US vs UK - Spectator Sports

Just thought you might find this article a fun example of cultural differences between the US and the UK/Europe. How fans like to watch their fave sports- baseball (US) and football (soccer - UK/Europe).

Wall Street Journal Europe

The Cotswolds

Yesterday I enjoyed a girls day out with a trip into the English Cotswolds. Since it's a long holiday weekend, Bettina and I talked about a girls day out in her car. We invited Gina too, since she is leaving the UK soon and still has lots to see before she goes. It wasn't exactly warm and super sunny, but it wasn't cold and rainy either. In fact, the sun did peak out throughout the day and we kept on the move to keep warm.


The Cotswolds is an area not far from Oxford, where it's a large cluster of towns and small villages with a certain type of architecture and stone used for their homes. I believe it's a type of sandstone that they call Cotswold stone and makes this beautiful honey color. Many of the homes also still have the traditional thatched roofs. This time of year especially is beautiful in the villages with all of the blossoms, lilacs, wisteria, tulips etc.

We started off with a stop in the town called Morton-in-Marsh and had a little stroll. We had coffee and breakfast at one of the Tea Rooms and luckily they had a table in the back garden in the sun. Lovely!

Next was the most picturesque town in the Cotswolds - Chipping Campden. Chipping means "Market" in Old English. So there are other "Chipping" towns in England - Chipping Norton for example. Here we walked along the gorgeous buildings, around the church yard, the Old Market Stall, into some shops and then another Tea Room/Eatery for lunch. Since it was Sunday, the proper English thing to do is have Sunday Roast. Usually it's served between 12-3 in the pubs. I ordered the beef roast and Gina the lamb. It includes a nice slab of your choice of meat, roasted potatoes, yorkshire pudding (which is a savory fried bread), gravy, roasted parsnips (yum!) and steamed (or roasted) veggies. I thought there was no way I would eat it all, and of course I did! In more than two years living here - I've never had Sunday roast since the hubby isn't too fond of that!

Our last stop was Bourton-on-the-Water, which I've been to before. It's very small, but very quaint and cute. There is a large square, where a large creek runs through the middle and little bridges cross over from each side. We also visited the model village of the village, which was pretty funny. Gina got some shopping in for gifts before she leaves and I considered some Cotswold cream ice cream, but was still too full!

We drove home on some back roads, where you can really get a sense of the English countryside. It's absolutely beautiful - especially right now with all of the green grass, little lambs and yellow rapeseed growing everywhere. This is when I miss having a car, so you can get out in the open space and drive around. I was living in Iowa and Oregon for goodness sake with all of that gorgeous and spacious farmland and greenery!

I also realized that in England, one must be well off to be able to live in the country. You would need a car, and to own that much land and a stand alone home, it costs a lot of money. And I couldn't imagine the heating and maintenance bills on those gorgeous, but really old and cold stone homes!

Easter in Oxford

Yes, Easter was almost a month ago now, but as I'm catching up, just thought I'd post a quick mention on how we celebrated Easter this year. The past two years, we've gone to Brian's advisor's home and had a nice lamb roast with his family. As things were really crazy busy for them this year, we stayed home and invited our friend and Brian's colleague Gina over for a meal. I've mentioned Gina before, she's one of the few women in the physics group over here, and she's American. Gina came over to Oxford about the same time we did. So it's been a pleasure getting to know her and hanging out. She's actually landed an associate professor job at the University of Delaware for this autumn. So she's leaving Oxford at the end of this month. We will be sad to see her go!

But back to Easter - Gina invited me to join her for the Easter church service, at the local church she attends in Oxford. I've actually only been to services at the big Christ Church - so it was really nice to attend a smaller local church. By no means is it any more modern, all the churches here are extremely old and traditional. But I did notice that the parishioners didn't really dress up for the service, as I expected them to. Looks like they are following the similar American church clothing style these days - pretty casual! It's a protestant church with a really nice service with the pastor in his thick British accent. This church also burns incense where someone carries the metal ball around the church throughout the service. They also inducted a new choir member, a young girl, which was really cute. We enjoyed coffee afterwards and Gina introduced me to her many friends she's made there.

In the meantime, Brian was home working hard on our turkey dinner! I say that with emphasis because as you know we don't get to cook a whole turkey very often. Frozen full turkeys are hard to come by. Somehow, I had found out from a supermarket that was closing and it was really cheap for over here (probably around 14 USD). Gina came over, we showed her our Singapore pics, had a relaxing afternoon and then a nice turkey meal. We took a stroll around the neighborhood afterwards and once Gina went home, I think we all slept well after that tryptophan!

