Four American Habits that Die Hard

So we have been in Scotland for about seven months now.  This is long enough, for me at least, to feel like we live here rather than just being temporary visitors.  I have adapted in a lot of ways, especially linguistically. I now talk about my garden instead of my yard, almost always remember to say trousers instead of pants, ask for a bus ticket to the city centre instead of downtown, and ask for my soup or cake "for takeaway" instead of "to go."  But it was that last bit (to go) that recently reminded me that there are a few American habits I have that die hard. I stopped into a coffee shop in the city centre to get a scone for takeaway, and the guy standing behind the counter said, after I ordered, "One scone to go." I was shocked, and told him he was the first person in Scotland I had heard say, "to go."  He was nonplussed, and his co-worker gave me my scone to go, and I went.

Inspired by "to go," here are four American habits, linguistic and otherwise, that die hard:

1) Chips vs. Crisps

Thanks to the Oxford Learners Dictionaries I can illustrate my problem (NAmE in the image  refers to North American English, by the way) . Despite picking up a variety of different terms, I have a very hard time calling potato chips anything but chips, and since I already have a reference for the word "chips" I find it very difficult to call French Fries by their British name.  Audrey has totally adapted, following her school friends' lead, but to me, a chip is a chip, and a fry is not a chip.

2) Walking the wrong way

I have finally mastered looking in the direction that the cars are actually coming before crossing the street.  This is not intuitive, it takes re-training of your mind and instincts, but since the consequences are relatively dire (being hit by an oncoming car you didn't see because you were looking the other way) I have been motivated to change my behavior.  However, walking along the sidewalk (or pavement, as they call it here) is a different story. I constantly find myself walking on a collision course with other pedestrians.  I stay to the right when I should be walking to the left, only being reminded to move by people walking straight toward me. Sometimes they just move to the side sympathetically, eyeing me as you would someone about to turn their car into a one-way street.  This is especially a problem on staircases - I come wheeling around the corner and nearly smack into people. And then I go back to trying to re-train my brain to walk where I am expected to walk.

3) Saying Good Morning or Hello

This is one both Paul and I run into every day.  For people that you see on a regular basis (work colleagues, church friends, singing acquaintances, people at playgroup, the local crossing guard) the Scottish form of address is generally "Hiya." But neither of us can really get our heads or mouths around "Hiya."  I usually say Good Morning, or Hello, both of which provoke a pause from people I'm addressing.  Paul points out that it might just be people reacting to our funny accents, but I think it's also a mental shift - she said Good Morning, not Hiya, so what do I say next?

4) Celsius vs. Fahrenheit

For this one it's not so much the day to day weather - if I read that it's going to be 9, for example, I have kind of an idea of how much chillier it's going to be in the morning than if it's going to be 13. But when you start telling a story, especially a story about Arizona, and it starts with "It was summer in Arizona, and it was 110 degrees..." and then you realize your listener has no idea what 110 degrees means, and you wonder, should I try to convert this to Celsius? Or just say it's really hot? I usually opt for the latter.

These issues may resolve as we're here longer  - who knows, by the time we come back to the States (or America, as they say here) we'll be totally Scottish and have trouble adjusting back to American terms and norms!

Post-Easter-Post

Today at church I heard a great children's sermon.  The regular sermon was good too, but I was struck by the children's sermon because the pastor did something I hadn't seen before. He told the kids he was going to talk to them about God's love, and sharing their faith.  And he proceeded to show them a sheet of paper on which he had printed, many times, the words "God's Love":

He asked the kids to count the corners on the paper (four, naturally) then pulled out a pair of "Sunday School scissors"..

...and proceeded to cut off a corner of the paper to share God's Love with one of the kids. He then asked them how many corners he had left - they said three. But of course, when he counted, he had three he had started with, plus two corners he had created by cutting off the fourth corner - so five corners. He got up to 10 corners by sharing God's Love, and he also showed the girl who took the first corner that she now had 3 corners, and when she shared with a neighbor, each of them had three corners. A great illustration, I thought.

A few other post-Easter thoughts - I spent Good Friday in St. Andrews, and it was an absolutely gorgeous day.  Between that day and sunny days in Dundee,  I have been taking a ton of pictures, some Easter-related, and some just arty.  A few of the more Easter-related are below. 

Churchyard, St. Peter's Free Church, Dundee	St. Peter's Free Church, Dundee
Church door in St. Andrews	St. Peters sign, Dundee
Dandelions on the tops of her shoes	Daisy Trinity
St. Andrews Cathedral	Exiting St. Andrews Cathedral toward North St.
Walking on Water...almost	Church on the Dundee-St. Andrews road with graveyard tumbling  down the hill

Happy Birthday, Great-Grandma!

