How to Buy Brown Shoe Polish in Dundee: Hint - No Target Here.

One of the tricky things about changing countries is that you don't know where to buy things.  I had realized that I was somewhat dependent on Target before I left the U.S., but it wasn't until I tried to buy brown shoe polish here that I realized the true level of convenience that Target, a store that carries pretty much anything you need, provides.  The closest thing we have to Target here is the Tesco Extra.  And to be fair, I didn't go there for my shoe polish, because it's a bit of a tricky walk, especially on my lunch hour at work, which is when I have most of my opportunity to shop.

But anyway, the brief story: I have brown leather shoes. They were getting pretty scuffed, since I walk pretty much everywhere I go in Dundee.  The smart thing to do would have been to go to the shoe store and get the shoe polish, but I thought sure I could find it cheaper and closer (the shoe store is pretty much on the far end of the pedestrian high street in town).  So I started looking. And I found tons of black shoe polish.  I could buy black shoe polish at the local post office near A's primary school.  No brown shoe polish, though.  To be fair, all the kids have to wear black shoes to school, so there's probably a lot more call for black shoe polish than brown.  Finally, after walking all the way downtown (in fact, past the aforementioned shoe store I didn't want to walk to), I found brown shoe polish, in a so-called "Gift Store" - there are several of these dotted around town, and I'm not sure why they are called Gift Stores, other than they sell gift wrap and gift bags, among many other things.  Most of the things they carry I cannot imagine giving as a gift...practical things like shower curtain rings, an inexpensive watch, vaguely strange things like velvet posters of unicorns to color...and of course, shoe polish....almost all black, but one tin of brown hidden in the basket. I think these stores might be competing with the British version of the Dollar Store (called, unsurprisingly, Poundland) but don't want to limit themselves to very low prices, perhaps. More points to ponder...and Target, I miss you and all your easily available made-in-China goods.       

Bath Science

Departing from the usual blog about Scotland to write about another passion - education.  Specifically, the education of our daughters, aged 5 and 2.

Most days, I give the girls a bath after dinner. Sometimes this is fun, sometimes it is just another step in the process of moving them from dinnertime to bedtime.  But a few nights ago, they were having fun playing with the water and I realized the bath was a great place to learn science.  Whenever the girls get in the bath, they always want to play with the water.  We didn't bring much in the way of bath toys to Scotland - we had a few before, but they mostly got chucked before we moved.  So their bath toys here are:

• a recycled-plastic boat
• 2 sturdy plastic cups
• 2 "Little People" figurines
• 2 mitt-style washcloths

With these, plus water, we do science. A (5) notices that the water coming out of the faucet starts out wide and then narrows as it falls into the tub. Why is that? We hypothesize.  C (2) becomes obsessed with her "giving a gift" game, and puts a Little Person inside a washcloth.  She tries to give me a gift of "a person, and water," but the water keeps draining out. Why is that, I ask A? She answers, correctly, that the water can pass through the (cheap) washcloth.  Why? I ask again, and she explores it further, thinking about properties of water, plastic figurines, and cheap washcloths. And we haven't even started exploring the soap.  

Three Things Scotland Does Right, in my humble opinion

Many of the entries in this blog are devoted to questioning things in Scotland that seem strange and different.  Although this often means different-bad, there is also different-good. Things that would probably never fly in the United States, but that Scotland - as a small country, and as part of the UK, can pull off. Despite the last sentence, this is not going to be about Scottish Independence. I'll wait until closer to the Referendum for that (for those of you who are not aware, Scotland is going to vote on whether it should be independent from the rest of the UK in September 2014...this is a huge story in Scotland that the US couple probably care less about.)

But, for today, a quick list of things Scotland (and the UK more generally) does right:

1) Health care.

