dispatches from the british road

The Wild Wild West. It always impresses me how the most fun and memorable travel experiences seem to pop out of the less glamorous aspects of a trip. After spending our Sunday at an eccentric environmental boondoggle known as the the Eden Project and then on a gorgeous hike along the coastline, we headed toward the hostel Stella had booked for the night. They had a firm check-in deadline of 9 pm, but we had plenty of time. I drove, Stella navigated. As the roads narrowed and other cars grew fewer and farther between, Stella's instructions became equally sparse. After a very long spell on the same winding road without a word from my copilot, I asked for an update on our progress, and Stella informed me that she was no longer sure we were going the right way. I pulled over and looked at the GoogleMaps printout with the directions to our hostel, and any doubts about Stella's navigational abilities quickly went away. I gazed in disbelief: almost a full page of instructions with no route numbers or street names at all, just turns and distances. The map portion was equally unhelpful: our route meandered through a cobweb of unnamed back roads. Only the occasional intersection was labeled with what I could only assume were the names of some very, very small villages. Where there are no street names or numbers, I quickly realized, Google is of little help.

There was only one way to connect the directions with real life. Each intersection we came upon had a signpost with the mileage to various villages, and some of the names matched up with places on the map. Thus, at the next junction, we picked the name of a village we knew was in the right direction and headed toward it. (I should stress that I'm using the word "village" only for want of a better term- often there was no sign of a church or pub, just a handful of country homes around a junction.) Many of the roads were only inches wider than our tiny rental car, and the overgrown brush on either side whipped the doors and side view mirrors. At times we encountered bogglingly steep grades and curves that had me praying no cars were coming in the other direction. Other stretches had tree cover dense enough virtually to block out the light of the late-evening sun. Eventually we came to a place called Portloe, with stunning views of the ocean far below. An elderly man with a hairy neck and long, caramelized fingernails was having a smoke outside of the local inn. The "No Vacancy" sign left me scratching my head as to who the hell takes their vacations out here. We asked him for directions, and within a minute I could tell he hadn't even heard of where we were going and was just interpreting our map for us. ("Take this road and follow your nose until you get to Portholland," he intoned in a vaguely Irish-sounding accent.) By this point it was past 8:30, so I extricated myself from the conversation as politely as possible, rolled up the window and continued on.

I don't know when it happened, but sometime before Portloe, we started having fun. It was a ridiculous, completely unexpected challenge. The scenery was amazing, and we laughed at our predicament and at the ludicrousness of tourism in this kind of place. We rolled into the Boswinger YHA hostel at 8:52 pm. "I was wondering if you were going to make it," said the teenager working the late shift at reception. I asked him if there was a pub around, and his smile told me that I was silly even to have entertained the idea. We did have a lovely walk, though, among some cows and the distant sound of surf and the fading light of a long summer evening:


Fun with Placenames. One of the fun little bonuses of being a Bay Stater in England is seeing the places that many of the towns in Massachusetts are named for. Up until now I hadn't noticed any underlying relationships within the names, except for the one-off correspondence between the two university towns named Cambridge. In Southwest England, though, I got a whiff of a pattern: I found Dartmouth, Plymouth, Falmouth, Truro, Barnstaple (yes, that's a "p"), and St. Dennis. If you're not from Massachusetts, or if you share my home state but aren't particularly observant, these are all the names of (or are close to the names of) towns on or near Cape Cod. Given the geographic similarities, I can certainly see the Cape reminding the early British colonists of Cornwall, so I doubt it's a coincidence.

And on an entirely random note, here's my nominee for the most deprived-sounding region of England: junction 14 on the M4 motorway leads to the towns of Hungerford and Wantage.

Wales. I had never been to Wales before, so Stella agreed to add it on at the end so that I could get my card punched. The Welsh language is alive and apparently much more viable than Cornish; the road signs turn bilingual as soon as you cross the border, and at least one radio station was utterly incomprehensible. Though the capital city of Cardiff is close to the border, we decided to pass on it due to concerns about traffic and testimonials to its relative unWelshness.

