enter the haggis

Happy Burns Night! Though it has been pointed out to me by a number of native Scots, Scotland doesn't really do holidays. Well, I mean, they do, they don't feel remotely obligated to celebrate anything ever. Scotland is a really apathetic place, unless it is something about being "English", in which case they get VERY nationalistic about not being English. As a result I just sort of figured that everyone would get VERY excited about today being birthday of their almost-patron saint, poet Robert Burns. (They did not, in true form.) Today is one of those would-be big holidays that people supposedly do things for, but they're not required.

What do people do to celebrate a poet, you ask?

They hold Burns Suppers which are formal dinners with a bunch of thoroughly absurd traditions, including an entire speech devoted to addressing the haggis, ceremonial slicings of the haggis itself, toasts to assorted members of the table and bagpipe interludes. I guess when you are drinking your weight in whisky this seems reasonable. From wikipedia, this is the order of a traditional Burns supper (click for links):

• Start of the evening
• Host's welcoming speech
• Entrance of the haggis
• Supper
• Immortal memory
• Appreciation
• Toast to the Lassies
• Reply to the Toast to the Lassies
• Other toasts and speeches
• Works by Burns
• Closing

I couldn't find any big public Burns parties - I think it's sort of like a traditional Thanksgiving celebration; it takes place at home. But that didn't stop me from having a Burns supper! A bunch of my international friends and I got together at a local, traditional Scottish pub to celebrate with haggis neeps & tatties and whisky. We didn't have to address any inanimate objects and we got to eat a lot of haggis (which is actually delicious). So maybe we sort of missed the excitement of the night (there were no never-ending toasts, replies, etc), but it was still nice.

And there was a lot of whisky...so we must have done something right.

so this is the new year

I could write something long and redundant about 2010 in this space, but I won't. I think if you've been keeping up with my blog, you know that 2010 has been a big year for me. A new chapter at the dawn of a new decade, etc. I think it's been a good one, but I also think it's too early to say that.

The one thing I will say about 2010 is that it taught me a lot about myself. I've grown up a lot this year. I am happy with the person I am (becoming).

---

Usually, I'm not one for new year's resolutions. I always forget them after a day or two. I do have a new year's resolution for the blog though- I want to make it more interesting, rather than talking about being cold all the time. Unfortunately, my day-to-day life is rather boring - I sit in an office and read/write all day. But in my free time I'm doing some cool things, so I'll try to write about that. Deal?

---

2011. It feels weird in my mouth, like every new year does.

i'm coming home again

Can you believe it's almost Christmas? Christmas here is a big, huge deal - they take it really seriously. It's like Thanksgiving and Christmas rolled into one mega-holiday, complete with turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce. (Hmm... where were you a few weeks ago!) Everything about it is very serious and fairly traditional. We even have what I have been told is a German-style Christmas market near my flat. If I ever felt marginalized for being Jewish in the States (read: not celebrating christmas) I would probably be very unhappy here, as 'not celebrating christmas' is not an option. GLASGOW LOVES CHRISTMAS AND YOU DO TOO. Everyone has Christmas parties for every sort of group possible - so far I have attended six parties, no joke - two different department ones (Glasgow Uni's and Strathclyde's) and two for the reading groups I attend (Socioling and Corpus Ling), and two friends' Christmases. It's definitely been a traditional (UK) Christmas, complete with mince pies, which to my surprise do not have meat in them ("mince" also means "ground beef" here) and lots of mulled wine. It has all been very exciting - I've never celebrated Christmas before, and certainly not like this.

But Almost-Christmas means I've been here for a little over three months. I am one-quarter finished with my master's degree, which is a bit daunting! I'm starting to work on a PhD project next... Almost Christmas also means I am coming home for a bit soon. Meanwhile, I apologize for not having written much in here lately other than to complain about being cold all the time -- I've been trying to get a lot of work done so i can take a few weeks off and relax while I'm in the states.

