New to Kew

Yesterday and today, I was in London at the National Archives, which are located in Kew (which is part of London). I took a bus from Exeter up to London on Wednesday morning, and I arrived in London on Wednesday afternoon.

From the Victoria Coach Station, I went out to the Victoria Railway Station to get some lunch, and then into the Victoria Tube Station to catch a train out to Kew Gardens. While waiting for my train, I discovered that the Victoria Line was "Closed Due to Industrial Action." Apparently, the drivers were unhappy about something or other and went on strike.

Once I got out to Kew, I set about finding the National Archives, which have signs that kinda, sorta point to them from the Kew Gardens Tube Station. I did eventually find them, and then set about getting myself a Readers Ticket, which lets me look at the documents in the archives. Mine is valid for six months, so it expires the day before my birthday.

After a few hours, I left the Archives shortly before they closed and went to the Globetrotter Inn to check in. If that sounds familiar, it's because it's where we stayed when Amanda's family were in London. Once I got checked in, I ditched most of my stuff, and took a couple of books with me to the Subway in Hammersmith. I spent about an hour and a half at Subway, working on some reading, before I went back to the hostel to get ready for bed. I decided to go to bed a little early, since I was pretty tired and knew that I had a long day the next day.

On Thursday morning, I awoke with a start and panicked that I had missed my check-out time. I felt better once I found my phone and realized that it wasn't even 7:30 yet. I had planned to get up at 8, but I decided to go ahead and shower, which I did. After my shower, I went downstairs to breakfast, and then went back up, finished packing, and got checked out. I got to the Stamford Brook Tube Station around 9:00, and then realized that you can't get an Off-Peak Day Travelcard until 9:30. Rather than springing the extra £3 for an additional 30 minutes of riding time, I picked up a copy of Metro, the free London paper, and read it while I waited for 9:30 to arrive. It was mostly concerned with the new Budget, which was formally proposed yesterday.

After I got my Travelcard, I went into the Tube station to find that there were "Severe Delays" on the Richmond Branch of the District Line, which just happened to be where I needed to go. Thus, I had to wait for a while longer for a train to arrive before I was able to get out to Kew. The good news was, once I got out to Kew, I didn't have any further problems.

I worked at the National Archives until around 1, at which time I had to leave Kew to go back into central London to meet one of my lecturers at the University of London at 3 pm. I met up with him, and stayed at the Institute for Historical Research to do some work on an upcoming paper. I headed back over to Victoria Station when they closed, to try to find a McDonalds to use the internet there.

However, the McDonalds at Victoria is a McDonalds Express, which just has a counter that opens out onto the station concourse. Thus, I wasn't able to get on the internet, so I had to go on over to the Coach Station and sit and do the Sudoku in The London Paper. I managed to do the Simple and Medium ones, but made next to no progress on the Difficult one in the 20 minutes or so that I worked on it before it was time to board the bus and head for home.

Topsham

Today, I went down to Topsham, a favorite destination of University of Exeter club and society social outings. However, the purpose for my visit was a little different. I went to the Topsham Library to do some research.

That I might need to go to Topsham didn't occur to me until a Rotarian at the Tiverton club made an esseitnally throwaway comment about their being some letters from prisioners of war in the Napoleonic era in the library. I thought that there might be something in there that I could use, so I made a note to go down and check it out. While much of the material doesn't fit with my topic in the least, there are a couple of things in the letters that could prove useful. I'll want to discuss them with Dr. Duffy and see what he thinks about them. It appears that the last time they were really looked at was for a PhD thesis about forty years ago, but I may be wrong about that. In any case, Topsham has a nice little library, and I may have to go down there again sometime to take a better look around town!

As an aside, there is debate over whether the name is pronounced "TOP-shum" or "TOPS-ham." I've never heard anything but the former; however, someone claiming to be from there told Amanda at church one day that it was the latter. This may be one of those cases like the name "Barham," which is either pronounced "BAR-hahm" or "BAR-ram." In that case, it was an issue because one of the Royal Navy's dreadnoughts (commissioned 1915; sunk by a u-boat in 1942) had that name, and different captains reportedly imposed punishments on their ship's company for mispronouncing it-however it was the captain thought it should be pronounced! The consensus on that one seems to be "BAR-ram," but that could be wrong!

