16 September 2007
The Weekly Dispatch No. 1:In Which We Arrive At Our Destination
And Begin To Learn The Customs

Greetings from England, which is a small island nation off the coast of France. The natives here speak a language not unlike our own, though there are oddities in spelling— a sense of humour, for example—and pronunciation—“Please get oaf my foot, you bleeding toad.”—but we are certain we can remediate them some before we leave in December. If nothing else, we will teach them that it’s not funny to make fun of Americans who wear their pants on the outside (pants, apparently, is their term for underwear, making “sweatpants” particularly humourous).

Our trip began on Saturday, September 8, when our friend, Lisa March, dropped us off at O’Hare, and we dragged our steamer-trunk-sized bags up to the British Air counter where we were told that we had been upgraded to World Traveler Plus status, which meant that we would have more legroom and would be given toothbrushes and socks. We were also promised toothpaste, but that was not included, which was something of a disappointment.

At any rate, we arrived at London’s Heathrow Airport early on Sunday, September 9, and “queued up” to have our passports and other papers validated. Let it be said that people who travel for many hours from all over the world should not be made to stand for 45-60 minutes in close proximity to other people who have also traveled for many hours. Once that process was completed and we had collected our four bloated suitcases, we met John from Chestfield Cars, who drove us to Canterbury through lovely, hilly countryside, terrain John told us would soon change.

“Kent is a very flat county,” he informed us, which, as we learned later in the week, was either a lie, an example of dry British humour, or a misunderstanding of the word “flat.”

After a quick stop at Canterbury Christ Church University’s International Studies office, where we were given a bag of groceries and the key to our new home, John dropped us off at 25 Monastery Street to get settled. We were both pleasantly surprised by the spaciousness of the house—small, of course, by American suburban standards, but more than adequate—and quickly unpacked so that we could start exploring the city. The house is located directly across the street from King’s School, an exclusive, expensive high school, and from the university entrance. Our view from the back of the house (Photo 2 below) is quite spectacular, even though there’s a rather large building of some sort in the way.  Oh...it's a cathedral.

We went out for a bit of wandering and found out quickly that Canterbury is a hugely popular daytrip destination for visitors from England and France and, judging from the languages we heard, other, farther reaches of Europe. High Street, which is the centre of the city and of the tourist trade, was bustling with visitors, which allowed us to blend in and get acclimated without feeling as if we were so clearly “not-from-around-here” that we would be preyed upon by pickpockets, panhandlers or telemarketers. When we returned unscathed to our house, we met Brett Smithson, our counterpart from Crowder College in Missouri (he, like us, is serving as “not-really-a-chaperone” to a group of community college students) and made plans to meet him later for dinner at Azouma, an Arabic-Mediterranean restaurant around the corner, which turned out to be a great place to eat. We stayed awake as long as we could that evening to help diminish jet lag and finally collapsed around 10 p.m..

As we—and the rest of the Americans—have become accustomed to saying, things are “different” here in ways that have taken a bit of getting used to. On Monday, a couple of those things became very apparent. When we met with our students for the first time since an orientation session in Bloomington-Normal, IL, in August, we became aware of our collective reliance on cell phones and the internet, neither of which was something any of us had access to, resulting in a bit of concern—even panic—on the part of students who wanted to contact their parents to let them know they had arrived safely. The students are staying in private homes in Canterbury, so a couple of them with calling cards were able to use a landline, but the majority were in limbo. Because it takes a while for things to be done here—thus the descriptive term, “different” rather than something judgmental—most of our students were out of touch until Tuesday unless they, as we did, found their way to the Two Sawyers, a pub just two minutes from our front door where wireless internet service is free and the staff both friendly and accommodating. By the time we had logged on for the first time, we had emails from worried parents who needed a bit of reassurance that their children were, indeed, in Canterbury and thriving.

On Monday, when the orientation sessions began, the students were reassured that on Tuesday they would be told how to get mobile phones and would be issued their student ID cards, which would allow them to use university computers and campus wi fi hot spots. On Tuesday, they were told to go to the City Centre to buy their phones (why they weren’t told that on Monday was, we decided, “different”) and that their ID cards were not yet processed. Luckily, our students arrived a week before the English “Freshers,” as their first-year students are called, so when they went into town to buy phones, they were all able to purchase them reasonably. Unfortunately for the Freshers, the Americans—there are 50 students here from Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Arkansas and New York—cleaned out the inexpensive inventory of three phone shops.

All of these “different” experiences aside, our hosts—both at the university and in the homes where the students are staying (with an odd exception I’ll explain soon)—have been wonderfully friendly and accepting. We have had nothing but positive interaction with colleagues and staff at CCCU, and our students have been surprised by the willingness of their hosts to do their laundry, make space in kitchen cupboards, and, in general, make them a part of their families. (The aforementioned exception is a woman who is housing two of our female students and told them in a note that if a representative from the British version of the IRS should stop by when she was out they should tell that person that they were the woman’s niece and a friend of the niece. Apparently failing to report income—the hosts are compensated for opening their homes to students—is a trans-Atlantic phenomenon.)

