THUNDERBALL AND GREENWICH PARROTS

[NOW UPDATED WITH PHOTOS!!] I did what I consider the healthy thing and spent Thanksgiving weekend with friends and not on the computer or behind a camera (okay a little bit behind the camera). I'll spare you the normal list of things I'm thankful for (though I'll acknowledge that I'm extremely lucky in my life and grateful for the people in it), and give you some of the smaller things that come to mind just based on this past weekend.

*SEEING MY FIRST JAMES BOND FILM. I know, it's crazy that I've never seen one. Oci told everyone in the Greenwich video store and they all expressed the required amounts of shock and amazement and encouragement on my endeaver, even though most agreed I should start with Dr. No, which the store didn't have. At first, we looked for Bond films and didn't see any. We asked the dude (yep, he was definitely a "dude" and I said he was cute and Oci told me after we left that he used to have a crush on her, but was too young for her at the time) and he reached under the counter and pulled out about 10 VHS Bond movies and displayed them on the counter. This store had a really great collection of all the cool movies and required classics displayed normally on the shelves--why they keep the Bond stashed away like the good drugs you have to be in the know to ask for is beyond me. But, I'll still say that Thunderball was exactly as ludicrous and fun as I had hoped. And Sean Connery was once young.

*WALKING THROUGH GREENWICH PARK ON AN AUTUMN DAY. I've done this a few times recently. It's beautiful, and has an amazing view across the Thames. Last time I visited, Oci and I saw a flock(?) of green parrots.

*COOKING AND EATING WITH FRIENDS.

Figuring out how to make pie crust with Oci. Jason and Oci sitting at the kitchen table chopping mushrooms, leeks, and garlic for the stuffing. Late night discovery of Cats' second lasagna in the oven from the party earlier that day and digging in with forks before going off to bed. (yes, Cats is a person's name) Possibly the last dinner with Mari and Ben for a very very long time. (I've managed to plant the seed of an idea to visit Seattle within the next couple of years.)

*SHOPPING FOR THANKSGIVING IN LONDON'S BOROUGH MARKET.

Jason and I spent Friday afternoon in the market, tasting things, enjoying the sites (piles of wild mushrooms and fragrant herbs, mountains of cheese wheels, little walls made of bakery loaves), and buying vegetables for Thanksgiving, which was held on Sunday.

*SPENDING TIME WITH LAZY TABBY CATS. Jason is usually highly allergic to cats, and we've resigned ourselves to not having any, but we both stop to admire cats on walls when we go for walks, and are sad to have to avoid them. This weekend, miraculously, the cats at Oci's house didn't cause hardly any symptoms, and so we sat up late one night just petting a cat and getting our fill of that purring and kneading thing and the narrowed eyes of a comfy cat.

*TRAINS AND TUBES. Reliable and affordable public transportation rocks. One of my favourite things about living here this past year is how great it is to hop on trains to get most places. Granted, there are some higher-end foodie areas of Wales that seem specifically designed to keep the riff-raff without cars from entering, but other than that, the trains have served us well in the UK and abroad. It's such a logical and comfortable way to travel. London, in particular, is so easy to navigate.

*THE LONDON EYE.

Before we left London, in case we don't make it back together in the few short weeks we have left, Jason suggested we take the highly touristy step of riding the London Eye. After much hemming and hawing and visions of being still on the top of this extremely slow-moving thing while our train to Cardiff left without us, we decided to do it. It's the big ferris wheel thing you see in pictures and it really is humongous. We went at night, and the city lights go on to every horizon. And Westminster and Big Ben are incredibly beautiful.

*INTERNATIONAL INFORMATION SHARING. Cats had a party on Saturday, where I met several of her friends and had a great talk with Phillipo, who does AIDS nutrition work in Nairobi and used to teach fruit farmers in the Amazon how to preserve their produce into jams and jellies for sales to cities. He told me about a project in a Brazilian city (town?) that works to provide all the food for its people by supporting farming in its surrounding green belt. He's enthusiastic and entertaining and excellent.

A pretty varied and random list, I grant you, but varied and random is part of what has been great about moving to a new place and taking what comes. I wouldn't trade it.

