London trip, part 1

[Kragen Sitaker]

Beatrice and I flew to London on 2002-12-21.  We'd had a busy week
just beforehand.

I just bought another laptop on eBay for US$330 --- the old one didn't
seem to have much physical wear left --- and the new one included an
extra motherboard, an extra keyboard, and two batteries, along with
the standard power supply.  I bought a Tecra 8000 again, the same
model I bought in February, because the old one held up quite well
under heavy use.  I hoped I could exchange parts and avoid having to
reconfigure drivers and stuff --- just move the old hard disk over.
It turned out to work better than I'd expected.

My old power supply had died three or four months ago, and I'd
replaced it with a Radio Shack universal power supply.  A week or so
later, the first time I let the battery fully discharge, I discovered
that the Radio Shack power supply couldn't charge it; the laptop drew
too much power when charging the battery from zero, so the power
supply would shut itself off to avoid overheating.

Well, the 45W power supply that came with the new laptop could charge
the old battery, so to my delight, I now had three working laptop
batteries.  Better, my work had a couple of dead Tecra 8100s in the
storeroom; they use power supplies compatible with my laptop, but
capable of supplying 60 watts.  I took one with me on this trip in
case the power supply from the new laptop gave up the ghost.

On the 21st, I read and wrote email on the plane, all the way from the
Bay Area to London.  The Virgin flight we took had a TV screen at each
seat, which played annoying, distracting music videos until we took
off.  I carefully covered the screen with the scrap of papery cloth I
found behind my head; presumably the staff intended it to keep my hair
oil off the seat cloth.

We left around 17:00, then arrived in London around 11:15 on the 22nd.

In the airport, I discovered that the train ticket machine wouldn't
accept the 20-pound note I'd acquired from a foreign-exchange parlor
before leaving San Francisco.  Frustrated, I pushed the cart full of
our luggage up the ramp back into Heathrow, converted some more US
bills to English notes, and returned downstairs to take the train.

Neither Beatrice nor I had slept during the flight, so we began to
feel tired and cranky by this time; but we each empathized enough with
the other to avoid taking the other's crankiness too personally.

We took a taxicab in the rain from the train station to the house of
some friends of Beatrice's family in London.  They planned to spend
the Christmas holiday out of the country, so we'd volunteered to feed
their cat and watch their flat, in exchange for lodging there.

They hail from France, originally, so we each had our chance to
practice our French a fair bit.  Mine came slowly enough that our
hosts kept switching back to English to make it easier for me, but
Beatrice conversed fluently.

Despite our exhaustion, we visited Beatrice's family in Paris later
that day, taking a short nap while there.  Her parents and her brother
had already arrived.  Her mother has visited England for several years
now, taking care of Beatrice's dying grandmother, who recently moved
into an old-people home with a nursing staff near her house.

On the 23rd, we went Christmas shopping in Camden Town.

On the 24th, we took the tube to Waterloo station, met Beatrice's
brother, and took a train down to a small town about an hour away
where Beatrice's grandmother lives.  We visited her for a few hours,
tasting a traditional English large hot lunch cooked by the staff,
after which I understood why French people prefer their own cuisine to
that of the English.

The lunch contained boiled, chopped kale, boiled, chopped, skinned
oversized turnips called swedes, boiled, skinned potatoes, boiled,
chopped, skinned chicken topped with a truly horrifying sauce,
consisting mostly of boiled, chopped mushrooms and wine.  The boiled,
chopped broccoli and the boiled, chopped cauliflower, at least,
weren't skinned.  The cooks eschewed the use of spices, perhaps
because they might have given some flavor to the food.

The lunchtime conversation, however, made it all worthwhile; I had the
chance to spend some time with some new parts of my family, including
my future grandmother-in-law.  She may die soon, so I may never see
her again.

Beatrice's sister Connie had planned to arrive around the time we did,
on Saturday the 21st, but didn't arrive until the middle of this
lunchtime gathering.  We welcomed her enthusiastically.

After lunch, I fell asleep, we saw Bea's old house and old primary
school, we came back.  Beatrice's brother Walter went to pass some
water at the loo in Waterloo, but fell and broke his ankle on the
steps.  We went to St. Paul's Cathedral for midnight Mass.

On the 25th, we went over to Beatrice's parents' house by a taxi (cost
30 pounds, about US$40), ate a big Christmas dinner, opened Christmas
presents, and watched the Queen speak on TV.  That night, I read
_Uncle Tungsten_, a book by Oliver Sacks about his childhood;
Beatrice's father Walter had given it to me as a Christmas present.

