and thumbs-up from two gentlemen who feel it is their civic duty to tell me every time I say something ‘incorrectly’ (you know who you are).

One of the traditional activities in Cambridge for both locals and visitors is to go punting. A punt is a flat-bottom boat that is powered and guided by someone standing at the back of it with a very long wooden pole used to push against the bottom of the river.

One of my boyfriend’s friends suggested a punting trip from Cambridge to Grantchester with a BBQ in a field in Grantchester before our return punting trip to Cambridge. The weather forecast looked beautiful, and the group was up to about 20 people. Little did we know this trip was going to inspire the new British sport of Xtreme BBQing. Let me just say, if you are planning on moving to the UK, buy loads of waterproof gear first and never leave home without it.

The walk from my boyfriend Neil’s house to the river started out badly. Like a silly foreigner I had worn summer clothes after seeing the forecast. We got caught in a massive hailstorm on the way there, and we were all soaked to the skin and absolutely freezing. Once the rain and hail abated, we were leaving puddles wherever we walked. At one point Neil’s roommate Rich said to Neil “You’ve just stepped in a puddle” and Neil said “The puddle is from my shoes”.

After waiting out the storm in front of the fireplace at The Anchor, a lovely pub on the river, the group of us loaded into the punts. As we were filling the punts with the BBQ stuff, the rain started to fall again. Five of the people decided to stay on land and go straight back to the pub, while the rest of us decided that it would clear up eventually and loaded ourselves onto the boats.

The punt ride was very enjoyable, with beautiful dappled sunlight filtering through the trees. We tried to send a message in a bottle to the other punt requesting more wine, but they missed the bottle. Someday years from now someone will find the bottle and wonder if we ever received our wine.

Another tradition while punting is to bridge jump. This involves one or two crazy people from each punt jumping onto a bridge as the boat passes below, then jumping back onto the boat from the other side. Some of the guys made it look easy, but I was still so wet and cold that I was not even going to attempt it. Neil ended up helping one of the girls, Sarah, up onto the bridge by pulling her up with one hand. *sigh* he’s so strong.

Okay, enough of that. So once we got to the BBQ site (which we decided upon long before reaching Grantchester) we unloaded the disposable BBQ grill and the food from the punts and lit up. Suddenly, as the food was being laid on the well-lit grill and my socks were almost dry, the skies opened up with a vengence.

Hailstones larger than I have ever seen them began pelting us so hard that all we could do was cower under whatever cover we could find. My shoes were still off because I had been trying to dry my socks, and I thought I was getting frostbite on my toes from all the ice piling up on them. In true British fashion, a group was huddled around the BBQ covering themselves up with blankets while making a makeshift roof out of the blankets to keep the BBQ from getting wet. Rich stayed huddled on the ground tending the BBQ, breathing in massive amounts of C02 while cooking the meat to perfection. After a very long time the hail finally subsided and we were able to enjoy our BBQ. Drenched and soaked, but well fed.

After another smaller hailstorm, which quite handily put out the BBQ fire when we were finished with it, and a couple of very close lightning strikes, we decided to head back. Emily was kind enough to remove the bulk of the piles of hail from inside the punts, and we enjoyed beautiful weather for most of the return punt trip. There was more bridge jumping as well as some strange inter-punt fights (mainly between Prue and Rodolph). Upon returning to Cambridge, the rain began to fall very hard again and we unloaded the punts while wrapped up in whatever soaking wet blankets we could find.

Two days later I am still sore from the constant seven hours of shivering, but at least I feel a little more British. No wonder they have such great senses of humour over here. It is the only way to cope.