This is my final post on the date April 20, 2014. The first one was about preparing for Easter in Scotland, the second about my in-law's wedding anniversary, and this one is about celebrating my grandmother's birthday.  It makes me a little sad that I rarely celebrated grandma's birthday while she was still living - it was often celebrated at the end of the day on Easter Sunday, if it fell close enough to Easter, but my family was always hurrying back to Virginia for school and work the next day.

But now, we celebrate. It was really Audrey's idea. Last year, after great-grandma Marguerite passed away in March, Audrey wanted to do something for her birthday. So, we made cupcakes. Disney Princess cupcakes, to be precise. And we ate them and said, "Happy Birthday Great-Grandma!" We might even have sung Happy Birthday. This year, Audrey remembered, and wanted to celebrate again. So she made a card, and we made cupcakes: Peppa Pig this time (local color, or should that be colour)

On the evening of April 19, we burned the card (or as Audrey said, "Fired it up") in our garden, and ate a cupcakes for evening snack.  Happy Birthday, Great Grandma! Hope the card got to you, and that you enjoyed the cupcake :-) Love you!

Great Grandma taking the girls on walker rides: Thanksgiving, 2012

Happy Anniversary, Pat and Phil!

Eleven years ago today, my husband Paul and I went on our fourth date.  I'm usually pretty bad at remembering details, but I can tell you with certainty what we did on our first four dates, eleven years ago.

Our first date was two Tucson's Fourth Avenue Street Fair.  During that date, Paul started ranting about the idiocy of people who insisted on having grassy lawns in drought-stricken Tucson, and I was hooked.

Our second date, we went to see a horrible movie, which somehow managed to garner critical acclaim - Gangs of New York.  On this date, Paul's loathing of Leonardo di Caprio was solidified, and we bonded not only over the horribleness of Gangs of New York, but also our mutual dislike for The English Patient, another critically acclaimed movie that perhaps two people in the whole US were willing to admit they disliked...and they were now on a date together.

Our third date, I invited Paul to go on the Medical Anthropology overnight camping trip to Patagonia, AZ. He gained major points not only by knowing how to put up our tent (I had borrowed it from my roommate and had no idea what to do with it) but also by making s'mores for my friends and making charming small talk with total strangers.

Which brought us to April 20, 2003, our fourth date.  Which happened to be both Easter Sunday, and my future in-laws 35th wedding anniversary. And the first time I had met anyone in Paul's family. Talk about your nerve-wracking scenarios. 

But it turned out to be lovely. Paul's parents are wonderful folks, and his brother and sister-in-law made me feel welcome, too. His nieces and nephew were just kids, 10 and 11 - now they're in in their early 20's. The food was great, and conversation flowed easily. There was an awkward moment around pictures - his parents took one of Paul and I (which I think is now packed away in a storage space in Virginia - at least I hope it is, since it didn't make it to Scotland with us) but of course I wasn't in any of the other photos, but who knew if I was going to be around another week, a month, a year? It was only our fourth date.

But, eleven years later, I have not only married Pat and Phil's youngest son, but have also taken himto Rhode Island for three years, and now Scotland for two. Part of his heart will always be in Tucson, though, with Pat, Phil, and the rest of the Orzechs. So Happy Anniversary, Pat and Phil, and we'll see you in Tucson as soon as we can!

  

Preparing for Easter in Scotland

Today is Easter, but I started to think about preparing for it a few weeks ago.  I know, I'm supposed to have been reflecting on Easter for all of Lent, but my earnest concern about Easter traditions only started a little prior to Palm Sunday.   Thinking about Palm Sunday made me miss Central Congregational Church in Providence, and all their Palm Sunday celebrations - waving palms, procession with a teenager plying Jesus, and even Jasper the donkey. Last week at Palm Sunday here, I ended up working in the creche (nursery) during church, so I couldn't be sure about the palm-waving, but there was definitely no donkey. I saw small palm branches woven into crosses (pre-woven, not even a palm leaf to weave yourself, or teach your kids how to make the cross out of it).

