The Weekly Dispatch No. 4:In Which I Am Coiffed British Style, Go Horse Riding While Beth Bikes The Countryside (And Does NOT Get Lost!); We Also Welcome Another Guest and Tour Maidstone

Once, a few years ago, the woman who was giving me a haircut told me, “You have perfect hair.” Naturally, I was flattered and even though I had not earned the compliment in the way that one might earn a “Nice shot!” or “You’re quite the dancer,” I, nevertheless, left the shop that day with a bit of a swagger. Before I had even gotten to my car, however, it dawned on me that what had, on the surface, seemed like something I could be proud of, it was, in fact, a burden, an obligation. I could not, as I mentioned, take credit for my perfect hair, which meant that I had been chosen to tend to it, be its caretaker, if you will, in the same way that the Knights Templar were charged with making sure nobody messed with the Holy Grail. And, like the Holy Grail, there probably weren’t that many other heads of perfect hair parading around.

I mention this bit of personal history because I knew that when we came to England I would, at some time or other, need to get a haircut. I knew, too, that I was going to take the advice of a former academic visitor from Illinois who said that the best place in Canterbury to get a haircut—pricewise—was at Canterbury College’s training salon. So, on Monday of this past week, I called and made an appointment for Thursday at noon. I felt good, at first, about my frugality, but, as the week wore on, I grew less confident in my decision. I began to imagine a scene in which I sat down in the chair, looked in the mirror and saw Lulu from To Sir, With Love (bubble hairdo, white lipstick) behind me, armed with scissors and comb. I also began to imagine things she would say as she snipped away:

“Ow, I shouldna done that.”

“I can fix that, I think.”

“So you don’t mind it patchy then? It’s quite nice, really, innit?”

By Thursday morning, I was ready to call and cancel. But I had made such a big deal of having my hair cut by a stylist-in-training that I couldn’t back out, so I made the five-minute walk to the school and climbed three flights of stairs trailing behind a dozen Lulu-esque would-be beauticians dragging wheeled suitcases, all of whom were eyeing my perfect hair in a way that made me very uncomfortable.

As it turned out, the young woman who cut my hair was not among that group. Her name was Joy, and she was in her third year of the program. She was, she told me, already a qualified hairdresser, but she had decided to do one more year so that she could get a job in a better salon. Her boyfriend is a student at a university just outside of London, and she’s hoping to work in London and, someday, opening her own shop.

Joy was very attentive and thorough and spent about forty-five minutes cutting my hair. She asked at one point if I wanted her to use clippers, and I flashed back to childhood when my father would take my brothers and I down to the basement, one at a time, to do away with whatever hair had dared to grow on our little skulls. (I tell people that I was in seventh grade before I knew what color my hair was because it never grew long enough for me to tell.)

“No clippers,” I said. “Just scissors.” I was going to stick with that decision but once Joy had finished with my haircut, her instructor came up to check her work and decided that I really needed to be clipped. Before I could protest, the all-too-familiar drone of electric clippers buzzed in my ears and short, silver hair flew everywhere.

“There,” the instructor said, clicking off the clippers, “now that’s a proper gent’s haircut. Just put a little wax in it, and you’re finished.”

Wax?

After Joy had applied the product, I stole a quick, fearful glance in the mirror and didn’t recognize myself. I looked like a cross between David Letterman, Samuel Beckett and the drummer from U2. In all fairness, it was a proper gent’s haircut, just not this proper gent. I haven’t had my hair this short since my basement days and have never relied on putting anything on my hair to make it do something—and I haven’t used anything since, either, resulting in some bristly cowlicks—but I am happy to report that I spent only about one-fourth what I’d have spent if I’d gone to a barber, and this haircut is going to last longer than one I’d have gotten there, I’m sure. A lot longer.

While the haircut was the most personally traumatic event of the week, it certainly wasn’t the only or most important. On Friday, a group of students and I went horse riding—as it’s called here—at a very nice stable a couple of miles outside Canterbury. Because not all of the students have bicycles, we hiked out to the place and had a great one-hour hack/trail ride through woods, up and down a few hills, and across a meadow or two. Everyone stayed on and seemed to enjoy the ride, but when it was over, only one student was up for a walk back into town; the rest called a cab, waving to us as they went past.