My first flight back leaves at 6:30 AM on Saturday. I think I am going to live-record my travels again (See september for the original ones), so you all have something to look forward to when I am fairly jetlagged. See you all soon!

but we are 78% water, even our pumping hearts

While the rest of the world seems convinced that the world has ended due to last week's 5 inches of snow over six days and yesterday's sudden onslaught of a proper New England-style snowfall for about 3 hours, prompting the university to strongly urge me to "not venture out of university buildings" (verbatim quote) and not one but two snow days in the past few days, I am generally unfazed, and therefore the only one in the office so far this morning. In fact I'm relieved that things are back to normal.

Come have a cup of tea with me, as we're out of coffee, and I have about 6 more cups of tea to drink throughout the day to stay awake anyway.

BEER

Today we are going to talk about beer! Because everyone loves beer. And it's what we drink when we're not drinking tea here.

Scottish culture pretty much revolves around pubs. It's a very egalitarian situation - you alternate buying the drinks with whoever is keeping pace with you - and the Scots can drink. I feel like my 4 years of undergrad were training for UK drinking - I am now confident in my ability to drink from 4pm until 11 pm, having eaten lunch at 12:30, with dinner at 8pm (this is not uncommon) AND NOT SAY OR DO ANYTHING STUPID.

So! Beer!

Unsurprisingly, not many American beers make it over here. And if they are here, either a) they're usually pretty good American beers or b) you're in a nice pub. Sierra Nevada is pretty popular, and I've seen a couple places that had Sam Adams and Brooklyn Lager (I was excited). That said, you can get a bottle of Budweiser in most places (Light beer doesn't exist here, so Bud Light is out of the question.) You can also sometimes get Miller Genuine Draft, and then laugh about it because you know it's shit! Last week I had both Miller and Corona, because they were The Cheap Beer Special. We should probably start being embarrassed about anything that you can buy in a 30 rack. Blue Moon is starting to trickle over here, which is hilarious, however - I keep seeing it as a "specialty bottled beer".

The cheapest of the cheap beers here are infinitely better than American cheap beers. The big one here is Tennants, which is made in Glasgow. Tennants is sort of like Budweiser in that nobody actually likes it, but everyone will drink it. Stella and Peroni are both pretty popular, though I have no idea why- one is infinitely worse than the other (hint: Peroni > Stella.) Other cheap beers include Belhaven, Grolsh, Heineken, Kronenbourg, and Budweiser Budvar (which I assure you is different than Budweiser.) Guinness isn't always cheap, but it's easy to get. And, of course, every country needs their hipster beer. We don't have PBR here (but everyone who has been to the states LOVES pbr, it's hilarious); hipster beer here is Red Stripe. These are all pretty cheap, they're about £2 or £3 at a pub. You can get most of these - except for Red Stripe, you need to be able to identify your hipsters - on tap. Tennants and Belhaven are on tap at every single pub ever, and most places will have one or two others on tap too.

The UK also has cider, which is amazing. Well, we have it in the states, but not in the same way. Basically: you can buy a two-liter of alcohol that tastes like apples for about £2.50 at almost any store that sells alcohol, and it will fuck you up. It also comes on tap, in bottles and in cans. There's a couple major brands: Strongbow and Bulmer's are the two big ones, and then there are some smaller breweries around (Addleston's is good and I think the main local one). A good rule for cider is "the cloudier it is the more you will get fucked up". I really like cider but that's a slippery slope to go down sometimes!

There are some really good local brews too - Deuchar's IPA is made in Caledonia, and it's amazing. I don't usually like IPAs and this is fantastic. Alloa is made in some place called Clackmannanshire, they've got a great beer called Good Times ("Hiya, can I get two Good Times?" sounds ridiculous, but it's delicious) and they make porter called Midnight Sun which is very good too. Caley is heavy; I'm not a big fan but maybe you are. There's a whole group of ales called Heather Ales, which are fantastic, but again not if you're going to be drinking them for a long time.

I happen to really like Hefenweizens, which are German wheat beers - we're close to Germany, so those are easy to come by; naturally I am very pleased. I've had a couple of real German Hefenweizens, and they were lovely, but alas I cannot spell them (I can barely pronounce them).

telling it like it is

My friend Olivia on Glasgow's weather:

Gah! Rain! Now I am soggy and wet! GRUMP.
Gah! Sun! In my eyes! And now I must watch it miserably out of my window. Stupid sun.
Gah! Wind! Hair in my face! Aaaargh! Stupid wind.
Gah! Snow! Cold feet and falling on my face! Stupid stupid snow.
Gah! Clouds again?! Why do we never get any NICE weather in Glasgow? Stupid clouds.