Instead, we headed for Caerphilly Castle, which is now right in the middle of a Cardiff suburb of the same name. When it was built in the 1200s, the castle was not only one of the world's largest, it was also at the cutting edge of castle technology, with a "concentric" design featuring multiple moats, walls, and battlements. The castle was built to defend Gilbert de Clare, an English lord, against Llewelyn the Last, the last Welshman to rule Wales. (Incidentally, Clare College in Cambridge is named for one of Gilbert's daughters, who saved the college from an early financial ruin.) Shifting alliance quickly destroyed the rationale for the castle's existence; it was left to rot and pillaged for stone until an early-twentieth-century restoration project. Here's a shot of the castle, with its very own leaning tower on the right side:


A Special Mention. I will conclude the tale of our road trip to the Wild West of Britain with an acknowledgement of another very special companion: Michael Jackson. The UK is also mourning the King of Pop (as is Vietnam, I'm sure), and it was a nostalgic treat to hear his old hits on the radio mixed in with the trashy dance music that generally fills the airwaves here. RIP, Jacko.

pirates and palm trees: this is england?

Penzance – I have made it to Penzance, and yes, there are pirates. I am at the end of Cornwall, the long finger of land that is Britain’s southwesternmost extremity, on a road trip with my regular traveling companion (and fellow WWOOfing enthusiast) Stella. We originally had a larger posse, but due to a confluence of events—including an unexpected rash of centipede hatchings that is keeping a biologist friend in lab for the weekend—it’s just the two of us. Cornwall has a reputation as a place apart from the rest of England, and there’s no better testimony to that fact the bizarre and alarming existence of palm trees here. And just as Salem, Massachusetts has embraced and profited from its witches, so has Cornwall’s largest town capitalized on its pirates. We unwittingly timed our arrival here with Mazey Day, Cornwall's traditional midsummer festival, and there are pirate costumes and skull-and-crossbones banners aplenty. The local pop music station goes by the name of Pirate FM.

Pirate antics aside, Cornwall is as serious about its regional identity as anywhere I have seen in the UK except for Scotland. The Cornish flag—a vaguely pirate-like white cross on a black field—is much more popular than the Union Jack, just as I saw far more of St. Andrew’s cross in Edinburgh. At the Mazey Day festival, vendors sell cards featuring doctored photos of Gordon Brown and Barack Obama holding oversized pasties, the region’s culinary gift to the rest of Britain. As we drove in toward Penzance, we heard a Pirate FM DJ interview a representative of the Cornish Language Partnership at its festival booth. The government-funded Partnership tries to preserve the Cornish language by offering courses in it, much like in parts of western Ireland where state subsidies are trying to keep Gaelic from disappearing. We stopped by their booth and picked up their free “Cornish for Beginners” brochure. Despite my enthusiasm for languages, this kind of enterprise strikes me as a fool’s errand. As my Cameroonian friends reminded me not long ago, people will talk the way they want to talk, and one can no more hold back that tide than command the waves to halt.

Speaking of waves, we also took an expedition out to Land’s End, the point where Britain finally surrenders to the Atlantic. Once you get past the tacky and overbuilt tourist facilities, it’s a marvelous landscape of cliffs, blue water, and rolling heath:

notes from auld reekie

Almost as soon as the rest of the family headed back across the pond, Trevor and I were on a plane to Edinburgh (pronounced ED-in-bur-uh). As compensation for being the family's and Trevor's tour guide, Mom paid for my flight and even gave me an allowance for our travels. Edinburgh is a delightful city: visually striking and gritty, intellectual, chronically inebriated, reasonably cosmopolitan and yet thoroughly Scottish. You are far more likely to see St. Andrew's Cross flying than the Union Jack, even in a city that has historically been more loyal to the crown than most of Scotland. On the same latitude as Ketchikan, Alaska, Edinburgh has the kind of low winter sun that I remember from my time in the last Frontier.