Terminology

One of the major purposes of this blog has been to help Will and me remember our time in England and all of the things we learned and saw. In that vain, here are a few interesting British terms and phrases I encountered frequently over the past several months, along with their southern American equivalents:

tick- a check mark
cheers- thanks
spoilt for choice- overloaded with options
trainers- tennis shoes/ sneakers
football boots- soccer cleats
trainer liners- thin, ankle-length socks
gumshield- mouthguard
The South West of England- southwest England
in hospital- in the hospital
should do- should
the till- the cash register
hob- stove/ range
chips- french fries
crisps- chips
brilliant- wonderful
sorted- sorted out
This bit of the train will be coming off- This train car will be separating from the rest
not suitable for- not recommended for
of course you can- sure (this is used frequently in stores when a customer makes a request)
Are you serving?- Are you checking customers out?

wash up- wash the dishes

washing up liquid- dishwashing detergent

soft toy- stuffed animal

queuing- waiting in line

never mind- it doesn't matter

flat- apartment

not meant to- not supposed to

pants- underwear

trousers- pants

to let- for rent

letting agency- real estate agency

Otter Valley Rotary Club

Tonight was the visit to the Otter Valley Rotary Club, located in Ottery St. Mary. Yulia and Anne are both away, so it was just Sangmi and me this trip. The Otter Valley club is all-male, and is one of the ones that would be regarded by some people in some clubs to be full of "tired, old grey-headed men in grey suits." I found them to be decidedly lacking in grey suits, and they didn't strike me as being particularly tired. They were mostly grey-headed (the rest were bald), and thus tended to be older on the whole than some other clubs. They do love their parliamentary procedure, as evidenced by a mini-debate on a point of order regarding whether the club could appropriate money by a general vote rather than a vote on the recommendation of the executive committee. The debate there was resolved by the President quashing the discussion on the grounds that, as two members of the executive committee were not present, the executive committee should deal with the issue first out of courtesy to those two.

Both my and Sangmi's presentations went fine; we had both added in a couple of new items. She was in a picture in the Express & Echo, which she had added into her presentation (it was of the crowd at the Exeter Football Club on Easter Monday). She also noted, for the first time that I've heard in one of her presentations, that she was embarrassed to say that she had been an English teacher in Korea, as her English, by her term, isn't very good. She was later assured by the sergeant-at-arms that her English was good, and was fined 50p for speaking better English than some of the members of the club!

I was fined 50p for having talked on the phone just before the meeting started. Amanda had called me from Newark, which I thought was probably worth the 50p. I found the club to be pretty lively, and they were especially interested in the parts of my presentation that dealt with turkey hunting (I happen to have a picture of dad with a turkey). They had lots of questions about how hunting works in the US (apparently, here most animals that are hunted are raised for that purpose) and were surprised to find that it is legal to go out and shoot wild animals (which required a discussion of hunting seasons). Unfortunately, I couldn't lay my hands on the picture of Robert when he was about 10 with a gun in hand and something that he had killed; it would have made a nice addition.

We didn't depart for Ottery St. Mary until 6:40, which is a good bit later than usual. There were two reasons for this. First, it is only about a 25-minute drive out to Ottery St. Mary, and second, the Otter Valley club's meeting began at 7:30 rather than the 7:00 for most of the other dinner clubs that we have visited. As a result, we didn't leave the meeting site until after 10:00, and got home around 11:00, which is par for the course for these meetings.

Bye-Bye Manda

Yesterday and today, I took Amanda to Bristol. Her flight left the Bristol Airport this morning around 10:30, so I left the Bristol Airport once she had boarded her plan at about 10:00. Because of the way the trains run, to get to the airport as early as we wanted (6:30), we had to leave Exeter last night. We had planned to spend the night in Bristol at the Backpacker's Hostel there, but the receptionist was extremely rude, so we decided to return to the train station to wait for the 2 am bus out to the airport. We were able to stay in the train station until around 1, but they locked the doors at 1, so we had to wait outside at the bus stop. Once the bus came, we had thought we were going to be able to take our backpacks on the bus (because the website said we could), but the bus driver wasn't havning any of that. Once we got on the bus, we weren't too happy to find that other people had their bags.

In spite of this, we made it out to the airport, and got everything set to put Amanda on her plane. We re-arranged her things in her bags, and let her get her clothes changed. Once the check-in counter opened, we got her checked in, and she headed off to security. I stayed in the lobby of the airport reading a book while I waited for her to tell me that she had made it on the plane. Once she was on the plane, I went outside and caught the bus back to Temple Meads station.