Yes, there is grumbling about long wait times and the fact that people may not be getting top-line care from the National Health Service. But here was our experience of getting health care in Scotland:

• We arrived in Scotland for my job
• Human resources told me to go check in at my local health centre
• We checked in at Ryehill Health Centre, just up the hill from our house
• We gave them a little bit of information (our passports and visas and immunization records for the kids)
• Now we can call them whenever we need health care.
• It costs nothing out of pocket. No out of pocket costs for prescriptions either. 
• If you need care on the weekend, you call a national number that does triage with you and tells you where to go to get help.    

We can't really complain, especially given the shaky nature of health care in the US when you are unemployed/underemployed. Dental care was similarly easy to access and much cheaper than US care - preventative care is free and more extensive care is about 7x cheaper (in my tooth repairing experience so far - $250 in the States and about $35 here)

2) Fresh, local food

This was a sign I took a picture of today outside the larger Tesco (large UK supermarket chain) in Dundee city centre. It's really common to see meat and dairy labeled as Scottish or British.  There is a local butcher and a local grocer just a few blocks up the hill.  When Paul asked where the Christmas turkey we ordered was from, the butcher pointed across the River Tay, approximately 15 minutes away by car.

Things also have a more limited shelf life.  I told my (English, but has lived in Scotland 20+ years) boss that milk in the US will stay good in your refrigerator for a week. She was appalled.  Milk is really only good here for 3-4 days after being opened. Fewer preservatives, I guess.  Organic food is also common, and often as cheap (sometimes cheaper) that the non-organic item.

Even the small market just up the hill (which is bigger than a US convenience store, but would probably charge premium prices in the US anyway) advertises their Scottish/British foods (and the prices for most items are comparable to the large chains like Tesco).

3. Walk-ability

We do have a car here, which is convenient, especially when traveling around the local area.  But like most of Europe, Scotland is much more walkable and accessible by public transit. I can  walk to work in about 10 minutes. Walk Audrey to school in about 15 minutes. Walk to the city centre in 20 minutes. And I could take the bus to these places even faster.  I can really get everywhere I need to go, and many places I want to go (singing rehearsal, the cinema) by walking. And everybody walks. There is no such thing as a school bus...literally everyone walks to school, or takes the city bus there. And in the city centre there are always scores of people (proper Scottish would be "loads of people") walking around, shopping, visiting the library, having coffee, all walking from place to place. Don't get me wrong, Dundee does have shopping centers and strip malls - but they are not the norm, and you have to work a bit to get there. I kind of like that (although I do miss Target for one stop shopping...not really a familiar concept around here).    

Tales from the Train: Scotland and England

Compared with the US, Britain has a fabulous rail network.  You can get to places small and large by rail in Britain, far more than you can in the US, where your options are really limited to the Northeast corridor (Washington DC to Boston) and perhaps the odd train to Chicago.   Over the past two days, I have gotten to know the rail network much better, traveling from Dundee down to Nottingham for a quarterly research project meeting.  Over the course of two days, this has meant approximately 10 hours in the train, and thanks to travel agents who apparently didn’t both checking that we used the most efficient routes, a lot of changing trains. I don’t really have sour grapes about this – we made all the changes with relatively little effort, as it was just myself and my boss, Wendy, traveling (with the addition of our colleague Mike from Edinburgh on the way back). But here is the synopsis of our travel (with the long, boring parts removed for readability).

10 am Thursday: we are on the platform at the Dundee station, drinking tea and coffee and eating pastries.   The weather is sunny – if you stand in just the right place on the platform, the sun filters down from the street above and warms you up.  I am amused by a sign posted on the platform encouraging people to clean up after their dogs – something Dundee citizens need to be reminded of, given the frequency with which I run across dog poop on the street, left as a little present to passer-by. 

Until they have their own toilet...priceless.