Encounters with unexpectedly good Scottish food. At last I had my first encounter with haggis, Scotland's famous dish of sheep organs, oatmeal, and spices boiled in a sheep stomach. The stomach was not included as part of the presentation on my plate, which was probably for the best. To my surprise, the haggis was not bad, not even merely tolerable, but quite tasty. Which is a good thing, because next week Trevor and I will be eating haggis again. Our next MCR formal commemorates Burns Night, an annual fete honoring Robert Burns, the Scottish national poet. As is customary, the haggis will be paraded into the hall while one of our Scots reads Burns' poem "Address to a Haggis." See how much of it you understand.


Edinburgh takes to the streets. Edinburghers love their outdoor festivities, and we stumbled on not one, but two large public gatherings during our weekend. One was a road race, which warmed my runner's heart, and the other was a street protest against Israel's military actions in Gaza. The protesters were numerous and quite vehement. I'm certainly no fan of Israel's response to date, and I can understand why Scots might be particularly disposed to be sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but the whole event oozed hyperbole and unwarranted moral clarity. George W. Bush's mirror image.

Scottish politics. Scottish-English relations are tamer these days than when William Wallace was fighting Edward Longshanks, but things are still in a state of remarkable flux. I was floored to learn that Scotland just got its own Parliament in 1999, after almost 300 years of being ruled exclusively from London. We visited the new, ultramodern Parliament building, which sits across from Holyrood Palace, the Queen's home when she's in town. (We didn't visit Holyrood, but Trevor did leave his mark; as we stood outside the gates he dropped his Coke can, which was summarily swept under the gate and onto the Queen's front yard by a strong gust of wind.) Scotland's Parliament only has authority over certain, "devolved" areas of government, but it was nice to see signs of a new budding of civic consciousness. In general, I was surprised by how kindly the Scots I met spoke about England. Some -- and I should probably note that most of these conversations happened in pubs after many beers -- took great pains to emphasize how much influence has traveled from north to south and not just in the other direction. Those age-old antagonisms are more like sibling bickering or collegiate rivalry than a blood feud, and Scotland's incredibly violent history seems to be receding in the face of prosperity. Below, Parliament and Trevor, Coke can still in hand.

pictures from the family trip

Lately my blogging habits have been rubbish, as the Brits would say. My little bro Trevor is staying here for a while longer, and I'm gearing up to write about the weekend we just spent in Edinburgh, the gritty and feisty capital of Scotland. But for now, some pictures from my time with the whole family:


Beefeater tour guide, Tower of London. This guy served 22 years in the army for the honor of showing tourists around London's capital of decapitation. "No, children, I am NOT a postbox!" he said, alluding to the royal insignia that appears on the chest of his uniform and also on mailboxes throughout the country.


The London Eye. Much like Paris' Eiffel Tower, this onetime eyesore and "temporary" structure has become a much-loved and essential part of the cityscape.


Big Ben, Parliament, and the River Thames, as seen from the top of the Eye.


The sibs outside Buckingham Palace, the Queen's main residence. I have found myself puzzling a lot during the last two weeks about the monarchy and its continuing role in British life. While Trevor and I were looking at the Scottish crown jewels in Edinburgh,* I asked a question of an attendant that must have come across as particularly ignorant. I realized then that I just don't have the cultural wherewithal to appreciate what all of this means to Brits... or at least that it's going to take a lot more effort for me to understand.


Mom and Dad at Stonehenge. The stones themselves were strikingly non-mysterious and non-mystical. The drive over was probably more memorable. Kudos to Dad for driving a standard with his left hand from the "wrong" side of the road!




Ancient, Medieval, Modern: Bath Abbey looms over the Roman baths in... you guessed it... Bath.




*If you're confused, yes, England and Scotland have the same Queen... but Scotland had its own, separate monarchy until 1603. That year, the Scottish King James VI succeeded to the British throne, uniting the monarchies as James I of England. He was on the throne for the Gunpower Plot (remember Guy Fawkes?), and it's for him that Jamestown, Virginia was named.

london calling

London -- Before Lent Term gets underway in Cambridge, I am spending a week around England with the full nuclear family: Mom, Dad, two brothers, one sister, and our newest addition, my sister-in-law. We have peered through the gates at Buckingham Palace, toured Churchill's underground WWII bunker, looked down at the Thames and Big Ben from the London Eye, minded the gap on the Tube. Given what's to follow, I should state at the outset that we're having a wonderful time, but it's just more fun to write and read about the "bad" experiences. "We went to the Tower of London, learned a lot!" just doesn't make for good blogging, you know?

