6/28/06 - Brighton, England

Edinburgh - St. Andrews - Glasgow - Newcastle - Carlisle - Manchester - Widnes - Liverpool - Norwich - Brighton

Highlights, Observations, Rants, etc. :

• The World Cup: For the past several weeks, one thing and one thing only has dominated the English national consciousness, due in no small part to the relentless coverage of the British media. A British scientist could discover the cure for cancer, or Tony Blair could announce his decision to have a sex change, and I still think the World Cup would dominate the headlines. First it was Rooney's foot (could he possibly be fit in time), then Sven's tactics (how to arrange the squad to maximize the quality of the 11 players on the pitch), and now building on unconvincing victories (whether the team can improve enough to realistically beat the Portuguese, not to mention Brazil or Argentina). But underlying everything has been a barely contained feeling (somewhere between hope against hope and unbridled optimism) that This Is England's Chance. The entire country is perched on a balloon of hype that will positively explode if they somehow do manage to win it all, and that will splutter and deflate disappointingly if they lose, just as they have in every major championship since 1966.
  It's a great atmosphere to be in the middle of, because the entire country is captivated. St. George's crosses fly from windows, cars, you name it. I watched the England-Sweden game, which actually meaningless except to determine who would get to avoid Germany in the next round, in Newcastle, and the pubs were filled with Geordies (as people from Newcastle are affectionately known) decked out in jerseys and facepaint. The same with the England-Ecuador game in Liverpool. There are even a host of World Cup pop songs, including Stan's World Cup Song, sung to the tune of She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain and with a chorus of "Singing ay-yay-yippee, the Germans bombed our chippy, ay-yay-yippee-yippee-yay" (Bob Dylan, eat your heart out), and a version of Come On Eileen reversed as Come On England.
  But all the unbridled enthusiasm hasn't exactly endeared the English team to its British neighbors. The majority of Scots I spoke to actually wanted to see England get 'stuffed', although they couldn't seem to decide whether they would prefer England to make an embarassing early exit or to come tantalizingly close to winning only to lose in the semifinal or final. At first this suprised me, especially since the Scottish team didn't even qualify for the finals, but after experiencing a few days of the intense media barrage, I could start to understand. The English commentators aren't exactly impartial, and the most trivial of stories relating to the English team (Peter Crouch's (in)famous Robot Dance goal celebrations, for example) are given precendence over everything else, including highlights from other games. As one Scotsman pointed out, "People make the mistake of thinking Great Britain is one country; it's not, it's four countries." I can see how all the pro-English rhetoric comes off as grating and/or condescending to the Scots, Welsh & Irish (who are historically sympathetic to underdogs anyway) and leaves them longing for their own independent match commentators & pundits.
  But I'm in England now, and as long as the lads keep winning, everybody (including me) is happy.
• Golf in St. Andrews: Travelling was getting tiring, so I decided to stop for a week in St. Andrews, an ancient and relatively small town on the east coast of Scotland whose only claim to fame would be its prestigious university, had some bored Scots not started whacking a little ball around with clubs several centuries ago. So now, the place is absolutely mobbed by tourists every summer on a pilgrammage to the Home of Golf (honestly, I think I heard more American accents there than in the rest of my time in Britain).
  The plan was simply to relax with a few rounds and watch the first week of the world cup. So I played golf and watched soccer, but "relaxation" isn't exactly the best word to sum up the week. Having played only once since last fall meant my swing was pretty rusty, and a lesson from one of the resident pros helped me to fix some problems but created a host of new ones; my time off also meant my hands were less calloused than they have been in a while, so by the end of my second day in St. Andrews, I was developing blisters on top of blisters, and I had to tape up my hands to the extent that they probably would have looked right at home in an Egyptian sarcophagus. All this, plus a newly developed (albeit relatively minor) case of tendonitis in my right shin, combined to severely inhibit my attempts at relaxation...
  And then, of course, there is the Old Course, the shrine of the game. This may be a bit irreverent, but I've now seen a fair number of world-renowned places/things, and like so many of them, the Old Course loses a certain amount of its mystique when you're there staring the hype in the face. In person (and of course this is just my perhaps overly cynical opinion), the Mona Lisa is surprisingly small, the Book of Kells is just another old manuscript (albeit a painstakingly ornamented one), the Giant's Causeway is a far from gigantic clump of hexagonal rocks, and the Old Course is, well, just another golf course, and not a particularly tricky one at that -- the general consensus seems to place it only 3rd most difficult of the 6 courses officially run by the St. Andrews Links Trust. I'm not saying each one of these world treasures can't be appreciated by a knowleadgeable onlooker; it's just that there's a tremendous tendency to go and see and ooh and aah, just because that's simply what one ought to do. So I decided to pass on playing the Old Course, and the corresponding GBP 120 for greens fees, GBP 40 + tip for a caddy (not required, but if you're going to do it, you might as well do it right), and 4:30 wake-up to get an available spot as a single. Instead, I played the New Course ("New" in St. Andrews being a relative term, as the course has actually been around since the 1890's) for three consecutive days. And despite hobbling, cursing, and spraying balls all over the course the entire time, it was absolutely brilliant. The "links" golf we have in the States isn't really links golf; it's a little too manicured, a little too Disneyland, as one of my playing partners put it. Between the ever-present wind, the rock-hard ground (think cement covered by a few strands of grass - I don't think I saw a ball-mark on a single green), the gorse, and the bunkers deeper than you are tall, it's rougher and more raw and arguably less fair, but somehow it's still great fun. I'd do it again in a heartbeat, blisters and all, except next time I'd hope to play a little better...
• "Quiet" Night Out in Liverpool: I met up with Steve Ellis, one of the guys I worked with during my internship in Germany 6 (yikes) years ago, for a few days in Widnes just outside of Liverpool. Friday night we went out looking to relive our days in the Altstadt in Dusseldorf with some good old-fashioned boozing. Steve & his friends surprised how quiet it was for a Friday night. If that was quiet, I'd love/hate to see Liverpool on a busy night. We went to a bunch of different places in the Ropewalks, an area in a several-block radius filled with bars and clubs, and all of them - plus the streets - were jammed with Scousers (the colloquial term for Liverpudlians) on the piss. An absolute blast.

Mundane Reasons Why Life in the US Isn't Perfect:

• If you want to withdraw $100 (actually I guess GBP 100) from a British ATM, you type 1-0-0, not 1-0-0-0-0 like you do in the states in order to get the decimal in the right position. I've never understood the need to enter 2 decimals when specifying a withdrawal amount, since no ATM I've ever used has ever been capable of dishing out cents. Leave it to the sensible Brits to get it right...
• Tipping isn't completely out of control. For dinner (or any other table service with a bill), you leave 10%. When ordering drinks at the bar, you just pay for them. None of the 20% or dollar-a-drink nonsense, but at the same time the 10% means your waiter still has a reasonable incentive to provide decent service (unlike Germany, for example, where in general no tipping = no incentive = horrific service) .

Blog Issues:

• So finding an internet cafe and then sitting there for a few hours every few days was starting to get impractical, plus I found myself simply not having that much to say. So let's give this new format a try, where I'll post less frequently and just expound on the highlights and spout off any other random observations I might have...
• Photos -- I finally got around to uploading the pics from my digital camera onto Flickr.com. Most of them are pretty unspectacular, since I tend to use my digital camera for quick souveneir shots and my 35mm SLR for everything else. But for each post, I'll list a link to the photos I've taken since the last post (I've now done this retroactively as well).