While we were riding, Beth, who had accompanied us on her bicycle, took a tour of the countryside and happened upon the village of Stodmarsh, which has a notable pub, The Red Lion, and a little church with a little churchyard/cemetery. We’re planning to bike back there again on a nice day for lunch.

Beth’s sister, Ginger, arrived on Saturday, and we spent most of that day keeping her awake so that she could get beyond the jet lag. We showed her around the city centre, walked the grounds of the cathedral and took a boat tour on the Stour River, which flows through Canterbury. By the time we let her go to bed at nine that night, she was asleep on her feet. But it worked. She was up early the next morning and has been on schedule ever since.

We tried to get to Leeds Castle that next day, Sunday, but because it’s now the off-season for tourist attractions, we missed the connections we needed to get there. Instead, we spent the day in Maidstone, which is a nice, quiet town with an archbishop’s palace (one of five the Archbishops of Canterbury owned between Canterbury and London; no vows of poverty for those guys, apparently), a captured Russian cannon, a medieval bridge—over which a modern bridge was built; you can still see the old one, though, from river level—and a flashy new shopping mall. We also watched some fishermen for a bit. They were angling for little silver fish no more than three inches in length and, using what I thought was a great deal of ingenuity, avoided catching trees or humans when they cast their lines—they were lined up along a walkway—by shooting the baited hook out into the water with slingshots!

It was not the day or place we had in mind when we set out in the morning, but it proved to be an interesting way to spend a few hours. At this point, everything we do is an adventure, and I expect that to continue throughout our visit.

Bits and Pieces
One of the perks of our stay in university housing is that, once a week, we have our house cleaned. Celia, head of the service, had been taking care of us, but this week, we had a mother-daughter team show up. The mother is much more of a go-getter than the daughter and did most of the work. As the daughter was vacuuming (hoovering) the stairs, the vacuum cleaner (hoover) came crashing down the steps and apparently—I was not an eyewitness and only heard all of this—smashed into her. She moaned loudly and, again I’m only guessing from the sound of it, hopped around for a few seconds. All her mother said was, “Well, you shouldn’t have dropped the bloody hoover on your foot, twit.” I’m looking forward to their next visit.

I don’t know why, but I came here thinking that British television would be more dignified than American fare, but it’s not true. While the news readers do gain more credibility by virtue of their perfect diction and “accents,” the morning programs, from the little I’ve seen, are no different from the Today Show or Good Morning, America. I haven’t made a habit of watching the shows, mind you (in fact, we’ve never watched more than an hour of TV at one sitting or in a day since we’ve been here—other than the NFL game last week), but I do turn on the television in the morning to get a weather report for the day. One morning, the forecast was followed by a story about an eighty-some-year-old woman who had been locked in a public restroom for twelve hours. They went to her home for a live remote hook-up, and the host asked her how it had happened. “Well,” she said, “there was a rap on the door, and a man said, ‘Is there anyone in here?’ and I said, ‘Yes, just a moment, please,’ but he locked the door, anyway, and then moved on to the gents’ room. He must not have heard me.” At that point, before the host, I’m sure, asked her how she spent those miserable twelve hours, I turned the television off.

From the ridiculous to the sublime: We have discovered a real treasure/pleasure in the Cathedral’s Evensong service, which is highlighted by the singing of the King’s Choir, a group of 20 or so boys—with a few men included to provide the lower register—whose voices can only be described as angelic. I grew up with the liturgy they are singing, but I have never been as moved by it as I have been listening to these astonishing boys, some as young as eight years of age. Last night, we met the grandparents of one of the boys and spoke with them after the service. They said that their grandson, who is from Oxfordshire, had to move to Canterbury and “be boarded” here in order to sing with the choir. It has been hard for him—he’s only 10—so his grandparents sold their house and are moving to Canterbury to make sure he has family nearby. We plan to attend the service fairly regularly, so we will, I’m sure, run into them again. Maybe we can get their grandson’s autograph.

