British oddities

Some things here are a constant surprise or mystery to me. First of all, the driving on the left thing is just impossible for me to conceptualize. I do not drive here, of course, but even walking or being in the occasional taxi, cars just seem to be coming from every possible direction all the time. I try to carefully look in all the directions and still somehow there is always a car coming at me out of nowhere. Fortunately the drivers are all very considerate or I would have died ten times by now.

Does driving on the left also mean that pedestrians pass each other on the left, on sidewalks? I literally can't tell; there seems to be no clear pattern except that I am usually doing it wrong. On the rare occasions when I pass someone without doing an awkward dance from side to side, I feel a small sense of triumph. Yes! I successfully walked past another human on the sidewalk! I never have a problem with this at home.

The next oddest thing for me is the doors. So many doors! You go into a building through the outer door, then there is an inner door, then a door into the hallway, then a door into the stairs and a door on top of the stairs, then doors dividing different sections of the hallway – doors doors doors. The doors often send mixed design signals (like there is a handle on the front, but you have to push it to go in) so I'm always struggling with them. They often thunk shut behind you, so that wherever you go there are doors thudding in the background. And they all say "Fire Door Keep Closed" with the same blue sticker, so I think about fire a lot. Here are some of the doors leading to my collaborator's office.

Here are the doors in my apartment. This is actually good design, because in a small space you want to be able to separate the smaller spaces, but still.

Same spot with the doors open.

Something that I insist is NOT good design is the release button. Every exterior door everywhere is locked from the inside; to open it, you have to press a button (usually green) by the side of the door.

Why on earth to they do this? What if you needed to get out in a hurry and didn't know the system? My collaborator suggested it's because this is how you have a door be locked from one side only, but we need that in the US too; our system is to have a push handle on the inside that unlocks the door. Is that not better in every way? Also, in order to lock my apartment door with a key, you have to pull the handle upward while you lock it. This is considered normal and I would never have been able to figure this out on my own. Why is this a thing?

These windows are also odd. See how they open just a couple inches only at the top? Okay, very safe, but hardly any airflow.

All bathrooms (in homes/hotels) have this towel warmer rack thing, I guess the idea being that you would turn it on as you head into the shower and then have a warm towel when you get out? This seems like a lot to remember – do people actually do that? Do they leave it on all the time? Also, there are no other towel racks or hooks in the bathroom; how is that right?

 

This kind of shower control, though, is genius, especially living by myself: one side controls the temperature, the other side just turns it off and on. Good idea!

Also, my apartment has a washer but no dryer; people here just hang stuff to dry. This is great ecologically and works really well in my current situation (it's just me and I didn't bring much), but it would be hard to adapt to this in a household of five people who do laundry rarely.

All wall outlets look upside-down to me, and they all have on-off switches built into the outlet.

Finally: Addresses. Where I live, houses have numbers. Here, not so much: there is a street (e.g., Sweetman Place) and a micro-postal code (BS2 0HY - these change every few blocks), and often a name of the building (Crown & Anchor House), and that's it. I thought I might order something from Amazon while I was here and I just couldn't figure out how it would reach me. 

 

Cardiff

Day trip to Cardiff today, which is in Wales, just across the bay from Bristol. Super easy! There's a cheap fast spiffy train that gets you there an hour, leaves every half hour all day. The Bristol train station is a five-minute walk from my apartment and Cardiff is a small city, highly walkable. When we arrived we hit the Cardiff Market for lunch. It's from the 1880s, just a pup in British history terms, charming steampunk vibe.

I made sure to get traditional "Welsh cakes," also called "bakestones," from the famous place in the Cardiff market, and I must say they are delicious. Kind of in between a scone and a pancake. I also got some traditional Welsh cheese, a cheddar kind of situation but creamier, very good.

Bristol also has a bunch of "arcades," nifty little covered pedestrian-only walks lined with independent shops. Very Diagon Alley vibe; we went to a dusty old bookshop.

Next,  Cardiff Castle. Here I am in front. Behind me is the "castle apartments" which are from the 1500s. 

Inside, I was especially impressed by the library. In this older world, studying with philosophers - I just wanted to find a nook and start reading.

The coolest thing was the Norman Keep, which is from 1087. I wanted to storm the keep! But there are a lot of very steep steps up to it, which makes for slow storming. I guess that's the point.

Inside the keep, there's... nothing. It's a "shell keep," an open space protected only by the walls: they would build temporary structures inside the walls. It's not a lot bigger than a basketball court. Shown below with collaborator Jer for scale.

In a separate part of the castle, under the ramparts, long spooky hallways with narrow windows.

View of the castle apartments from the top, along with some modern city features - the castle is right downtown.

Welsh language everywhere, very entertaining to imagine how to pronounce it.

University of Bristol

The University of Bristol is at the top of a big hill and is beautiful. It's also dingy, like most things here -- kind of sooty and run-down.

This is Cotham House, which is the home of the philosophy department.

Inside it really is like a house!

This is the building with our classroom in it (with collaborator Jer heading in the door). Over the door it says "Founded A.D. 1679." It wasn't the University of Bristol then, it was a merchants' guild school.

As in the other building, the inside is a gorgeous creaky old mansion.