TAKIN' A BATH DAY

Bridge in Bath, April 2006

When I was living in Seattle and working only half time, I had Fridays off. Normal people had to work, and I felt like every Friday was a sneaky sick day, and I treated it like one. I called them "Ballard Days." I would go to Ballard and just hang out all day, sitting in the cushy leather chairs in the wine shop with a book, window shopping at the hipster art shops and boutiques, or playing on my computer in coffee shops. Sometimes I'd meet someone for ice cream, or go for a walk by the waterfront, or take photos. Those days are what I think of when cheesy magazines remind me to "take some personal time" or "give yourself a treat now and then." Which of course I'm already doing if I'm reading a cheesy magazine--that's another thing I did on Ballard days. I'd buy some green-living, permaculture or home design magazine and curl up with it all morning, or take it to the coffeeshop with the sunroom in Fremont. So anyway, pretty perfect days and at the time, guilt-free, because I was able to live on the half-time job and and no real reason to need more than that. And I was still doing lots of theater at night, so I felt like I was keeping busy and productive overall.

This school year has been a little like that. I had to go to classes, work in the bistro, and do all my coursework, which involved piles and piles of reading. But most of my time was mine to organize as I pleased. So if I needed to take a walk to clear my head, I could. If I decided to sacrifice a full day to wander in the yuppie waterfront suburb, I could. I just had to get my work done in the allotted time.

Now, my school life is over, and my flexible self-driven research project will soon be done, too. Soon I'll be back in the real world, hopefully with a full-time job. And most likely my time will be scheduled for me. No more flex-time. So I'm trying to enjoy it.

Today, I went to Bath with a colleague of mine to conduct an interview with someone doing sustainable food supply chains work with an NGO. It was great--we got some names and anecdotes to lead us to the next stages of our study and learned some of his ideas for solutions to complicated problems. Also, we had lunch at the all organic, local, seasonal restaurant we had tried to go to when Corey was here and couldn't get a table. (yep, it's been on my mind since April--I walked straight to it without a map.)

Then my colleague left, and I spent the rest of the afternoon having a "Ballard Day." It was rainy and cold, but when isn't it here? Bath has beautiful buildings, all made of the yellowish smooth "Bath stone." I wandered through charming but fairly standard boutique shopping areas and trolled the used book stores for something to read on the train ride back to Cardiff. I lingered in the tiny one-room "Book Exchange" and talked to the eighty-something year old man about Thomas Hardy and Raymond Chandler. I wandered by the riverside and the cathedral and touched the sweaters in the fancy fashion shop. I had some coffee and checked my e-mail in an internet shop by the train station, and then I dozed on the train ride home.

Oh yeah, and I almost got run over by a bus. Early in the day, before the interview. It's hard to explain how it happened if you haven't seen their assinine system for street crossing here. Suffice it to say that from my side of the road, I was looking at a walk sign and walking toward it when a man on the corner yelled at me. I stopped and turned to him, thinking he was joking or mocking me or just being random (I couldn't hear what he said). I think I heard a horn and I turned back and there was a bus two feet in front of me. It had taken a left turn and probably was going very slowly anyway, but still, it seemed to me, and apparently to others around, to have been a close call. I wish I could describe the man who then came bounding over to introduce himself as my "black knight in shining armour." All I can say is that he was black and friendly and dressed kind of brightly. The fact is I can't remember well enough to make it a compelling story element. I'm sort of assuming he had a Caribbean accent, but I can't remember. Anyway, he came over, shook my hand vigorously, and gave me a hug. And I have to say I needed one, and was grateful for it.

WHAT I'M THINKING ABOUT MOST DAYS LATELY

I'm still in the university town and nearly all of my classmates have left for the real world, so there's not much going on to talk about. I'm doing interviews and research work these days. And not much else. Which is really cool, but writing about it now becomes blogging about work, and that's not so professional and may come back at me some day. I think actually that the content of my interviews is part of a funded research project and not even officially publishable until the project publishes larger reports. But even if it's not so, it's still specialized information that should be published for real at some point, and not on my blog.

But some of it's general procedural and policy, and within that, some of it may be worth reading about even if you're not obsessed with the details of public procurement and school, prison and hospital catering.

So, today's lesson: Creatively procuring food in the face of restrictive regulations.

I find the convoluted regulations around catering and vendor contracts pretty interesting, since mostly it involves creatively working around trade restrictions in order to be able to buy fresh, seasonally grown food that didn't fly in from Greece. There's a built-in contradition in UK policy (and that of most EU countries) in that there is an EU and UK mandate to include sustainability and environmental considerations in all government policy and legislation, but also a mandate to open all public contract tenders without trade restrictions to local or home-national contractors. This means that you cannot specify local food from local suppliers, but must allow vendors from any EU country or anywhere in your own country a fair and equal chance. So you cannot directly choose to reduce food miles and carbon emissions, or to protect agricultural jobs in your region.