Encounters with bad British food, vol. ii. On our second night in London we had dinner at a pub just a few hundred meters from Trafalgar Square. By then I think everyone was beginning to catch on to the fact that the UK has somewhat different standards of service and convenience than the U.S., but it still came as a surprise that we had to walk up to the bar to order our food and that the waitstaff were not exactly falling over themselves to clear the previous party's dirty dishes. But so far we had been lucky with food, particularly with a delicious dinner on the first night. That luck would come to an end at this particular pub. All four of the guys ordered "sausages and mash"--known more colorfully in the British culinary lexicon as "bangers and mash," as if you didn't already have enough to smirk about with all of the guys ordering sausages. One of my brothers declared it to be the worst meal he had ever eaten. I wouldn't go that far, but the sausages were mushy and bland, the potatoes clearly of the instant variety, and the gravy utterly devoid of taste. The ladies' meals didn't go over much better, and we ordered a pizza when we got back to the hotel.

Jack the ripoff. By far the worst tourist attraction I have seen to date in the UK is the Jack the Ripper walking tour. As far as serial killers go, Jack the Ripper has a more terrifying reputation than he deserves. He killed five prostitutes in 1888, and his notoriety owes more to the conspiracy theories swirling around the killings--more than one involving the royal family, naturally. The tour started off promisingly enough, with our apparently quick-witted guide getting regular laughs from the group. By the time we got to the site of the first killing, however, it begin to become clear what we were in for. The temperature was near freezing; the guide rambled, repeated himself and frequently went off on tangents; and nearly 45 minutes had passed before we moved on to killing #2. To make matters worse, there was nothing to actually see along the way, as most of the important Ripper-era buildings are gone or now house reputable establishments such as banks. We had been out for nearly two hours, going ever deeper into deserted East End neighborhoods, when we finally bailed out, leaving about ten poor souls to listen to the rest of this guy's yammering. By this point most of us were delirious with cold and finding ways of entertaining ourselves and each other on the sidelines. I didn't feel too bad, because I have little patience for people--whether they're teachers, conference speakers, or Jack the Ripper tour guides-- who show so little effort to assess and respond to their audience's level of interest and engagement.

Krakow preview. My youngest brother, Trevor, is staying for an extra 11 days beyond the rest of the family. He is enjoying this longer sojourn thanks to the Winter Study term at Williams, which he is using for an independent project (already written before he even boarded the plane) on WWII in Europe. I am putting him on a train to France during my first week of class, but on the surrounding weekends he and I will enjoy two parentally-subsidized trips to Edinburgh, Scotland and Krakow, Poland. There will surely be many fantastic experiences on these trips, but somehow what my little bro has latched onto is the idea of going clubbing in Krakow. The idea has found its way into almost every conversation about his European tour (always accompanied by his rendition of a techno beat: nnnnnn-TST nnnnnn-TST nnnnnn-TST), and it now feels absurdly over-anticipated... which will surely add to the hilarity of whatever actually does happen.

scoundrels!

i. Guy Fawkes -- The night after the election was Guy Fawkes night in England. If you've seen V for Vendetta, you may recall that the character "V" wore a mask modeled after Guy Fawkes, and you may also recall a little rhyme that starts out like this: "Remember, remember, the fifth of November / The Gunpowder Treason and plot / I can think of no reason the Gunpowder Treason / Should ever be forgot."

The objective of the plot in question was to assassinate King James I and blow up the Houses of Parliament in London, in response to the anti-Catholism of the Crown and the government. It failed, and the conspirators were executed. Fawkes was not the ringleader of this band of 17th-century Catholic terrorists, but he was the one caught with the explosives, so it is his name that has gone down in history.