For Easter itself, I thought about the American traditions, and then ran into Scottish roadblocks:

1) Dyeing eggs. Okay, didn't even really anticipate this one: almost all eggs in the US are white, right. you could get brown eggs if you wanted, but they're not as common. Not so here.  Eggs are uniformly brown. No white eggs to be found, even in a big store. So how do you dye eggs when they are all brown? I asked Paul to get stickers, so we sticker-ed our eggs this year:

 

2) Hunting for (plastic) eggs hidden by the Easter Bunny.  Okay, we were doing better on this one. The trickiest part was the plastic eggs (which Paul found and bought, although he lamented the whole time the three dozen plastic eggs we had left in the storage space in Virginia).  But Easter candy was plentiful - gummy bunnies (Haribo has a monopoly over here on gummy things), Cadbury mini-eggs (not the creme eggs although those are also everywhere), jellybeans - and we have a garden (yard) for hiding eggs.  So what if the Scottish neighbors thought we were a bit nuts, yelling "Eggs!" and hiding and re-hiding them in the garden between 9 and 10 am (see video clip below). We didn't find any bit Easter Egg hunts (like at church in Providence).  The one thing we did discover was a Scottish penchant for egg-rolling. At school, Audrey's teacher and classmates told her she had to roll a big egg down a hill, "like rolling the stone away from the grave" on Eastern Sunday morning. And some friends of ours did plan to go egg-rolling first thing (like 8 am) on Easter. We have the big plastic egg that the 36 small plastic eggs came in, so we thought we might roll that down the hill...but at church, a girl (8 or 9 years old) came up to me to ask if Audrey wanted to roll her (Cadbury chocolate) egg down the hill with her.  I said sure, and later Audrey told me that they had rolled an egg for the girls and an egg for the boys, and when they rolled down the hill, guess what, they broke, and she got to eat 3 pieces of chocolate...so maybe this is the point :-) 

3) Eat peeps. This is really more of a my-father Easter tradition, but with two marshmallow-loving kids, it seems like a good tradition to uphold.  Except there are no peeps in Scotland. Cadbury has a virtual lock on the market, and they don't make peeps. At church I found pink marshmallow bunnies, but it wasn't the same. No chicks. No sparkly sugar. Just not the same!

Enough for now - off to roll the plastic egg down the hill, which Audrey is currently taping with scotch tape (sellotape, here) so that it will be able to survive its rolling journey in one piece!

Blog bonus: Here is the 30-second video of her rolling the egg. Tried to put it on Facebook but it came up as a black screen (audio but no video) every time...

Getting there is half the fun: London with kids

Battersea Children's Zoo: not an actual transport experience

I was a little nervous about going to London with the kids. Okay, I was a lot nervous. When we went to Edinburgh, Audrey was sick half the time, so I was hoping at least we'd all be healthy for London.

Well, we lucked out. Everyone was healthy.  And we all had a good time in London, too, starting with 5.5 hours on the train traveling down from Dundee.  The kids were surprisingly entertained by the smallest things - C (2.5 years) pretend-punched probably 50 tickets, and A (5.5 years) made paperclip necklaces for everyone.  They went to the toilet (exciting, going when the train is going...) and walked to the FoodBar car and back.

When we got to London, we did do some adult things (like go to the British Museum) and some kid things (the Battersea Children's Zoo) and some in-between (taking a Thames Cruise, going to the Angela Lansbury Film Festival showing of Bedknobs and Broomsticks).  But I think the kids had the best time getting from place to place.  Taking the Underground (train) and the Docklands Light Railway to the film (and stopping to play in a lovely park on the way).  Walking down to the British Museum from the Kings Cross area. Taking the Underground again and walking across a very windy bridge to Battersea Park. Taking a taxi to Westminster Pier to catch the boat for the cruise, and of course cruising (we thought it was going to be too windy, but it turned out to be fine, we even sat on the top deck). And I almost forgot one of the kids' highlights (because I wasn't there - my parents watched the kids while Paul and I nipped down to Somerset House to see a small collection of Impressionists) - the London Transport Museum.  Where else can your 5 year old drive a double-decker bus while the 2 year old pilots a taxi? They loved it, and didn't want to leave, even to meet up with mom and dad.

For the whole trip, they didn't seem to care too much about the destination, they just wanted to travel.  We don't have a subway in Dundee, or a river to cruise down.  Who cares that there are 8 million objects in the British Museum? They just wanted to ride the train and play in the park.  Kind of like home, but with a bit more adventure.  Isn't that what traveling is all about?

Update: Six months in Scotland

The end of March marked our six-month anniversary here in Scotland.  There wasn't a lot of fanfare - the biggest thing that was happening the week of 24th March was that we were preparing for my parents  and sister's visit, which started on Sunday the 30th for us in Dundee. A bit more on that later. For now, the update, with some pictures below.