Well, today marks the fourth day of me behind the wheel of a british car. The wheel is, of course, on the wrong side of the car and the driving lanes have me driving on the left side of the street instead of the right. Already millions of non-british folks have achieved this seemingly insurmountable task, but let me tell you, I was proud to have survived intact! And today I haven’t even driven into any curbs! Fortunately the British rental car companies include insurance in the daily rental price. Haven’t killed anyone yet, but the night is young, and tonight it is raining! There are many cyclists in Cambridge, and the roads are more narrow than the cars (maybe why there are so few SUVs?) and the bicycle lanes that the city planners put in don’t actually give the cyclists their own lane but rather just take a bigger swathe out of the driving lanes. The great thing is, I am staying in a house called ‘The Cottage’ on ‘Old House Road’ (yes, that is the entire address) and I drive through gorgeous countryside on my entire ten minute commute to work. It is truly the best of everything – high technology company in countryside, with a city two minutes further down the road.

I miss my US friends terribly, but I don’t miss the 405, the 101, the 110 or even the 10! LA folks know what I mean. Dontcha?

Well, I for one am exhausted!

It is 28 degrees outside. I have just finished my third week at the new job. After not working seriously for years, I am finally settling in to sitting in front of a computer for 7.5 hours a day (no 8 hour work days here) with other people on computers all around me. The job is becoming more managable, or at least I am understanding the product and my role in it a bit better. Knowledge, it turns out, is a great stress reliever. I have been going through the tutorial for our product, getting through about one page per two hours, and finally get the general idea. Duh. You connect to a target (the chip) through an interface (Trace or ICE), load an image onto the target that contains the RTOS (Realtime Operating System) that you wish to run on the chip, and then run through the code looking for errors. When the original chunk of code is compiled, the level of the optimization controls the amount of original code left in the end build. So if I am debugging a highly optimized build, then the errors might not point me to the exact spot in the software with the problem, but if I use a low amount of optimization, then I can usually find the area in the code that I want to test. So that explains why Microsoft Word is such a large size, becausse if they were to optimize the compiled build into a smaller sized executable, then there would be more difficulty in the developers finding the sources of bugs.

Whew.

Ok, so if learning everything in that preceeding paragraph weren’t enough to completely rock my world, I am also househunting. With no car. In the cold. This means that every morning before work I have been taking the bus somewhere to look at houses, and every lunch time I do the same. Generally, the busses that run every ten minnutes don’t arrive for at least thirty minutes when I am in a hurry. And since it has been 32 degrees each day, I have been loading up on cashmere before going out the door. Aftger looking at many homes that were absolute pits, I finally found one right across the street from work that is gorgeous! But now the owner, whom I met and got on well with, is saying that he may want to sell the house instead. Ugh! Tht would mean at least another week of this dreadful househunting.

Other than the growing pains of adapting to a new country, job, etc., I have been getting out and having a little fun. Bern and I went to a fundraiser for Prince’s Trust, Prince Charles’ organization which helps people start businesses and helps teenagers or young adults with unsavory pasts get a new start in the arts. The party was in the Master’s Lodge at Magdelene College (part of Cambridge University). The Master (I can’t remember his name) said that no one normally gets to enter the house. It was beautiful. And the attendees of this benefit were some of the ‘Gown’ set (each town here seems to have it’s own ‘town’ and ‘gown’ set) and it appears they all wore black or dark red blazers. I was in a pink sweater set. Stood out like a sore thumb.

Wow. Moving countries is hard work!

I have been staying with my friend Bern, who had set up his study as a bedroom for me. Unfortunately, it was so quiet that I couldn’t sleep, and the sofa bed was too short for me. He lives in a village outside of Cambridge called Balsham that is really nice, but the buss ervice that is supposed to run there doesn’t really exist as far as I can tell. So, in order to get some sleep and be in Cambridge itself with proper bus service, I moved into temporary housing at www.cambridgeapartments.com. It was difficult to feel like I had made the right decision when I didn’t even have my own space, but now everything is improving rapidly.