Naturally, Fawkes is remembered here as the villain, not the hero, of 5 November. Today Guy Fawkes night is marked with fireworks, bonfires, and burning effigies of Fawkes. By now the night has lost most of its original political content and is basically an excuse for pyrotechnics and merrymaking. I attended the festivities in Cambridge, still in an exhausted stupor from the election all-nighter. It's a pretty big production here, with roughly 20,000 people crammed onto Midsummer Common and all manner of carnival rides, games, and booths. When you're so engrossed in university life, it's easy to forget that people actually live in Cambridge, so I was glad to share in a local and national tradition.

ii. Oliver Cromwell -- Craving some solitude on Saturday afternoon, I hopped a train for a short trip to Ely (EE-lee), a small town two stops from Cambridge on the northbound line. (The intermediate stop is a conspicuously landlocked placed called Waterbeach.) Ely is famous primarily for its magnificent cathedral, which I did visit, and slightly less famous for being the home of Oliver Cromwell when he launched his political career. If you're not familiar with Cromwell -- and I believe most Americans are not -- he's thought to be part of the reason why the Founders of the U.S. initially avoided a strong executive under the Articles of Confederation.

A half-century after the Gunpowder Plot, Cromwell and his associates actually did succeed in killing the King--this time for being too Catholic. He was a member of Parliament and a devout Puritan who thought King Charles I was introducing a little too much pope-ish stuff into the liturgy and suppressing religious liberty. Cromwell became a leader of Parliament's army during the English Civil War and was one of the signers of Charles' death warrant. The country had a brief period of commonwealth government under an ineffectual Parliament, which Cromwell eventually dissolved, making himself "Lord Protector." He wielded near-absolute power for five years until his death. His son Richard took over before a brief spell before England reverted to the old monarchy under Charles II.

I visited Cromwell's house in Ely, which is now a museum. In various rooms you can try on period dress (with helmets!), vote on whether Cromwell was a hero or a villain (roughly 50/50 according to monthly tallies), and view a bizarre replica of Cromwell on his deathbed. Probably the most memorable part of the visit was a book I saw in the gift shop, called Oliver Cromwell's Warts. The double-entendre refers to both the Lord Protector's moral failings and the actual warts that dotted his face. The book jacket provides a wealth of gee-whiz facts about Cromwell, including a claim that he "once attended a party covered in poo." I would love to know that story, but "poo" was not listed in the book's index, and I didn't have time to look the hard way.

One gee-whiz fact about Cromwell that I can verify is the undignified fate of his earthy remains. Since he died before the reinstated monarchy could bring him to justice, Charles II had him exhumed and then posthumously hanged and beheaded. His head eventually came back to Cambridge, his alma mater, where it was reinterred at Sidney Sussex College. This plaque commemorates the occasion. It is said that only the Master of Sidney Sussex and a couple other college bigwigs know the actual location of the head, but I suspect that's a bit of Cambridge lore -- of which there are many -- that might not withstand scrutiny.

fresher's week dispatches

A financial bailout. So far I have been able to avoid the worst of what Cambridge's bureacracy can dish out, but I had a close call on Thursday. After getting out of my morning lecture, I hustled down to the Language Centre to sign up for a French class. The enrollment hours were brief and deviously inconvenient, and the place was jammed with people when I got there. Finally I made it to the front of the line and explained my dilemma. The class cost £100, payable by cash or cheque, but I couldn't come up with the payment that day. I had signed up for my bank account the previous week, but they hadn't sent me my chequebook yet. I had deposited my Gates stipend at my bank on Monday, but it takes cheques at least four days to clear in the UK, so I couldn't withdraw cash from the ATM. Knowing that my situation was not my fault and that lots of new Cambridge students must be in a similar boat, asked if I could reserve a spot in the almost-full class and pay at one of the later enrollment days, emphasizing all along how committed I was to taking the class.

To paraphrase the response: "not a prayer, buster-- come back when you have the money." Crap. I knew that the class was going to fill up, and it was now or never. A few moments of desperate haggling and attempts at negotiating failed. However, I was in luck-- there was another Gates Scholar in line behind me, whom I've known since we interviewed in Annapolis in February. She spoke up and offered to front me the money; she had gotten to Cambridge long before I had and consequently had a chequebook. I gratefully accepted and paid her back as soon as my cheques arrived, enclosing my repayment in an effusive thank-you note with a promise to buy her a cocktail at next week's Gates dinner cruise on the Thames.