Lastly, while we are still very much strangers in a strange land, our computer has become British. When I was typing up a handout for my class the other day, I typed in the word “honor,” only to see my spelling corrected by the machine to read “honour.” If it suddenly develops a craving for brown sauce or marmite, we’re in deep trouble.

Next week’s dispatch will include a recap of our trip to Leeds Castle, which we reached yesterday, and, I hope, a guest entry from Beth about the trip she and Ginger are on right now to London.

Cheers!

The Weekly Dispatch No. 3:In Which We Are Victims of British Plumbing, Visit Dover and Brighton, Take Another Hike (with Predictable Results) and Watch NFL Football

While our accommodations here are quite comfortable, we have needed a few small repairs, which the university has been prompt to address, though not always with the results we expected. For example, a fuse that controls the hood fan and light above the stove/cooker had been removed, and we could not get it back into the socket, nor could we get the socket pushed back into place in the wall. When the electrician came and fixed this minor problem and flipped the switch, which turns on both the cooker and the hood, the kitchen was filled with the kind of roar that Midwesterners would take as a warning to head to the basement. Over the din, the electrician explained that all of the hood fans in university housing were altered so that they were always on and always on high. The reason, he went on, was that students who lived in university housing—and our house had been student housing, once, as evidenced by the deadbolt locks on every bedroom door—were not the most attentive, and they often set off the smoke alarms, which resulted in a visit from either a university representative or the local fire department. So now, whenever we cook a meal, we are forced to shout (I said, “Add the onions!”) or use arcane hand signals until we’re ready to eat. We are planning to take out the fuse again, though it will be a little trickier for us than for the last tenant because the electrician added a screw to the face plate to prevent any such removal. But I have tools…

The fan is a nuisance, but the repair to our boiler (a wall-mounted version of our much larger water heater at home) is still ongoing—in fact, there are two plumbers hard at it as I write this—and proved to be a more alarming problem. The saga began when we noticed that the boiler was leaking and that water was dripping onto the counter. A repairman came and spent a couple of hours getting that fixed. While he was working, I mentioned that the water in the shower was not very hot and that we had to move the lever as far as it would go, and even then, it was only warm at best. So, he went upstairs, did some adjusting and left.

It’s important at this point to note that our shower stall is about the same size as a British phone box, which means that you had better keep a firm grip on the soap, or you could find yourself wedged in an unbecoming and uncomfortable position, calling for help.

The next morning, expecting to enjoy a hot, lingering shower, Beth sealed herself into the glass cubicle and turned on the water. What I learned that morning is that the sound one makes when the water is too hot (a shriek) is easily distinguished from the one made when the water is too cold (more of a yelp), and that it is not easy—given the stall’s size—to avoid the water, whatever its temperature, and that the bi-fold doors—they open in and require you to move to one side—make escape nearly impossible. The fluctuation in temperature, it turns out, is the result of a problem with the boiler which was masked by someone who found that keeping the water warmish was better than scalding/freezing and adjusted the shower thermostat accordingly. Since the first day, we have learned a kind of contortionist’s dance that allows us to get into the water when it’s making the transition from hot to cold or vice-versa and out again before the transition is complete. It’s really a thing of beauty to watch but not really an audience kind of activity, so you’ll have to believe me.

The boiler is also the source of our heat—we have hot water radiator system in the house—and as the weather turns from the surprisingly sunny to the more typically English damp, we are hopeful that the inconsistency of the shower does not translate to a similar inconsistency in the warmth of the house. We should know more about both of these once the repairmen have finished.

Aside from that, we thank our proverbial lucky stars every day for this opportunity. The classes we are teaching are enjoyable—my English students are comfortably familiar in their classroom demeanor; Beth finds our American students to be bright and funny and excited to be here—and the interaction we have with both students and colleagues continues to be a delight to us both. We have also come to appreciate the field trips the university is providing.

This week, we traveled to Dover via motor coach in a downpour that did not abate the entire time we were there and, in fact, turned into a windy squall once we reached the coast. But not even soaked shoes, sodden jeans or inside-out umbrellas diminished the day for any of us.

We pulled up at the foot of a long hill, unloaded and then tramped up the hill to Dover Castle, built by Henry II, visited often by Henry VIII, and arguably the site of England’s most important military outpost from the Napoleonic Wars to World War II because it is where the distance between England and the continent is the shortest (28 miles).