At Temple Meads, I missed the train back to Exeter by about two minutes, and so I had to wait for the next one. I caught the next one, and was back in Exeter and back home before 1:30 pm. I have a Rotary event tonight, and I wish I could sleep, but I'm just not having much luck (hence this blog entry). I'm goin to get back to trying to sleep before I have to get ready to head down to the Odeon to meet our ride out to Ottery St. Mary at 6:40 tonight.

The South Devon Coast

Today, we had planned to take a trip out to Penzance. For a variety of reasons, that trip was cancelled and replaced with a trip to a good bit of the South Devon coast.

We began our travels for the day in Dawlish, a lovely little town a short train ride away from Exeter. It is just big enough to garner main-line trains stopping there. We spent about two hours in Dawlish itself. We walked along the (artificial) brook that runs through town, and we saw the waterfowl sanctuary. We got sandwiches at a local café, then got drinks at the Boots next door, and sat down by the brook and watched the black swans while we ate. Next, we walked up to some gardens at the top of the town, and then we headed back to the train station to catch a train out to Dawlish Warren.

Dawlish Warren is a nature preserve that our guidebook describes as a large collection of sand dunes. Apparently, there have been some problems with erosion of the dunes, because they have planted lots of grass and other ground cover on the dunes recently. Some of it was still fresh enough for there to be signs warning visitors to keep off. We didn't see much in the way of wildlife, but we did get lots of sand in our shoes!

After Dawlish Warren, we proceeded up to the next station on the line back to Exeter, Starcross. Starcross is a small village across the Exe from Exmouth, and is famous for, as nearly as I can tell, absolutely nothing. We strolled around town for about 40 minutes, and made a quick stop into a Spar to buy a bag of chips. From Starcross, it was about a 14-minute ride back to Exeter St. Davids (we decided against making a stop in St. Thomas).

After we got back to Exeter, we had dinner at the Impy (I had a chicken burger, Amanda had soup, and we shared some onion rings). It was, as per usual, quite tasty. We plan to stay in Exeter for the next few days, until we head to Bristol on Monday to deliver Amanda to the airport for her Tuesday morning flight.

The First Great Ocean Liner

On our way back to Exeter following our trip home for Will’s Grandmommy’s funeral, we got to see the S.S. Great Britain from a distance, but today we finally got to visit it up close. We travelled to Bristol this morning primarily with that in mind, though we were fortunately able to see several of the city’s other sites as well.

Our day out began around 8:30 this morning. We had a bit of a scare when we were unable to retrieve our pre-booked (and paid for!) train tickets from the station’s ticket machines; however, one of the station’s employees in the travel center was able to print them out for us quickly, saving us from missing our train. The train ride was fairly uneventful, and we arrived in Bristol on time. Following the pedestrian route signs, we made our way to the harbourside and to the Great Britain. Using a 2-for-1 promotional offer from First Great Western, we were both able to enter for only £8.50. The museum well worth the cost, and we are allowed to visit as many times as we want within the next year.

We were able to walk around the dry-docked base of the ship and learn about the conservation methods being utilized to preserve it, including a pair of massive dehumidifiers called “Deep Thought I” (located inside the ship) and “Deep Thought II” (located in the drydock, which we were actually able to see). Then, we walked through some excellent exhibits outlining a major stages of the ship’s working history, including its roles in both world wars (admittedly as a source of spare parts in the second, as the ship was scuttled in 1937) and its life as the “first great ocean liner” in the middle 19^th century. There were numerous hands-on activities within the exhibits, such as one that allowed visitors to learn about steering the ship.

Following the exhibits was the opportunity to go on board the ship, which is outfitted as it was in its days as an ocean liner making frequent voyages to Austrialia. We climbed the stairs onto the deck where we were asked to pick out one of the four types of free audio guides. There was a guide specifically for children (narrated by Sinbad, the ship’s cat) in addition to guides focused on maritime archaeology, the experience of first class passengers on board, and the experiences of steerage passengers on board. We both choose the first class guide. Interestingly, the commentary on the guide consisted entirely of excerpts from journals of real first class passengers describing different parts of the ship and aspects of life on board. There were a number of areas marked “First Class Passengers Only Beyond This Point;” no word on what the steerage audio guide does if you go beyond those points.  Perhaps we will find that out on the next visit . . .

