Why are my memories being Britishized?

(Guest post by Steve.)

Learning to drive on the wrong side left-hand side of the road has been an interesting experience. Standard phrases like “Stay in the right lane!” when actually referring to the slow lane on the highway don’t make sense, although Sarah and I are both able to interpret each other appropriately.

The most fascinating adjustment has been my memories. Just the other day as we were shopping for a car, I began reminiscing on my first car purchase–the fantastic Dodge Neon. It was a great car that served me well during my college days. I could still remember leaving class for the day and approaching it from the right side, opening the driver’s door, and getting behind the wheel. Unfortunately my thoughts of the good old days were cut short by the startling cognitive dissonance when I realized that since I owned that car in the states, its driver’s door was certainly on the left side not the right side as my mental images had shown me.

I am mildly worried by this. Which memories have been or will be changed due to my new culture? What if I can no longer tell the difference between a true memory and a false one? What if I become the example of someone who has become Britishized in dictionaries?

That’s not a Welsh accent

When we were in Wales this past weekend we stopped in the town of Monmouth.  It was a medium-sized market town off of the foreign tourist circut.  We stopped in the late afternoon and walked along the high street – looking in the various shops.  At two different shops the clerk commented on our accents, wanting to know where we were from.  Both then started conversations with us – the clerk at the sandwich shop called the other clerk because she was “from the states”  (ends up she lived there 20 years ago).

 The next day at the open-air museum one of the docents commented that he thought Steve was Welsh when he initially said hello, but quickly determined otherwise as he spoke more.  The docent went on to tell us that asking where someone is from based on their accent is a standard way of starting a friendly conversation.  Nice folks over there in Wales.

Odd busfellows…

Today, instead of driving to work, I walked from our apartment to the Reading Train Station, where I hopped on the Thames Valley Park bus.  The bus runs from the station out to the business park where Microsoft is located, and it is financed by the tenants of the park, and is free to the riders.  One of the other compaines at the park is Oracle, along with bg and some others.  So, the bus is full of a bunch of people from Oracle and Microsoft.  It would sort of be like Amazon and Microsoft teaming up and providing a shared bus for their employees.  Wierd.

Ben

Our friend from Seattle, Ben Morrell is going in for some pretty heavy-duty cancer surgery tomorrow.  We won’t be able to make it to his prayer meeting in Seattle tonight, but we’re praying for him from here and know that God hears us in England just as clearly as he would in Seattle.

Wales

Steve and I spent the weekend in South Wales. We saw Tintern Abbey, Raglan Castle on Saturday. We had a senic drive and a short walk in the Brecon Beacons on Sunday morning and then made a visit to the St Fagans museum of Welsh life before heading home. Pictures are up at Flickr. I’ll post a few stories this week, but now need to get to bed.

Timberrrrr!

On Tuesday my work took me to a customer site in Cranleigh.  I took the train to Guilford, Surrey where I met a colleague to share a taxi to Cranleigh, about a 25 minute journey.  About half way there we stopped behind a lorry stopped in the middle of a narrow strech of road.  After looking about we noticed a tree had fallen across the road on the opposite side.  The driver of the lorry in front of us hopped out, followed by the taxi driver then my colleague, Phillip.  The three guys tried to push the tree back up and swing it to the side to no avail.  The lorry driver backed up across the road, ran across the road and scaled the 8ft embankment – which was extremely impressive.  I finally had the good sense to snap a picture just as he had pulled the tree back up onto the bank.  Phil and the taxi driver are looking on, wondering just how he did it.  They got back into their vechicles and traffic continued through.  We got several thumbs ups from drivers in the cars that saw what had happened…

 The really interesting thing to me is that no one had tried to do anything yet.  No telling how long the tree had been down, probably a half hour or more because after we proceeded there were nearly 300 cars queued up behind the site.  People had probably been creeping around it all morning as the backup grew and grew.  Funny that someone going the other direction was the one to finally stop and do something.  As we drove along the taxi driver muttered something about useless people from Surrey in suits…

Training

Today I had my first trip on a British train.   I was on the train at 6:30am to make it out to a customer visit for my job.  We’ve been on trains on our trips to continental Europe, but never here in England.  Overall the experience was good – pretty easy to figure out – train was pretty much on time.  As compared to Germany not quite as surgically precise on time, not quite as clean and the timetables are not as easy to find or read – but quite sufficient. 

I also had “training” this afternoon for work.  It was a really sweet setup.  One individual has the task of going through lots and lots of required training and then boils it down into a single session – hitting the high points and telling us what other steps we have to complete to meet our training requirements.  Brilliant!  One hilarious thing is that on a conf call with 60 or so participants somone is always falling off mute – lots of funny things that weren’t meant to be overheard.  An hour or so into the call someone (who was obviously calling in from home) was calling for his kid to get out of the mud.  It was pretty funny, then one of my co-workers who was listening in the same conference room with me said “Hey, that’s Peter Johns* – I’ll IM him to put it on mute!”  It worked, he was muted within 45 seconds, and a bit embarassed:-)

*not his real name

Driving lesson

Today Steve drove on the left side of the road for the first time.  We drove over to the Microsoft campus and then Steve tooled around the MS parking lot for about thirty minutes, practicing shifting left handed and turning, with me coaching on slowing down and turning tight.  Our little rental has quite a bit of pep for being a tiny little thing and it is tough to keep the speed down after driving the tank of the Volvo back home.  Also, one distinct disadvantage of right-side-of-the-car driving is that you have to operate the blinker and shift with the same (left) hand.

How I wish I had started with a lesson.  I started in the Avis parking lot at Heathrow – and had hit a parked car in Bath within the next hours :-)  Steve got us back home into Reading swimmingly.

Winchester

Today we took a day trip over to Winchester to see the cathedral.  It was really the first time since we’ve been here that we did something like we would do on vacation.  It was so strange to think as we were strolling around town that we were “home” and not on vacation.  Sure beats going over to Belleveue Square mall.

Pictures are posted at Flickr.  Click on the picture at right to navigate.

Winter…

…is on its way to England. This frost greeted us before work today.