On the 26th, we'd hoped to see BodyWorlds, but found it wouldn't
reopen until the next day.  Beatrice did, however, figure out how I
could connect my laptop to the Internet (by configuring her iBook as a
wireless access point, aka "base station", with NAT built in), so I
sent the 60 messages I'd written and downloaded the 263 more that had
arrived in the mean time. 

Later that day, we went to see Beatrice's childhood friend, Shaheen
Bilgrani, who works on children's books.  We chatted with her and her
mother for hours on various topics.  They seemed surprised to hear
that not everyone in the US supports the impending war with Iraq; of
course, the international news media don't carry much news of the
massive American antiwar protests.

Beatrice twisted her ankle on the way back to the flat.  She
experienced a lot of pain, but the sprain seems superficial.  I hope
she feels better in the morning.

I've seen enough of London to get used to the superficial differences
from any place in the US, which I will try to list here.  I think I'd
need a couple more weeks here to start to understand the important
differences, but sadly, we return quite soon.  I doubt the following
list will give any experienced world traveler insight into London, but
perhaps it will give them insight into me.

The electrical plugs have a quite different design; the receptacles
occupy about three to six times as much wall area as the American
receptacles, and the plugs correspondingly take up more space, and
it's 240 volts, not 120.  This has many minor, but far-reaching,
consequences.

Large household appliances like electric stoves and dryers need no
special plugs.  The plugs all lie flat against the wall, with the wire
coming out the edge, so you can push chairs and other appliances up
against them without straining the wire.  Power strips here contain
three or four receptacles, not six to eight, and they take up more
space.  Fuses have finer gradations of current; I've seen three-amp
and thirteen-amp fuses in appliances.

Each wall receptacle has its own individual power switch, for safety,
I suppose.

Refrigerators here hide in kitchen cabinets, specially designed to
provide airflow over the cooling coils.

Drivers drive on the left side of the street; this surprises me every
time I ride in a car or walk across a street, and my surprise
surprises me, too.  I thought I'd adapt more quickly.

The taxicabs' shape revolts me; they resemble some of the uglier cars
designed before World War II.  However, they have plenty of floor
space for luggage.

Prepaid GSM mobile phones bring great convenience.  Bea and I have
been using a leftover mobile phone from another family member; it had
about two pounds left on its prepaid balance, so I bought a 10-pound
"top-up card" at a phone store, and two minutes later, it had twelve.

I see them in use at bus stops everywhere here, often texting; and I
see ads for cellphone-only services like yell.com.

Surveillance cameras dot the landscape.  The flat we borrow has a
camera at the front door, attached to a little black-and-white LCD
screen in each apartment, so we can see the person ringing the
doorbell.  In the subways, I could often see five or six surveillance
cameras at a time.

Overhead power lines seem rarer here than in the States.

The subway allows dogs, as long as you carry them, and the trains also
allow dogs.  This pleases me.

London smells of mold, of rotting leaves, of moss, of algae, and of
decay.

I don't know much about London's overall environmental impact; often
invisible factors like smokestack scrubbers and thermal insulation
play large parts in determining environmental impact, as well as
factors like car use.  Public transit here goes everywhere, fast and
reliably, and "petrol" costs 75 pence a liter, or about US$4.80 per
gallon; California's unusually high gasoline prices hover around
US$1.50 to US$1.90 per gallon.  The streets seem full here, but not
nearly as full as in San Francisco.

However, in a variety of ways, the Londinians do not practice visible
means of environmental conservation mandatory in California.  Low-flow
toilets, faucets, and showerheads seem unknown; grossly polluting cars
belching visible clouds of black or white smoke continue to operate.
Consumer packaging uses as much plastic as in the US, but the city has
no plastics recycling program.  I have seen no compact fluorescent
lightbulbs in people's houses, although I have visited only three
houses so far.

I have not seen the notorious London fog, only London rainclouds,
which rain a little every day.  Microfiber polyester vests and
sweaters have kept me warm enough so far; my long wool coat has
remained unused, unnecessary.

London contains a great diversity of peoples; I hear as many languages
here as in San Francisco, I see many different colors of skin and
modes of dress, and I hear many different accents.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra died in August of 2002.  The world has lost a great
man.  See http://advogato.org/person/raph/diary.html?start=252 and
http://www.kode-fu.com/geek/2002_08_04_archive.shtml for details.