We are knee-deep in Snowpocalypse 2010 (it's been snowing since Friday night and we have managed to accumulate MAYBE six inches of snow so far). This is nothing, and people are freaking out. God forbid the Scots ever come to New Hampshire.

little cream soda

submitted without commentary: signs in Tesco

it's beginning to look a lot like a new england winter

it's snowing! (this is the view from my sitting room.)

Do you guys remember when London was in the news last year for days because it snowed and nobody could handle that? It's like that. Apparently it rarely snows in Glasgow, because it's never cold enough to snow, so it's very exciting. Nobody knows what to do with it though!

jive turkey

Happy Thanksgiving week, blogfolks! Continuing on the theme of my blog as a food blog...

I was worried that I was going to miss Thanksgiving and be sad about it, but this was not the case! Instead I am going to not one but two Thanksgiving parties. The first one is tonight, with the Scottish Lesbian Army & Friends. My international friends are having a Thanksgiving party on actual Thanksgiving, which is going to be a lot of fun - they really like the concept of getting everyone all together in one space.

On the whole the UK is very confused by Thanksgiving, which is adorable. They get the concept of it, but not much else. They don't really get the customs or the food you'd eat. But I have a bunch of friends who are also Americans, and we've been trying to explain it as "everyone gets together, gets dressed up, drinks a lot of wine, eats a fuckton of food, watches tv, takes a nap, and eats more". Everyone likes the idea of it, and we've told them to think of it sort of like Christmas, but with more food. Christmas is their big holiday, with turkeys and stuffing and whatnot. I had a "Christmas sandwich" yesterday, which was chicken, ham and stuffing. (And probably mayo.) Close, guys...

We have cranberry sauce here, but it usually comes in a small jar and is very expensive. Dried cranberries are pretty easy to come by, but nothing beats a good cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving, right? It took four stores in two different parts of town, but finally found some! LOOK AT THIS:


I bought three bags of them, had to go hunt down nutmeg, and ran home to get down to business. My flatmates thought I was NUTS. They watched me do it, deciding that I was in fact making cranberry jam. Not quite... All my friends (except for the Americans, they are clearly excited too) think cranberry sauce is "mental" and simply cannot wrap their minds around it. I hope they are ready...I just tasted it & it's delicious.

I feel it in my bones

It is November and I am freezing already. I have many more months of this, and I understand it is only going to get worse.

You would think that after 22 years of bitter New England winters I would be prepared for Scottish winters. I thought I would be! I'm a pretty hardy New Englander. Being cold doesn't really bother me - I am prone to opening windows in February in New Hampshire. In fact I don't think I ever thought to myself "holy HELL, it is cold." In New England, it's a really windy sort of cold - the temperature will drop really low and you can feel the cold on your skin.

Glasgow shares a latitude line with Moscow. Which, by the way, is in Russia. But I was assured that we get a "nice Gulf Stream warm-up" from being so close to the Atlantic. This was a lie. Every day I think "Holy HELL, it is cold." (On paper it doesn't sound terribly cold here - the temperature's been hovering around 45 degrees Fahrenheit, which isn't terrible. I would daresay that 45 is a pretty good temperature for the fall, especially this time of the fall.)

But it's not the same kind of cold. This whole country wears wool coats all the time, because it's the only way to keep warm(ish). By mid-October, I had to go out and buy a wool coat because my New England-Acceptable ski coat wasn't keeping me warm! It's not a windy sort of cold here - though we do have wind sometimes and then you just sort of want to die - it's more of a damp cold that seeps through your bones and into each individual muscle and you wonder if you will ever be warm again. Suddenly I understand the wool coat thing, they sort of act as insulation for your body.