If I had been shut out of the class, it would not at all have been an atypical experience for a Cambridge student. There are just so many uncoordinated moving parts around here, so many offices and institutions that don't talk to each other, so many delays intersecting with deadlines. Most people manage to scrape by, but you do hear the occasional horror story, and my missing out on the class wouldn't have been so bad in comparison to other possibilities.

A stroll to Grantchester. On a much happier note, this weekend I rounded up a posse to walk along a footpath on the River Cam to the tiny hamlet of Grantchester. The village is home to a teahouse known as The Orchard, which once played host to a remarkable group of friends. For the half-decade preceding WWI, The Orchard was a hangout for a subset of the Bloomsbury Group-- including the philosophers Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the novelists E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, the poet Rupert Brooke, and the economist John Maynard Keynes. Amazingly, they became friends before most of them had done their most significant work. Keynes is of greatest personal interest to me, as an economist with whom I have a lot of intellectual sympathy. (Hint: he's pretty much the boogeyman among the "just let the market run its course and everything will be fine" set.) I'll close with a shot of some contemporary Cantabrigians following in their leisurely footsteps:

lake district recap

I am back in Cambridge for the madness of "freshers' week" after a fun but soggy few days in the Lake District. A few thoughts before I return to the more mundane tasks of assembling my life:

The Scholars. I traveled with 100-odd Gates scholars, most of them freshly minted like me, but there was also a number of returning scholars doing multi-year degrees who served as our chaperones/tour guides. I referred to them as "the elders" until I realized that I am older than most of them; one, in fact, is younger than my youngest sibling! For those not familiar with the program, the Gates Cambridge Trust can theoretically support scholars from any country except the UK. Our group was roughly half Americans, but it included students from countries ranging from Canada to Zambia to Croatia to Malaysia.

Poets and opium-heads. Our Lake District amusements included orienteering in the rain, hiking in the rain, kayaking in the rain, visiting a gingerbread bakery in the rain, and touring the former home of the great poet William Wordsworth in the rain. Wordsworth's house began its life as a pub and hosted a number of colorful men of letters as long-term houseguests. Sir Walter Scott, who tried his best to be polite but could not abide by the Wordsworths' teetotaling and twice-daily consumption of porridge, would sneak out the window of the guest room each morning to get a proper English breakfast and a pint of beer before his hosts woke up. Another guest, Thomas de Quincey, penned Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, possibly launching the addiction-memoir genre that has more recently given us Augusten Burroughs and James Frey.

Encounters with bad British food, volume 1. On the way to the Lake District, we stopped at a park for a picnic lunch. We were each issued the kind of lunch you carried to school in 3rd grade: a sandwich, a bag of "crisps," a juice box, fruit, and some "biscuits," all in a brown paper bag. The first unusual thing I noticed about my tuna sandwich was that it had corn in it, which seemed odd but wasn't a dealbreaker. (The Subway chain has stores here, and it has corn in its lineup of vegetable toppings.) A few bites in, however, I noticed a taste that was vaguely familiar, mildly unpleasant, and definitely out of place. I puzzled aloud about the taste until a nearby scholar, an Irish woman, filled me in on the mystery ingredient: margarine. Tuna salad, white bread, corn, and margarine-- yuck. Fortunately, the names of the crisps and the biscuits provided some comic relief. The flavors of crisps included "Ready Salted" and "Prawn Cocktail," while my cookies carried the appetizing name of "Digestives."

The family name. Perhaps as some kind of karmic compensation for elementary school taunts about my last name, the Powers name won me an unprecedented degree of cachet with the Gates crowd. A few of the returning Gates scholars who organized the trip told me that they were eager to meet me because of my name. I accepted the compliment as graciously as I could, but mentioned that my name couldn't stand up to that of one of my Alaska friends, Dan Stellar. The name Daniel just sounds like a winner all around, and when combined with a last name that's a synonym for "awesome," it's pretty much impossible to compete.