So the way to reach those goals, if you wish to, is to specify things like frequent deliveries and how soon after bread is baked must it be fed to your pupils. You can also design menus to be based on foods grown seasonally in your area. So you specify in your tender criteria that food is fresh, not frozen, deliveries are flexible and/or within certain time of baking or whatever, seasonal varieties are to be used, quick response capability for extra deliveries, etc. Things that will tend to favor local suppliers, because they'll have closer access and more flexiblity and cheaper access to food that is seasonal in the area. Once a supplier has won the contract, then catering managers and buyers can work more directly, asking for what apples are cheap, in season, overstocked, etc. There's no law against it at that point.

As you might guess, this process is not one that can be built into law, though policy guidance can encourage it. Generally, it requires an activist catering or procurement official willing to put in the time, learn about the local supply chains and vendors, and reach out to potential suppliers so they know how to bid on the contracts. It's not straightforward, and it's time-consuming. It would always be easier to contract with a large catering company who'll get you the required basic nutrition at the cheapest price. (And you'd save money on labour, too--fresh food takes more time and skill than tossing chicken nuggets in the oven) And therein lies the challenge to making sustainability a part of general practice in public catering. Somehow it's got to become either so popular (and pushed for by parents) that catering officers want to do it, or built into training and job requirements such that they have no choice. Our research is based on the idea that best practice needs to be identified and disseminated to interested officers so they don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Please visit again for tomorrow's procurement dilemma: Mums pushing burgers through school railings so their kids won't be forced to eat healthy food!

BAYONNE

And now for something nearly the same, but not.... A Walk in Bayonne!

During our trip to France recently, I took piles of photos. I'm slowly going through them bit by bit. These aren't even my favorites, so keep watching this space for when I get around to those. Today you get Bayonne.

Bayonne is known for chocolate, so we headed first to the chocolaterie. We bought some chocolate, but also one of these gateaux basque, a basque specialty we saw throughout the region. They come with either cream filling or cherry filling. I prefer cream, and I have a recipe (in French) that I'll have to try over Christmas.

Soon after eating a piece, I got a headache. Not sure if there was corn something in the cake (the shopkeepers had assured us there wasn't) or if it was the perfume on the bus ride there. Anyway, the town was still pretty and we kept on walking.

Shopping seems to be a major point of going to Bayonne. We refrained, except for the chocolates, and contented ourselves with staring at buildings.

For me, the beauty of Bayonne was all in the details, like these windows with colored curtains and the little cozy balcony below:

Many of the buildings have this cool colorful style:

Along the river front was especially beautiful:

I saw this scooter. It wanted me to bring it home with me, but I told it I had another little scooter waiting for me in Seattle, which missed me very much, and would be sad if I brought another one home.

We also went to the excellent Basque history museum, but I have no photos of that to show you. Sorry 'bout that. It was too dark to get any good ones. Besides, the best thing was the film from the 1920s or so, showing the Basque shepherds and their cool espadrilles and berets and their sad young men heading off to America to make their fortunes. There were also some pretty great farm tools which I intend to copy when I'm old and grey and living on a farm with lots of time on my hands.

After this trip, I definitely want to be Basque when I grow up.

AND ON A SUNDAY...

We went for another walk. I know you were imagining our exciting British lives as something more adventurous, but most days we walk around--not so different from our free days in Seattle. Only here, we pass this castle on our way through the park:

And on to the farmers market across from the stadium, to get a chicken, eggs, goat cheese and some apples, and some glorious blackberry wine. Oh yeah, and to chow down at our favorite (and only) indian curry cart:

A not so photogenic day, this, or maybe I just wasn't in the mood to take photos. We went back by the tower side of the castle, and through the high street (what they call the main shopping street here in the UK) where we saw the ever-present drummer dude with dreadlocks and no rhythm.

Just one more stop--at the middle eastern deli/shop to get a lemon to roast with the chicken. And there we saw rows and rows and rows of pickled things. I never knew so many things could be pickled!

Finally, our bags full of goodies, we walked home via City Road, where all the shops are shut tight because it's a Sunday. Not as pretty as Saturday's walk, but certainly more productive.

A WALK IN CARDIFF

I bet you were sitting around wondering what it was that Appalachia and Jason were doing last Saturday. Well, we were going to go to Tintern Abbey, but it was freezing and we were both trying to recover from colds, so we walked around Cardiff instead. You can come with us through the magic of photography!

First we walked down the alley, noticing the moss on the walls



To the Bakery in the alley







Then we walked through an underpass



and on to the park, where we saw strange and beautiful purple berries and a lemon tree, growing fruit outside in the Welsh climate.