The day’s journey starts smoothly, and then we begin the string of train changes.  First in Edinburgh, then in Newcastle, then in Sheffield, then finally arriving to Nottingham close to 5 pm.  Not too tiring – we have managed to read and work pretty much the whole way. We walk around the corner to the ticket office on Nottingham (literally, around the corner, since the whole station is under construction) to see if we can get better seats for the train home the next day.  The ticket agent says, “it’s a good thing you stopped in” because the time of our train has been moved up 10 minutes, due to a landslide and poor track conditions near Sheffield, with no notification to us.  Good thing we did stop in.  She can’t really help us with the seats, only about to give us a different seat for the very last leg of our journey – Edinburgh to Dundee. Before hopping in a taxi, we stop in at the sweet shop to buy some “sweeties” for the kids in Scotland.

After the meeting the next day, taxis arrive slightly earlier to get us to the train station on time.  Although things are only a few miles apart in Nottingham, it seems to take 20 or 30 minutes to get anywhere, sitting in traffic for an interminable amount of time, waiting to turn right across traffic, taking many detours that seem to point us away from the station, until we finally arrive.  I am in a mild panic, thinking it’s nearly time for the train, but in fact it’s only 16:16 and the train doesn’t depart until 16:38.  As the time for the train draws closer (16:37 and still no sign of the train arriving on the platform) the number of people waiting grows, and we realize that because of the track problems, they’ve put two trains-worth of passengers of one train, and any hope of having a reserved seat flies out the window. We muscle our way on and grab a seat, leaving the unlucky Nottingham students to stand. Although we leave late, we make up enough time to catch our connection at Sheffield – even having to a wait a bit for it, time to take a picture of the Victorian bar, the Sheffield Tap, a World Beer Free House – not, Wendy explains, that the beer is free, but that the bar is not connected with any particular brewery and can serve whichever brands it pleases. 

Sheffield Tap, a Victorian bar in the rail station.

Colleagues Wendy and Mike waiting for the train in Sheffield.

 Our train arrives and we board, finding our seats in the front coach (coach F…not the most intuitive one to put first, but I spy the letter as it goes flying past, leaving us scurrying up the platform to board). This a long haul. After the first train, I am ready to be home. Forget flying cars – I want to skip straight to teleportation.  We stay on the train for a long time. I finish my book, and we are still an hour and a half from Edinburgh. To make matters worse, the train is slow – 12 minutes slow, to be precise, shaving our comfortable 10-12 minutes change time at Edinburgh to a perilous 6 minutes or less. If we don’t make the 21:40 train, there’s another on at 22:08 but it’s the “milk run” – stopping at every podunk station between Edinburgh and Dundee. C’mon train, speed up! Just a few minutes will make a difference between making or missing that connection. A few minutes, and the luck of where the trains happen to be parked…if we step off one and just have to cross the platform to the other…       

Divine intervention – and the nicest train conductor ever…intervene. They identify eight or nine passengers (including Wendy and I) hoping against hope that we can make the connection to the 21:40 train.  Although we’re due to arrive at 21:35, the conductor talks to Edinburgh Waverly and gets us a track as close to the departing Aberdeen train as possible. They also talk to the other train and they agree to hold the train for 2 minutes. The conductor gathers us all in the end of the First Class carriage and gives us directions on how to go from track 11 to track 15, and says maybe the staff will even open the ticket barriers for us. We pull into the station, and Wendy says “Ready, set, go!” The first man opens the door and sprints out of the train, followed closely by the other 7 or 8 of us. We run flat out across the platform, crossing the road in front a bewildered taxi driver, not used to seeing eight or nine people dashing across his path, even at the train station. We race toward the ticket barrier, and the staff open up the handicapped gate, allowing us all to flow through at top speed.  “The end of the platform for Aberdeen” they yell helpfully, as we dash pell-mell down platform 15, finally reaching the still-open door of the train. We pile in, breathless. I was tired before, but now I am awake. We made it! After catching our breath, I enquire what carriage we are currently in, and realize our carriage is just one up, so we walk through and sit down just a half a minute before the train departs from the station. And the boredom resumes. But only for another hour.  And then I don’t have to take a long train journey for another month….