Both Monday and Tuesday were, as noted above, orientation days for our students and for us. On Monday evening, the Illinois students were treated to dinner at Super Noodles, an Asian restaurant, and then invited to join the Freshers’ Crew—a group of gregarious students in yellow t-shirts—at the Students’ Union, which has a fully stocked bar. Our students behaved themselves, even though many are under 21, but one of the Missouri students overdrank, passed out on his way home and then woke up mid-mugging. He lost about $200, but he was all right and his misadventure served as a cautionary tale for our students. Frankly, though, we were not worried about our students, anyway; they are as bright and responsible a group of students as we’ve ever met, and they are more interested in both their studies and the opportunities to travel as much as they can. The most impressive aspect of the group is their affinity for each other—they bonded very quickly—and their determination to make sure everyone’s experience is as positive as possible. They are also open to whatever this place has to offer and are eager to do as much as possible.

On Tuesday night, we hosted all 13 of them for a birthday party for Erik, and then again last night to celebrate Matt’s birthday. We have two more birthdays before we leave, and the group has also asked if they could, on some Sunday mornings, gather at our place to cook a big breakfast. (If you’re keeping score, two of the students are from Kishwaukee College, two from Harper, two from John A. Logan, one from Rend Lake, three from Madison Area Technical College in WI—which is part of the Illinois consortium—one from Oakton, and two from College of DuPage.)

Wednesday was the first class day for our students—they are two weeks ahead of the British students, a condition necessary for them to get credit at their home schools—so we decided to go off on our own in the morning to Herne Bay, which is on the North Sea coast, to buy used bicycles at a shop recommended to us by an instructor who had been here a year before. We decided to buy the bicycles because we discovered early on that daily shopping excursions were going to be the norm—small refrigerator, smaller packaging—and felt that it would be more expedient to ride rather than walk. We also wanted to explore the countryside as much as we could on days we had no school obligations. So, off we went on a double-decker bus. Our first mistake that morning was getting off at the wrong bus stop, which resulted in our having to hike a mile to the cycle shop. At the bike shop, we found two good used bicycles, got advice on how to pedal back to Canterbury, and then struck out for a beautiful ride along the seafront on a wide, paved promenade that took us to Whitstable, where we were to pick up the Crabbe and Winkle national bike path back home. The Crabbe and Winkle, we were informed, is the old railroad bed for England’s first commercial railway and could be accessed from the parking lot of the Tesco supermarket. We did not find Tesco or the Crabbe and Winkle, however. Instead, we rode ourselves lost and ended up taking the bikes on the train back to Canterbury so that we would be there in time to join our students for the Modern Britain class in the afternoon. So while we were not able to brag about our cycling prowess and stamina, we were able to tell people how to travel on a train with a bicycle, something we reassured all who would listen is a good and necessary skill to have.

Saturday, we decided, would mark our first cycling adventure, so we bought route maps from the city’s information center and an ordinance map, which marks every road and every foot, bridle and bike path in Kent County. Well, almost every road and path. Our plan that morning was to ride to Pett Bottom where there is an equestrian centre offering hack rides and lessons. I glanced at the maps for a bit, plotted our route, and we set off. Things went along well for the first 20 minutes or so before we took our first wrong turn and ended up on Nackington Road, a narrow, heavily-traveled highway. We stopped to check our bearings—as if we had bearings to be checked—and decided to turn off on Church Road, which, if the map was to be believed, would take us past Nackington Church and along a path to Bridge Road and, from there, to our destination. We made the turn, passed the church and found ourselves on a path that quickly deteriorated from paved to gravel to a tractor-tire-rutted dirt track that plunged down a hill and deposited us in the middle of a Kentish strawberry farm.  Another checking of bearings, another wrongheaded decision, and we ended up at the far end of the strawberry farm with no way out. Fortunately, there were strawberries that had dropped off the trucks, so we were able to fortify ourselves for the rest of our trek—we had long ago stopped riding for fear of popping a tire and were walking—around the fields and back to the church road. There, we found a man who pointed us in the right direction. As we pedaled away, we decided that paved roads were among man’s greatest inventions. We held that thought for only a few seconds because we found that the paved roads we now were taking were narrower than most of the bicycle paths we ride at home, rose and fell like a roller coaster (so much for our friend John’s claim to Kent being flat!) and were shared by lorries, loud and fast motorcycles and a good many automobiles. On more than one occasion, as we were being passed by a vehicle, I scraped my elbow against a hedgerow and listened to Beth screaming behind me about certain death and my questionable map-reading skills.

Needless to say, we survived the trip and, in fact, had a pleasant day in the country, highlighted by our discovering not only the equestrian centre, but a wonderful pub (the Duck Inn, where Ian Fleming wrote You Only Live Twice in 1964) and a more leisurely, though extremely hilly, route through a couple of picture postcard villages that culminated in our topping a hill and seeing the cathedral in the near distance, a moment that had could only have been rivaled by the joy felt by those pilgrims who had hiked on that very same path all the way to Canterbury

There are many more things that we experienced during our first seven days here, but those are, perhaps, best related when we return in December and force you to watch an interminable, narrated slide show. I will send an update next week and report—among other things—on my first day before a group of English Freshers who will be learning all I can teach them about American Literature 1607-1800. Wish me luck.

Cheers…