In light of my blog slowly but surely becoming a food blog, this brings me back to soup. As you might know, I love soup. It's good for you and warms you up - what else can you ask for? Unfortunately, as I know all too well from my previous visit to the UK, the only sort of soup you can really get is Cream of Blank soup. Even straightforward things like minestrone soup is more like Cream of Minestrone soup. If you order chicken soup expecting chicken noodle soup you are going to be very disappointed, because you've actually got cream of chicken soup. Some cream of blank soups are delicious - cream of broccoli, for instance, is a magical thing. And then there are others that are just surprisingly lumpy in ways you don't want. (I imagine the Brits find American soups to be terribly weak.)

As a result of being cold all the time, I spend a lot of time around lunchtime thinking about how much I would like soup, but I would not like the cream form of it. (The last time I did this I got cream of lentil soup, which I would like to not eat ever again, thanks.) I would look around at the soup selections in the grocery stores, thinking, "This would be great if it was not going to be cream of blank." (I realize I could make soup myself, but that sounds difficult.) Imagine my surprise when I found pumpkin and coriander soup the other day!
yes, I do eat in my room rather than in the kitchen.

Pumpkin is not A Thing here - I saw a few of them for a hot second around Halloween, but they're not very popular, whereas you are all drowning in pumpkin flavored everythings. So naturally, this is all I have been eating for the past few days. Admittedly this is also a cream of pumpkin situation, but that is totally the correct way to do this. I am very pleased. All is right with the world again, or at least until they take this pumpkin soup out of the stores - it's a "limited release".

meeting people is easy

It would be presumptuous to say that I was a popular person at home. I certainly knew many people, though. If I wanted to do something, there would almost always be someone around. Also, I don't know how to talk about Having Friends without feeling like I'm six years old, but here we go.

If I were to move almost anywhere within the continental US, I am fairly certain that I would know someone (or know a friend-of-a-friend) who lived there too. And if I didn't, the time zone isn't different enough that I wouldn't be able to keep in touch with everyone. It's not like moving a seven-hour plane ride away! I don't like to keep harping on this point, but going from knowing a ton of people on one continent and then moving to a new continent where you don't know a soul is, quite frankly, a terrifying prospect. You have to go out and meet people, and you have to make friends all over again. And it's stressful! You have to remember to call them or text them and invite them to do things and try not to feel like you're bothering them. I spent a lot of time doing things that interested me, like going to art galleries and gigs and such, hoping that I would meet people who also liked these things. Unfortunately some of the things I'm into are not the most accessible things to invite someone to - "hey, do you want to come with me to a minimalist composer's concert?"

The international society has a weekly pub night, where we all converge on a pub and socialize, so of course I go to that - I now have a pretty solid group of international-student-friends who go every week (mostly Germans, they're a lot of fun) and I think I am friends with most of the people in my office (although I feel like I probably come off as a tool most of the time, to be honest; there's a handful of MRes students though, and we all hang out together as The Newbies). Everyone in the office is really nice and we all get along really well - it's a good group of people.

And then a really strange small-world twist of fate, I ran into a girl whom i had had been introduced to briefly once at a gig a few weeks ago - it turns out she is my advisor's wife's student over at Glasgow university, studying sociolinguistics. She runs something called Lock Up Your Daughters, which is a magazine & monthly club night - I met her girlfriend and bunch of her friends and they've been great. (Though I am definitely comfortable with my international friends and my office friends, I did need some gay friends. Sometimes international groups of people are not the best places to be out, loud & proud, you know? I live near a whole bunch of gay clubs but would never go to them alone, and I'd feel weird asking a straight person to come with me.) But yeah - I've been hanging out with the LUYD crew and getting involved in that, which has been fun; they're exactly the sort of liberalminded queermos I was looking for when I first arrived.

So there's that! YOU GUYS I HAVE FRIENDS.

(On a mostly unrelated sidenote, this is how I am apparently going to a party on Tuesday for the BBC tv show Lip Service, which is like The L Word but set in Glasgow. It's pretty terrible- seriously, check it out. LUYD has been asked to be there to do a DJ set, as they are a "staple of Glasgow's lesbian scene"... I'm starting to get involved with promotional stuff like flyering, so I'm apparently going with them. You guys, these are my friends!)

we're from north america!