This is the beautiful classroom we're teaching in.

 

Bristol living

I have it pretty good here. I'm staying in an apartment of my own (AirBnB) on a cute little street called Sweetman Place. There are two delightful cafés within a couple blocks that serve excellent coffee, good bread, and very possibly the best donuts I've had in my life.

My apartment is nicely furnished. 

Spiffy kitchinette in the living room. Behind those cupboards is a little dishwasher and a little washing machine! No dryer; as in France, you just air-dry your clothes here. It works. I don't need the second bedroom but it's handy for the clothes-drying rack (not pictured).

The oddest thing about the apartment has been the air fresheners - there were NINE of them stinking up the place when I got here. I think there is still one I haven't found because in a certain place in the house, the smell hits me. 

The kitchen had very little in it when I arrived - no leftover staples from earlier guests and very minimal cooking supplies - but the property manager brought me some mixing bowls and other helpful items, and there is easy grocery shopping very near by. All the dairy products are labeled as to whether they are BRITISH.

Every cafe has hearty sandwiches and most of them offer "toasties," which is their term for a grilled-cheese type sandwich, except they usually have more than just cheese. Yesterday I had an excellent cheese-and-leek toastie. Doesn't that just sound so great? A cheese-and-leak toastie.

Bristol

I am in Bristol, UK for three weeks co-teaching a class called "Co-Constructing Spacetime" with a collaborator at the University of Bristol. It's awesome! My collaborator says Bristol is a lot like Seattle, and I get that; the cities are about the same size, on the water, both with a kind of gritty formerly-industrial now-artsy vibe. But you don't see this kind of thing around a corner in Seattle:

I do a lot of walking here and Bristol is a wonderful walking town. The 40-minute walk from my apartment to campus includes many many steps, called The Christmas Steps, lined with cute little shops.

Turns out they have nothing to do with Christmas; it is a corruption of "knifesmith." There is 256 feet (25 stories!) of elevation gain, which is great exercise, and great views like this one.

As if that were not sufficiently picturesque, there was also a Balloon Fiesta yesterday.

Air quality

Seattle is having bad air quality due to wildfires in Eastern Washington - bad enough that we stay inside with all the windows closed. Fortunately, it's not super hot here, so although we miss tennis, we are fine. 

My department chair is an atmospheric chemist, and anytime there is wildfire smoke, he goes into super data collection mode. He wanted to measure conditions at a variety of locations and asked if our family would help out. It was super cool! He gave us a handheld particle counter.

Each run is one minute: it sucks in air through the silver tube on top, measures the size of particles in the air with laser scattering, and delivers a count of different-size particles, ranging from over 10 microns to less than 0.3 microns. We learned that 10-micron particles are stopped in the nose, 2.5-micron particles are stopped in the throat, and 0.3-micron particles go all the way into the alveoli in the lungs, making them the most impactful to people's health. We were asked to do a series of five one-minute runs indoors, and another series of five one-minute runs outdoors, to help answer the question of how much difference it actually makes to stay inside. Here's Aaron doing the outdoor run.

This is our data sheet. Fascinating! Obviously indoors is way better.

When we delivered this data to the scientists, they were impressed at how clean our indoor air is and asked if we had been running a filter. We have! It's fun to know it makes a difference.

Pandemic camping

We have had quite a few camping trips this summer. In normal years these can be hard to fit in because the kids have so many obligations, but not this year! There are some risks involved for sure, especially the public bathrooms. We wear masks and don't linger. 

Our first trip was to Lake Quinault, just the four of us. The campground was COVID-ready, alternating full with empty campsites.

The most memorable part of that trip, though, was the rain. We were there from Friday to Sunday; it started raining late Friday night and rained continually through Sunday morning. (To be fair, it is the rainforest.) Jordan and Dale built an elaborate tarp shelter, and we spent almost all of Saturday just hanging out in that tiny little outdoor living room, playing cards and eating and reading books. Limited as it was, it was at least different from being at home! We did find a dry hour or two for a walk in the beautiful woods, returning covered with mud. And here we are at some non-raining hour, apparently burning some wet wood.

The other trips we went on have been with friends. We went back to La Wis Wis with much the same crowd and had a very pleasant time. We had to have a zoom meeting in advance to discuss the protocols: no sharing food, masked most of the time, no communal tent for the kids (the kids were all at one campsite but only siblings shared tent space). It works. We've also been back to Middle Fork, one of our favorite spots, but have not been able to camp there: apparently bears have moved in. 

We camped again with friends at a place near Middlle Fork, Tinkham campground, which has a surprising view of I-90 but was better than nothing. Here's a socially distanced group photo from Tinkham... we did a panorama, and did some fancy footwork to get everyone in. See how Aaron is on both sides? 

The only water at Tinkham was from this astonishing hand pump.

We also find time for the occasional day trip. Here we are at Deception Pass early in the summer; we drove up, hiked for an hour or so, had a picnic lunch, and left just as things started to get crowded.

Jordan and Dale have also been on two camping trips without Aaron and me, arranged especially for (and by) the 16-year-olds and their dads. That's fine... Aaron and I are content to stay home and eat sushi.