Early May Bank Holiday

It gets harder and harder to try and blog on a regular basis! But we've done some fun things again in the last few weeks, so I'll try to catch up a bit today. We don't have work today, since it's a public holiday called Early May Bank Holiday. It doesn't really have anything to do with the banks, it's just what they English call a public holiday. We still have another one at the end of May, Late May Bank Holiday. It's the same day as Memorial Day in the US.

Back from Singapore!

I had hoped I could have blogged from Singapore, but didn't have easy email access (and wasn't trying too hard either). So now I'll blog an overview of our trip since I've returned to Oxford. Brian is still in Singapore and is flying home to me on Sunday. He's getting a lot of work done now that I'm home! We've had a fantastic time and are really impressed with the city.


Our place was okay. We stayed in a visitor's guest room on the NUS campus. It was clean, but pretty plain and on the ground floor (which I wasn't so keen on). I would say my biggest complaint was the breakfast - it was a bit sketchy (asian noodles for breakfast?) but you can't go wrong with toast and coffee. And I do have a new fave - they call it kaya. It's a spread or jam with a light green color but it's made of eggs, coconut and sugar. They eat it on toast and call it Kaya Toast. I happen to like it best on French Toast!

The NUS campus was huge, so Brian takes the free internal bus to the Science building where his new office is located. He's in the Center for Quantum Technologies and shares an office with another Oxford researcher named Stephen. Stephen is a theorist, while Brian is an experimentalist. Stephen also is getting the same type of funding as Brian. Since this is a new collaboration for both Universities, Brian and Stephen are the guinea pigs, and so spent a lot of time last week getting paperwork figured out and bank accounts, etc. I went with them to get visas and green cards. So we now have visas and green cards for Singapore! Brian also has a Singapore bank account and will be paid in Singapore dollars. Good thing their economy is actually pretty strong compared to the rest of the world right now. They have been affected somewhat, but not at all as bad as the US, UK or European economies.


I think the overall impressions we had of Singapore are extremely favorable. First off, the weather is hot and humid. Which I LOVED for a change! The temperature was between 80-90 degrees, with 100% humidity. I lived in tank tops and skirts. I think there was 10 minutes during the whole trip where I put on a cardigan. You definitely have to get used to sweating a lot. I guess it's common that the locals shower two times a day.

The cleanliness of the city is also unbelievable. Obviously the fact that there are steep fines for making a mess makes a difference. It's neat to see how the residents respect keeping the city clean and recognizes that it's for everyone's benefit. I thought maybe it would feel like the government had a strong hand on everyone about this, but it didn't feel that way at all, and that it's just a normal day-to-day part of their society. There are fines for littering, chewing gum is illegal, and it's true that you can get in trouble for not flushing a public toilet!

Speaking of toilets, not to get gross, but I decided that one area where you can really get a sense of different cultures is in their bathroom habits. In Singapore, and I'm guessing in Asia, that it's common for people to go to the bathroom by squatting. In all the women's bathrooms, they would look just like Western bathrooms (stalls with normal toilets) but at the end there would be a stall with just a large porcelain hole in the ground, and grips on the ground where you put your feet. It's so you just squat over the hole to go both number 1 or number 2. Yikes! I also noticed that even on the normal Western toilets in the girls bathroom, the lids would both be up (like how guys leave the lid up). It's again cause sometimes the girls just squat over the toilet bowl and it's easier if both lids were up. The funniest of it all to me though are the bathroom signs they have to tell the public how to use or not to use the toilets. The one that describes how you shouldn't stand on the western toilet and then squat down on it it hilarious. Good lord!!



We thought we might feel out of place, but Singapore is such a international city state. People from all over the world work, live and visit Singapore. I realized that I couldn't assume any asian person I saw was a local. They could either be expats like us or tourists. Lots of Westerners are expats there and work in the city. Of course, the majority of the population are Singaporeans, who are mostly Chinese and from Southest Asia (like Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, etc). Of course, there is a high influence from India and the Middle East as well. This is especially apparent in the ethnic districts in the city: Chinatown, Little India and the Arab Quarter. We walked around each of these areas and tried to have meals in them as well. We probably spent most of our time in Chinatown as it was the largest ethnic area and had a great market.


Speaking of food, Singapore has amazing asian cuisine and it's really inexpensive. Of course we could go find expensive restaurants if we wanted, but it was so easy to find cheap yet really good and filling food. The local thing to do is get a meal at a Hawker Center. They are definitely a bit sketchy looking at first and are reminiscent of food stalls at the fair. But as it's Singapore, they have high hygienic laws and so you can definitely count on the food being safe - and amazing! We ate lots of seafood, local asian fare, middle eastern and india.

I would say the highlight of my trip was last weekend. We had been busy with getting things set up, spending time with Stephen and Brian's graduate student Hendrik who also was visiting, that we decided a relaxing weekend just for the two of us was needed. We had heard that an hour away by ferry was Palau Bintan (Bintan island) in Indonesia. We found ourselves a beach resort and bellied up! We had to pay 10 american dollars (funny they requested USD) to get 7-day visas to visit Indonesia. It was incredible!