I have been here long enough that the initial shock of UK vs American English has sort of worn off. At first I was making a conscious effort to try and translate things into UK English - especially in an international community, many people only know British English - but I've mostly given that up. I probably sounded like a tool. If anything, retaining American English makes for a good discussion point amongst English studies and linguistics people.

But it still stresses me out that I don't know how to be polite over here. Well, it's not that I don't know how to be polite; I consider myself to be a very polite person. Cashier at the store, I know you are probably having a shitty time; I want you to know that I appreciate your existence. Waitress, thanks for bringing over my food; no, I don't need anything else, I'm all set thanks. It's just that I don't know what the UK equivalent of politeness would be!

For the most part, I can deal with this sort of thing in mini interactions. In stores or at the coffeeshop, it's mostly fine. Every morning I see the housekeepers for my office on their way out and I will tell them "Have a nice day." (They are still baffled by this, and I have been doing this for nearly a month now.) After purchasing something from a store, I will tell the cashiers to "Have a nice day." ("Cheers" means "Thanks", but it's not the same sort of thing. "Ta" is more of a "thank you" than "cheers", though, and is used mostly as a "thanks for holding the door open" sort of situation.)

Everyone here seems very taken aback by the question "How are you?" (and variations thereof: "How have you been?"). The usual answer I get - once the other party gets over the original processing of the question at hand, that is - is "Yeah, I've/it's been alright." AND HERE IS WHERE THINGS GET COMPLICATED FOR BOTH PARTIES:

In American English, "alright" is used to show indifference. Maybe it was mediocre. It was okay. Nothing spectacular. I've been okay.

In British English, however, "alright" means that it was good, or that they've been well, or that they had a good time.

I'll ask someone how an event was and they'll tell me that it "was alright, yeah". And that means that they really enjoyed it! If you've asked how they've been doing, "I've been great, thanks!" I imagine the pragmatics of these particular conversations would be FASCINATING to study. That said, I think the British English equivalent of "How have you been?" is "How've you been getting on?", but that seems to be used to show concern over something.

Occasionally there are people who are used to interacting with North (Canadians do this too!) Americans, who are used to getting this question a lot, and they usually ask me back - "How was your weekend?" And I will say that it was "alright", in the American sense of "it was okay", whereas they are using it in the sense of "oh, it was very good." Do you see the problem here? (My Irish flatmates will describe something as "grand" if it is good, which is at least a little less stressful.)

Clearly I don't want to come off as an stupid American lumbering around any more than I have to, but it legitimately bothers me that I can't figure out how to come off as polite here. To finish a transaction and not say anything - which appears to be the standard UK response - seems terribly rude to me. The same goes for not asking someone how they have been doing! I don't think I'll ever wrap my mind around this. And I'm sure as soon as I do, I'll be back in the States being horrifically rude to everyone ever.

Q: What's orange and tastes like bubblegum?

A: Irn Bru!

Yes, this is a real thing. Here in Scotland, Irn Bru annually outsells Coca Cola products.

It is not as terrible as it looks. It's actually pretty good, once you get past the color. It has been described to me as the national beverage of Scotland and "the best hangover drink of all time". (It is basically 100% sugar.) I was very apprehensive about trying it - admittedly, the color is very offputting; I will only drink it from a can - but it's not terrible. (It's also not great, however.)

I could go on forever about Adventures in Eating here. Maybe I will just give up and turn this into a food blog.

remember remember the fifth of november

Today is Guy Fawkes Day! (If you do not know who this is and you are reading my blog, I am going to need you to go obtain a copy of V for Vendetta - the film or the graphic novel are both acceptable - and check back in when you are done.)
Scotland is a very... nationalistic place, to say the least. Though it is part of the United Kingdom, it is very much it's own country: Scotland has its own parliament and Scots law is different than English law. Yes, it's technically English, but it is its own variety of English. (They even have their own dictionary.) Here in Scotland, we are SCOTTISH DAMMIT. Someone who is a native of Scotland would probably be very offended if you thought they were English.