To add to the fatigue of starting new, I already went on my first business trip to our office in a place between London and Oxford called Maidenhead (heh heh… heh heh… shut up Beavis) to meet with some of my new team. The trip from Cambridge to Oxford or anywhere along that M14 Corridor requires a train ride into London, a subway (Tube) ride from one train station to another, then another train up towards Oxford. In all it takes 3.5 hours. Maybe some day they will put in a direct route, but until then it looks like this may be a leftover of the thousand year Cambridge/Oxford rivalry.

Well, I have survived my first week as a resident of Britain. The worst part is over, beginning a job for which I am grossly underqualified. The company that hired me designs embedded systems (the chips that run our cellphones, cars, gaming consoles, etc) and I am just this little automated GUI validation engineer surrounded by big bad hardware engineers who talk binary and unix and theoretical mathematics. whoa.

The most trauamtic moment of the week would either be the morning when I bought what I thought was an apple turnover for breakfast and discovered it had a mystery meat product inside, or when the unix geek next to me was helping me get my computer on the network, and when he said “Go to the system control panel” my mind went blank and I said “huh?”

Anyway, it is freezing here and I am looking forward to that first weekend trip to Spain or Italy. That is what life is about.

There are many ways to get in trouble with language differences, even in another english speaking country. Here are some translations of common terms in Britain:

• AMERICAN TERM …………… ENGLISH TERM
• Pants …………… Trousers
• Underwear …………… Pants
• Bum …………… Vagrant
• Bottom …………… Bum
• Rude …………… Cheeky
• Sausage …………… Bangers
• Chips …………… Crisps
• French Fries …………… Chips
• Toilet …………… Loo
• Mail …………… Post
• Vacation …………… Holiday
• Bus …………… Coach
• Thanks …………… Cheers
• Friend …………… Mate
• Coworker …………… Mate
• Fellow Bar Fly …………… Mate
• Stranger …………… Mate
• A**hole Driver …………… Mate

Some other cultural differences include the men using cloth hankerchiefs rather than disposable kleenex. I got used to this very quickly (seeing it – not doing it) and now I realize just how much garbage and how many trees I go through using kleenex.

Also, they seem to cook fresh food, and are really very good cooks, not even using prepackaged foods. I have had some of the most amazing meals made from scratch including chicken curry, pad thai, roast lamb, potato and parsnip soup, and more. All made from completely fresh ingredients. No wonder Americans tend towards obesity more. We cook prepackaged as often as possible, or eat out. Did you know that a chicken curry takes as much time to make as macaroni and cheese? And it has zero fat and lots of nutrients.

In London, there is quite a bit to do if you have a large budget. There are also some very lovely things to do while visiting on a tight budget as I am. For example, many of the museums are free or donation based. They are subsidized by the government which means that people of limited means can visit. Yesterday I went to the Natural History museum and saw fossils discovered all around the world. There was a wonderful exhibit on the various types of volcanic materials, as well as an enticing dinosaur exhibit. This museum also had quite a few places for people to sit and rest. The bird exhibit was a bit disturbing since there were hundreds of stuffed birds collecting dust behind glass. This is the museum where my friend Michael and I went to the Harry Potter premiere after-party.

The pub culture in England is unlike any other. France has their café culture. New York their bar culture. Belgium their moules et frites culture. But in England there are pubs on every corner. They have intriguing names such as The Dog And Duck, The Goat, or one I just drove past called Take Courage. I seem to think the pubs are named by the owners putting many words into a hat and picking out two. They add an ‘and’ between the words, and there is the name. For instance, how many Horse and Hounds are there? Also, there are countless Boar’s Heads, Churchill Arms, Fox and Hounds, and White Stags in each town. Speaking of Churchill Arms, there is one in London on Kensington Church Street between Kensington and Notting hill that has some of the best thai food around. Evidently the thai food phenomenon in pubs is quite common. This pub also has pulled draughts, which means the beer is stored in the basement in the original oak barrels, and the draught pulls at the bar actually pump the beer directly from the oak barrels.