I am reminded of the interviews I conducted with young adults about their online life; they emphasized that what made it online from their lives was the fun, social, traveling-new-places part. Work (or school) was generally not photo-documented or posted about.  My life is the same. I spend most of my week working, yet I have no pictures of it, except for this one of Audrey sitting at my desk, with dad behind her. And I didn't even take the picture (thanks mom). I guess I have a few photos from quarterly meetings, where we travel to our partner universities, in Surrey and Nottingham - but again, I spent most of my time at work! I enjoy my work, I like my boss a lot, it's a fun project, and it keeps me busy.  In my "spare time" when I'm not working I'm taking care of the kids, doing what I did in Rhode Island - exploring the place - except without a car this time. We do have one, but my manual transmission skills are poor and enthusiasm for driving on the wrong side of the road practically nil...so no car, just walking, the bus, occasionally the train.  Good thing the UK has a good public transit system! I also joined a women's singing group almost as soon as we arrived - we were still staying in the bed and breakfast, we hadn't even found our rental house yet when I went to the first rehearsal.  That has been great - all singing by ear, no music, 40 or more ladies ranging in age from 28 to 88 - very opposite to every choir I've ever been in, but lots of fun.

Audrey at my desk in the Art College

Paul is settling in, though the transition has been harder for him. If we had arrived in July instead of practically October, things would have been a bit easier for him and for Audrey - we would have been here for the start of school instead of 8 weeks in, there might have been more people playing at the parks in the summer than there were in October - more people to meet.  But, Audrey did get into school (and catch up with the phonics she had missed in the 1st 8 weeks), Paul did find playgroups to keep him and Claire busy, and has even found a yoga class that morphs into a night out at the pub every Wednesday.  That group even took him skiing - when friends ask Paul what he's doing in Scotland and he says "Drinking and Skiing" they're a little shocked...but he's fitting into the culture :-)

Six months in, we have done a bit of touring around - we went to St. Andrews (castle, cathedral, the cafe where Kate met Will), to Edinburgh around Christmas to enjoy the "Edinburgh Christmas" fair, and to Stirling and London when my parents and Sarah visited. We're starting our hit list - the Scottish Highlands and Islands, Stonehenge or some other less well known stone circle, Dublin, Istanbul, maybe Spain (or somewhere with a warm beach).  And of course Naples for when Margaret and her family get there later this year. We'll see how many we can make happen!

We don't know for sure what will happen at the end of my 2-year contract.  My boss has already offered to write me into future grants this autumn, but we're not sure we want to stay beyond the 2 years.  Some things are great (see my previous post on three things Scotland does right) but it's far from family, and we're not sure we want to raise Scottish kids.  Both Audrey and Claire are already picking up British words (and spelling for Audrey).  Audrey's learned the British monetary system as she's learned to add and subtract, and Claire told her sister the other day that she couldn't come play because she was "on holiday."  So far the lobbying from Paul and Audrey seems to be pointing back to Rhode Island, but it's still early days yet. 

I've pasted pictures below with captions that move from our earliest days to the most recent - some you may have seen on Facebook, but probably not all...enjoy!

 

At the Parlour cafe our first week in Dundee	Starting school after a month of back and forth with the city council
Magdalen Green, near our house, and yes, traditional, still functional British phone booth	With A in Edinburgh, before ice-skating
Paul with girls by the sea in St. Andrews	Girls with Gingy in front of Edinburgh Castle
Beautify sunset, looking toward the Tay Rail bridge near our house	Visit from cousins Tim & Julia, passing through Scotland in January
Happy New Year photo	Funny "haggis" cookies at the local baker, for Burns Night in January
Playing on Magdalen Green on a warm(er) winter day	A with her Healthy Roundabout badge for Rainbows
Yes, the weather was that bad: family visits Scotland, and it rains (near Broughty Ferry beach)	Stirling Castle: more bad weather, but a cool location!
Orzechs on the beach, St. Andrews	C climbing the abbey walls in St. Andrews - literally.
Amusing Papa and Nana on the train to London	Sports in the park: race to the center of the flowers
The British Museum: drawing, of course.	Big Ben Selfie for C and Papa
Copycat Big Ben Selfie for A and Kay	Paul and half of Tower Bridge ( the other half looks just the same, anyway)
Singing "Let it Go" (the Elsa Song) in front of Kings Cross Station	A's photo of us before we got on the train to Dundee, leaving Papa and Nana on their own in London