(The closest analogy I can give you is that Scottish nationalism is much like Southern [American] Nationalism - it's as if Texas was the most liberal part of America and constantly threatening to leave as a result of the rest of the country being too conservative. Perhaps more accurately, Scotland is what would happen if Vermont got its act together and decided to become its own country once and for all.)

So naturally the Scots are very, very excited about Guy Fawkes Day. How could they not be? Dude tried to overthrow an entire government by blowing that shit up. I imagine if their Personal Life Hero role had not been already claimed by Robert Burns (more on this in January), Guy Fawkes would be a close contender for the position. People don't seem to really excited about going out for Guy Fawkes Day like we would for the 4th of July, though I have been promised many fireworks tonight. I assure you that my daily life is not full of bagpipers and kilted men - though this does happen, but mostly for weddings and other severely formal events - but I would not be surprised if they were out in full force today.

keep calm & carry on: it's a thing

When Americans talk about stereotypes they often forget about themselves - how are we seen by the rest of the world? (I have many feelings about this, of course.) More often than not, I've discovered that Americans are viewed as industrious people. (Or, at least, I am seen as such a person.)

Things will frequently go awry and nobody seems to notice. Well, not even awry, that makes it sound like something terrible has happened. But "Keep calm and carry on"? That's not a joke. That's a real mantra here. Well, they might not say it, but it's been totally internalized.

Little things will happen in our flat- like the lightbulb that burned out in our hallway over a month ago - and nobody seems to mind the inconvenience of not having a lightbulb there. All we have to do is go down to the accommodation office and ask for a new one, but everyone seems to be okay with not having light there. This is fairly minor - the second week that we were here, we didn't have running water when we woke up one morning. No running water meant no shower AND no coffee (and no tea), and my three flatmates sort of thought about it and decided well, it wasn't the best of situations but surely we will manage. I got dressed to go find someone to fix this situation immediately, because water is one of those important things that people need to have.

But it's not just my in my apartment. The other week, we blew a fuse in the department's kitchenette. While this remained unfixed, the tea drinkers were all busy running around chasing/hoarding the kettle across the department. Meanwhile, the coffee drinkers would be herded to move the giant industrial coffeemaker to the next nearest office, sit and wait for the coffeemaker to do its thing, and then move it all back into the kitchen in case whoever's office it wasn't around or was busy when the next coffee round happened. This was fixed pretty quickly, lest the department fall apart from lack of tea. Meanwhile, the door handle of the ladies room fell off and nobody seems to be especially concerned. We might get trapped in the toilet for a while if we're not careful - but no bother! Nobody (besides me) seems to be overly concerned about these things. In fact, I would maybe venture to guess that nobody is worried about anything here.

Similarly and/or tangentially, nobody seems to be especially upset over not having internet. In fact, I know a lot of people who don't have internet in their flat. Not only does this seem to be an extraordinarily normal thing, nobody seems to be particularly bothered by it. (In contrast, I get stressed out if I'm going to be at Glasgow University library for more than 2 hours, because I will not be able to get online without a Glasgow university username to check my email.) I guess it is the same sort of idea of just keeping calm and carrying on.

This boggles my mind, but I am slooooowly getting used to it. I'm quickly learning that if something happens it could take a few days to get fixed. A printer jam in the States will be fixed in about 5 minutes, but here we might be printerless for a week or so, but we'll manage somehow. We always do.

Get off the Internet! I'll meet you in the street

Do you guys remember how, way back in 1998, it was determined that if you used your real name on the internet or you gave out your email address to strangers, someone would TRACK YOU DOWN AND RAPE YOU?

Only 12 years later I am using my real name on the internet with much consistency - between my column (now mostly defunct), my twitter account and my email address (yes that is almost my full legal name!)

This weekend I am meeting people from the internet! In real life! I need to back up a little bit.

I read a website called Autostraddle, which you should check out if you like a lot of the same things I do. Anyway, they ran an article about meeting other lgbtq girls, which rapidly became a Meet Other Autostraddle Readers sort of situation. (I followed their advice and saw JD Samson of Le Tigre fame play a show last night with her new band MEN, and met some gays there. So far so good! Also can we pause to discuss how I was sharing airspace with JD Samson.


...


continuing on, now.)