We'd never bothered to go into the park's conservatory, but always meant to, so we decided to go in there.



It had a big central pond with carp and turtles, and a teenage duckling of some unusual variety in a nest on the ledge above.

From there, we walked home. These are some of the random things we saw:

TEA CEREMONY

Recycled Cardiff Market shot from August 2005

In general, living in Britain for a year has not converted me from coffee to tea. But there is one thing about tea drinking that I hope to continue to have in my life. It took me nearly a year to realize how it works and what’s great about it, because I have made few friends here who I see in their homes. The main exception to that are my friends Phil and Oci. Phil is really the one I credit with teaching me about tea. Whenever he would come over casually to hang out, drop something off or whatever, we would do the greeting thing and then he would pause for a bit and then give in and ask me if he could have a cup of tea. (Not always, but I definitely remember it happening.) I still didn’t quite get that it’s what needs to happen whenever someone enters my home. Though I did note a trip where I went to pick up something from their house and Oci was out of town, so it was me going over and Phil inviting me in for a cup of tea. I accepted and we sat down for a tea-length chat. It was the first time I’d ever talked to Phil alone, as it usually works out that he’s over to hang out with Jason or that we’re all doing something as a foursome. It was quite cozy and felt like friendship.

More recently, I went to visit Oci and her friends and family for a campout weekend at her family’s field. Most drank tea, though some were happy to see that I’d brought my little camp coffee maker. There was no ritual. But on our way out, when we went to her step-grandmother’s house to drop off some things we had borrowed, she invited us in to tea. We accepted, and had a very pleasant tea-length talk. Tea-length talks are satisfying (unlike tea-length Gunne Sax dresses from the 80s). It’s enough time to pass along some interesting facts and opinions, to compare newspaper preferences and slightly revealing bits of family history. Later, when we got to Oci’s shared house, her roommate was there cooking dinner and immediately offered us tea, warming and welcoming and nice. The next day, Oci and I got up and had tea in our pajamas before breakfast.. And then later, when we were wandering around Greenwich looking at the Prime Meridian and the Cutty Sark we stopped by her mom’s house to say hi, were offered a cup of tea, accepted, and had a nice perfect-length conversation about the house, childhood, how the times they are a-changin’ etc. Then we helped move a dresser downstairs and were on our way.

It was that weekend that finally, after more than a year in the UK, really settled in my mind what tea is good for. The time it takes to make and drink a cup of tea is the perfect length of time for small, but meaningful conversations with new acquaintances, lingering musings with close friends, and cozy breaks in otherwise hectic days. It’s a small commitment with a definite end, and means that neither party need feel that they’re being kept from whatever important things they might be doing that day. Even stopping by unannounced is not a problem if a cup of tea is an easy timekeeper. Obviously, one or the other could then suggest a walk, or another cup of tea, or whatever other extension device is appropriate, and if it sounds nice, which it often does, things can continue from there. But having given, or accepted, tea is always an acceptable total interaction, so either party can then extricate themselves gracefully with social comfort and warmth still intact. It seems perfect to me. I think I’ll bring the ritual home with me to the States. But I think it works for coffee too, so don’t be afraid I’m going to try to get you to drink milky white Earl Grey when you ring my doorbell. But I do recommend you give it a try.

CARGO HOLD

Biarritz Beach, September 2006

For those of you not in Seattle, but instead somewhere on the East Coast, know that we had a plan that would involve a winding trip down the coast before coming to Seattle. In an attempt to reduce our carbon emissions footprint, we had decided to take a freighter home. As in a big barge. Across the Atlantic Ocean. We had researched it and it costs more than a plane, but feeds you for the ten day journey, and is about as much as business class plane fare. We would go from Liverpool to Philadelphia and then take trains to visit folks and then take a train across the US to Seattle. (This bit was still unresearched and may have turned out to be financially infeasible anyway) Then we could have written articles about it for green hippie journals looking for clever ways to beat the guilt and paid for it all out of our new career as eco-travel writers.

Unfortunately, in the kind of luck we've had in delay after delay and general uncertainty this autumn, we found out that I would not be staying here for a long-term job on THE DAY AFTER we could have booked passage on the last freighter heading east before winter.

So, not only will we not be lounging around reading books and playing fiddle in the middle of the ocean, but we will also not be able to visit East Coasters on the way home. I must admit that I hadn't really thought about how cold and miserable it might be in the middle of the ocean in November/December, and it may all be for the best that we couldn't do it now. We're also likely to be a bit unsettled and anxious during that in-between homes time, so you'd probably rather see us later anyway.