I had been hoping we could have gone to Bali while we were there -but the locals told us Bintan is even better as it hasn't been taken over by all the tourism yet. And that is definitely the truth. The first thing we saw on the bus on the way to the beach resort were some wild monkeys hanging out on the road! Instead of like wild deer on the road in Minnesota, it was a bunch of wild monkeys just hanging out! At the beach resort, the other wild animals we saw around were some kimono like dragon lizards, amazing birds I've never heard of, and more monkeys in the trees!


The beach resort was wonderful - our room was pretty simple but nice, and it didn't really matter since we spent every waking moment on the beach (or drinking at the bar next to the beach). The bathroom (ha, again) was funny as the toilet, sink and shower are all in the same bathroom - as in, there is no separate shower stall. The water from the shower just sprays all over the toilet and sink! It all dries just fine. . . :)

The food again was incredible and amazing prices. Friday night we ate dinner at a Thai restaurant on the deck by candlelight overlooking the beach. Saturday for lunch I had Indonesian fried rice and beef satay (grilled meat on a skewer with spicy peanut sauce). Saturday night we went to an Indian restaurant and they were having an outdoor beach BBQ. So we sat again practically on the beach and stuffed ourselves silly with local indian-asian-indonesian fused fare. Fantastic!

To wrap this up, I flew back on Monday. We were flying on Emirates Airlines, the best airline I've even flown on. Talk about amazing customer service - even in coach. Puts all US airlines to shame (especially Northwest). We had a stopover in Dubai, which was cool to say we were there. Took at 23 hours total from Singapore to our flat in Oxford. But was able to go straight to bed when I made it home - so there wasn't really any jet lag.

Now I'm just enjoying my tan before it disappears in 3 day. :)

Going to Singapore!

Finally getting really excited about the trip to Singapore. Haven't thought about it much until now, since wasn't sure if we'd be really going - pending the visas approvals. But now that they are (what a relief!) we are going to Singapore!

So now a geography lesson:

Singapore is one of the only few city/states in the world. It's located in Southeast Asia, on the Malaysian peninsula and literally on the equator. See map here. So the weather is sunny, hot and really humid! Sounds fab to me, although I'll probably pass out from heat stroke since it's been awhile since we've been in weather like that. Singapore is a former British crown colony but has been independent since the mid 1950s. Therefor there is a lot of British influence and why English is spoken there.

It's a very westernized society in Asia, so we've been told it's a great place to go for a first experience in Asia. The locals are made up of people from China, Malaysia and India. But lots of expats have also moved there for good job opportunities. So English is spoken quite easily there, as well as Mandarin Chinese and Malay.

We've also heard the food is fantastic - Chinese, Thai and India abounds - which we love all of it.

To explain why we are going there:

Brian's funding from the Royal Society has ended as it was a two-year contract only. As the research Brian has been doing at Oxford is going well and he'd like to continue with it (so he can write more papers to publish) he's taken up funding provided by the National University of Singapore. There is a reciprocal agreement between the NUS and Oxford to have a researcher do the work at Oxford, but also so Singapore can have their name on the publications. Brian will need to visit Singapore probably 2-3 times in the year for collaboration work, but we will continue to be based in Oxford. Next week I'm going along for a number of reasons: both of our plane tickets will be paid for, we receive more money initially if Brian's dependent (his wife) travels with and, hey, it's Singapore!! How cool!

We are leaving together next Saturday 21st, and I'm returning on March 31st. Brian is staying on until about April 4th. The University is putting us up, so we're not quite sure what our level of accommodations will be, so I'm not expecting much. But it will be extremely clean I know, as that is a huge thing in Singapore also. We've all heard the stories, you can be jailed or caned for spitting gum on the ground! They have extremely harsh laws for cleanliness so we just have to be careful to follow the rules. (We read that it's illegal if you don't flush the toilet! Yikes!)

I'll definitely blog and post photos post trip and possibly during if I have access. Cheers!

Birthday weekend

Hi all,

It's my birthday today and I'm celebrating by not doing a whole lot except enjoying a chill weekend like usual. We did pop to the pub (as you'd expect) and my hubby's in charge in the kitchen, so all is well! The sun has been shining for the day which is great to see, and all the daffodils are popping up everywhere. The main focus is our trip to Singapore next week - so packing is top of mind (although I hate packing and always leave til last minute.) But have been doing laundry and ironing to prep and realizing that my summer clothes are pretty limited and borderline out of fashion! Guess will have to do some shopping when in Singapore!

Thanks for the Bday messages and I'm going to blog more about Singapore next!