This was great and actually kind of beautifully timed. I've been here long enough that I'm ready to start feeling comfortable Being A Gay Here, but I have to find them first. (My American gaydar keeps getting thrown off by straight men who are clearly rocking some gender ambiguous alternative lifestyle haircuts, sunglasses, and tight pants.) Even though this is obviously a pretty queer city, I'm not quite ready to go myself to a gay bar. I live near a whole bunch of them, but they're kind of intimidating and mostly full of gay men. I'm brave but not that brave!

But I am e-brave, and it would be awesome to have some gay friends who clearly are intelligent/interesting. And besides, people meet on the internet all the time, through online dating sites, Craigslist, "tweet ups" and other such things. So I added my email address, saying that I had just moved here and don't know any gays ... and got a few emails from some other Autostraddle readers in Scotland - a few in Glasgow and one in Edinburgh, all of whom were very friendly people!

And so today I am meeting one person for coffee and another one on Sunday for brunch/coffee. 2010 YOU GUYS. The Internet is truly a magical place - between email, facebook, skype, twitter, blogs etc etc etc it is bringing us all closer together.

but if you never hear back from me again i was probably violently kidnapped & raped via 1997. So we still run that risk, but it's a risk I'm willing to take.

and you in your autumn sweater

It's starting to feel like autumn around here, which is exciting! Previously it was just raining and being warm a lot. Now it is cold and raining! No, just kidding, we've been having some really sunny days lately.

I really like Glasgow a lot - I can see myself being here for a long time, I think - but for now I live in the city centre, where there are no trees. No, that's a lie, I can see a couple trees on my way to my office, but it's not the same as a Proper New England Fall. (Glasgow Green, where I took this picture, is a park about 10 minutes away from where I live. Sometimes I go over to Glasgow University and get jealous of the beautiful West End of Glasgow, complete with trees everywhere.)

I've lived in New England for 22 years, and while I think I am pretty much over homesickness at this point, but I do find myself being surprisingly homesick for New England fall. I think living in New England ruins autumn everywhere else for you.

the dream of a common language

The Scottish accent is famously a pretty dense thing to decipher. It's a British English accent, but with more to it. I don't know how else to describe it - and on top of that, the Glasgow accent is like the Extra Super Mega Scottish Accent. It's like listening to Sean Connery talk every day. (Some people are less mumbly.) After living here for about 5 weeks I'm starting to not notice it anymore; it's starting to sound pretty normal to me. Ordinarily this would be a terrifying concept to not notice something as big as an accent, but I am generally taking it as a good sign - This is a vast improvement over my first few weeks here, when I understood about 45% of what was being said to me at any moment in time. Though I'm a native speaker of English, sometimes I may as well not be!

Here's a fairly accurate clip about the Scottish accent:


Anecdotally: the other day I was skyping with A, who is in South Korea, when a guy with a fairly standard Glaswegian accent came by to look at our shower and reported back to me that there was nothing especially wrong with it...and A was dying - "DOES EVERYONE SOUND LIKE THAT?!" Yes. The answer is yes.

You wouldn't think this, but American English and British English are more different than you'd expect. Scots English is different enough from British English (it even has its own dictionary: The Dictionary of the Scots Language) but from what I can tell it's close enough to British English for my general purposes.

There are still a lot of words I don't quite "get" yet, and I feel ridiculous saying almost all of these things. Here everyone would say "loads" where we would say "lots", and the word "wee" is liberally used here to describe something that is small. "What's on?" is equivalent to "What's happening?" or "What's going on?". I have to remember not to ask for "a bathroom", as I will be directed to a shower room; I need to ask for a toilet instead, and "loo" is often thrown around instead. Then there are the things I absolutely cannot wrap my brain around: I keep calling the kettle the teapot, and if I am looking for push pins, I am looking for "drawing pins", which go in a "notice board", not a cork board.

There's an interesting article floating around that discusses how language is directly influenced by the people speaking around you - I can guarantee this is is true. I am trying to let some Britishisms into my language though - I can hear myself trying to replicate the intonation patterns of native UKers, and I'm catching myself describe things as "quite _____", more so than I usually would. Especially in an international setting - where most people have learned British rather than American English - it's often easier to use Britishisms as common ground.