The museum uses smells and sounds, in addition to sights, to make the experience more realistic than many similar ones are. The lavatories area has a slightly unpleasant odor (and one door is slightly ajar, with a recording of “Can’t you see this lavatory is occupied?” which plays if you push on the door) and the area where horses were stored has a musty animal smell. Similarly, a museum employee plays some of the popular tunes of the time from the piano in the first class saloon (which in American English we would likely call a lounge). Though some of the efforts are rather cheesy, they make visiting the Great Britain an enjoyable experience for children and adults alike.

We ate lunch in the museum’s café. Will ordered a panini, and I ordered the soup of the day, which turned out to be an onion soup. We actually shared both items, since the panini was far more filling than the extremely tasty soup.

Following lunch, we visited Explore@Bristol, the city’s science museum. We had a 2-for-1 offer on admission to it, and our museum tickets included a 25 minute planetarium presentation. The museum was in many ways similar to Mobile’s Exploreum and Birmingham’s McWane Science Center, with numerous hands-on on science activities. One of our favorites was a water wheel powered by an apparatus which was labeled a “treadmill.” The treadmill was actually essentially a giant wheel like those that are put in hamster cages- except that this one was for people.

The planetarium presentation was nice, though confusing. Apparently, in the UK, the Big Dipper is called the plowman or the saucepan. It and the north star were the only mentioned stars and constellations that we had heard of before, because of the differences in what is visible in the night skies of Britain and Alabama.

When the museum closed at 6pm, we walked over to take pictures of Bristol’s cathedral. Taking pictures inside is prohibited, but we got several lovely shots of the exterior. The cathedral is magnificent, but it is nothing special when compared to some of the other British churches we have seen.

We also took pictures of the council house, which is located across from the cathedral. It, too, is an impressive structure. On our way back to the train station, we also got a look at the Christmas steps, a bombed-out church, and the Hippodrome. 

At Will's request, we ate dinner at a local Subway and killed some time there before finally returning to the station to await our late-night train home. It would have been nice to have taken a slightly earlier train, but we'd booked this one accidentally, and changing the reservation would have been expensive. 

Devon Cream Tea

When my relatives were visiting last week, they and Will had Devon Cream Tea at No 21 Cathedral Close while I was working at Build-A-Bear.  I was a bit sad to miss that because I’ve been wanting to experience a traditional local cream tea for months. Fortunately, Will was kind enough to take me to the same restaurant this afternoon for that very purpose.

The tea consisted of scones (fruit or plain), clotted cream and fruit preserves to put on them, milk to put in the tea, and, of course, the drink itself. Will chose plain scones, and I choose the fruit version. Though they were clearly not a particularly healthy snack, the scones topped with clotted cream and preserves tasted wonderful. I fixed my tea and scones in the traditional way, including putting milk but no sugar in the tea. Since it was a beautiful day, we enjoyed our tea at one of the outdoor tables with a magnificent view of the cathedral. We had quite a lovely afternoon!

To Falmouth...

Tomorrow, I will finally get to use one of my Christmas presents from Mom and Dad, a Red Letter Day voucher for a wildlife-watching boat excursion in Falmouth! Will and I took the train from Exeter to Falmouth this morning so that he could do a little naval history research at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall. We were supposed to change trains in Truro, but since our first train was running quite late and everyone aiming for that connection missed it, the train company paid for taxis to transport us all from Truro to Falmouth.

We arrived at the Falmouth Docks train station a little after 1:30p.m. and made our way towards the city center. Our first priority was to get some lunch, which we did at the Pizza Express down on Discovery Quay. We sat out on the balcony which gave us an amazing view of the water. It was quite an enjoyable meal.

Following lunch, we headed over to the Bartlett Library of the National Maritime Museum Cornwall so that Will could do his research. I used the time to study for my looming Epidemiology exam. Will found a number of good secondary sources but unfortunately no useful primary ones.

When the library closed, we trekked to our hostel. We were pleasant surprised by the quality of the place- it is second only to the Greg Tom in Krakow among hostels we've stayed in. The rooms are large and pleasant, the decor is nice, and free coffee and tea is provided. My only complaint is that they do not allow guests to lock their doors, claiming this is unnecessary since they've never had any trouble with theft.

Falmouth is a really nice town, and Will and I both wish we had more time to spend here. It has plenty of lovely shops, colorful places to eat, and beautiful flowers and beaches. Though it is likely quite crowded during the summer, it is reasonably peaceful now.

I am really excited about going out on the boat tomorrow- but in the meantime, I have to focus on my Epi test. I'll be taking it first thing tomorrow morning, before Will and I embark on out Red Letter Day.