That said, I definitely can't replicate a Scottish accent at all. I sometimes still catch myself being very embarrassed when I speak, because my accent is so flat and boring and very, very American, while a good Glasgow accent is so sing-songy, and all the back vowels are dipthongized. (If you are not a linguisticky type person, this means that they actually have two vowel sounds smushed together. [iu] for /u/ sounds are the most noticable, though /o/ and /a/ have some pretty good ones too. I can't find you a page about this that doesn't involve a lot of knowledge of phonetic background information, but you can probably find something accessible on youtube.)

While I can use a lot of the lingo properly, I can't help but feel like I must sound like an idiot with my ridiculous American accent. (Thankfully, the phoneticists around me say I don't have much of a Boston accent but more of a Canadian accent - looks like Mom's Canadianness rubbed off on me more than I thought! I don't hate Boston accents, but now I am very glad to not have too strong of one.)

today in adventures in grocery shopping

YOU GUYS LOOK WHAT I FOUND. This really is A Thing here!
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In the United Kingdom, most people go out for lunch, getting a sandwich/snack/drink combo for about £3, but for whatever reason, the UK is insistent that mayo must go on everything and that vegetables are a sort of rare event. I wholeheartedly disagree with this sentiment, so I bring a vegetable-filled mayo-free sandwich for lunch to my office instead. Since I essentially sit and read all day, I try to go for a walk around lunchtime down The Death Hill, just for a change of scenery. I usually just go to one of the corner grocery stores and pick up a yogurt. (UK food has a reputation for being pretty terrible - this is only 85% true; it took me about three weeks to find a vegetable that wasn't a potato here and I almost cried with happiness the first time I found a bag of spinach in a grocery store - but god damn this country can do yogurt well.) I am pleased to report that in this particular Sainsbury's, spotted dick lives comfortably next to the yogurt. I think this could be a fairly terrible accidental purchase.

Help, I'm Alive!: A One-Month Retrospective

[editor's note: Two years ago in late July, I was in Edinburgh, Scotland for a weekend, with food poisoning. Today I am back there on a hike with some Germans, hopefully without food poisoning. Through the magic of the internet and auto-posting, I present the following.]

You guys, I have been in Glasgow for a month! I can't believe it's been a month already. Things are going so, so well - this blog has sort of shown the ups and downs of the first few weeks of moving to a new country by myself, but I definitely feel like each day is better than the last. There's a lot of things that I am still working out - like what side of the street and which side of the stairs to walk on. (This is more complicated than you'd expect.) Sometimes I still have difficulties figuring out where I would go to buy things - we don't have Wal-Mart or Target or CVS here - but this is getting better. Some days I wake up and just really want to see something instantly recognizably American, like peanut butter and jelly or the word "eggplant", and some days I want be able to talk to someone from home and not have to wait for 7pm to be able to do so. But moving to a new place by yourself is an emotional rollercoaster, let alone a new country or a new continent! I think I am doing very well. I have tentative friends! It's all very exciting.

It's an amazing opportunity to be here, and even more of an amazing opportunity to be working with the man who invented my field in addition to meeting all these other important linguists and literary people across three institutions (Strathclyde, Glasgow University, the University of Edinburgh). I am very, very lucky. There's no second-guessing crossing an ocean to do something and the more I am getting into what I am actually doing the more I am absolutely certain this is was absolutely 100% the right choice for me. I love all the work I am doing, and the people around me are so passionate about their work, so deeply involved that I can't imagine them doing anything else. I've been in contact with all these important linguistics people - the other day I met the woman who headed the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. (No big deal or anything...only one of my life goals achieved! She was so interested in what I had done and what I am doing here.) Glasgow Uni and Strathclyde are already both aggressively courting me for their PhD program next year; I just want to tell them to cool off a little bit!

I can't believe this is my life. I am so, so lucky.

I definitely still feel like I have a giant American flag tattooed on my forehead, but with every day I feel more integrated into Scottish life. Maybe soon I will start talking with a Scottish accent. (Or at least write a blog post about it, as I keep meaning to.) Or maybe that will just have to wait for month two...