We had about 90 minutes to explore the castle on our own before we were to meet up for a tour of the Secret Wartime Tunnels, a honeycomb built into the White Cliffs of Dover that served as barracks for about 3000 soldiers when Napoleon threatened to invade and then as headquarters and a hospital for the British armed forces in World War II. It was from this underground command center that the evacuation of Dunkirk was planned and carried out. It was also a place Winston Churchill liked to visit. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take any photographs inside the tunnels (they are “secret,” after all), and we were warned not to touch anything because many of the artifacts housed there—everything from radio and telephone equipment to surgery supplies to cooking utensils—had recently been cleaned and treated and might, if brushed against, cause a rash…or worse! I’m not sure if there was any truth to the warning or not, but we were all very careful to avoid contact with anything.

We were also told that the tunnels are haunted and, in fact, two of our students said they had looked down one of the side tunnels and had seen a transparent bluish figure opening and going through a door at the far end. They saw the figure before the guide told us about the haunting, and neither knew the other had seen anything until after we got outside again. Strange, but true! There is a haunted tour near Halloween, and some of the students are talking about going back for that.

After the castle, we went into the centre of Dover and saw the oldest ocean-going boat ever found, dating back 3500 years to the Bronze Age. It was discovered during an exploratory dig in the city when a highway expansion was being started. One of the most interesting facts about the boat is that it was sewn rather than nailed together. There are plans to build a replica and, in the next two or three years, to sail it across the channel.

At the conclusion of the Dover trip, nine of our 13 students took off for France for the weekend. They boarded the ferry and ended up in Calais, where they spent the night in a hostel, and then went up the coast to Boulogne, where they spent Saturday and part of Sunday. They came home waterlogged—it had rained all day Saturday, too—but proud of themselves, I think, for having struck out on their own. They were all glad, they said, to get back to England which, already, has become their home.

Our Saturday took us to Brighton, a place I’ve wanted to visit since reading Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock as a student. We took the train and saw a great deal of beautiful countryside on the way and passed through towns we may visit as destinations in the next few weeks. After hopping off the train, we went down a San Francisco-esque hill toward the sea. Along the way, we stopped and toured the Royal Pavilion, easily the most outlandishly extravagant place I’ve ever seen.

The 35-year-long project of George IV, the place resembles an Indian palace on the outside but is decorated, in several rooms, in faux Chinese style. Again, we could not take photographs, but mental pictures will remain with me a very long time, particularly the formal banquet hall which features a one-ton chandelier suspended from a high domed ceiling in the talons of a silver dragon. This was one of those places where the audio guide we were given was worth a listen.

The rest of Brighton is seaside-tourist-tacky: exactly what I was hoping for. From the long pier with an amusement park at the end to the little stands that sell Brighton Rock—a souvenir candy—to the fortune-tellers and street performers, it is tawdry and a little dirty and really wonderful. We even saw the scariest-looking man either of us has ever seen. Beth said he probably has a poet’s soul, to which I answered, “Yeah, in a box in his apartment.” I wanted to take a picture of him, but I was afraid all of the piercings in his face would reflect too much of the flash. Plus, I was just afraid.

On Sunday, we took another heritage walk. This time we hiked two-and-a-half miles out of Canterbury—up and down a couple of steep hills—to Tyler Hill where we went into the woods and followed the “radfall” to Broad Oak Valley. A radfall, as we discovered is a Saxon earthwork comprising two berms with open space in-between. The radfall marked the boundaries of two estates and provided public space between where people could travel or—and this was the real reason for the radfall—chop down the trees, thus providing the landowners a pathway to get from place to place without having to clear it themselves.

As has become our custom, we reached the moment where, as Beth has come to recognize it, “confusion ensues.” This time, though, it was not so much our fault as the mapmakers. A kind woman in Wellies walking her deaf Whippet stopped to help us out, and she agreed that the landmarks we were given were not there. So, instead of locating the non-existent footbridge, we leaped a stream and entered Little Hall Woods, a truly idyllic spot, where we had lunch. Deciding that we were already off-map and that there was no point in trying to get back on-map, we climbed out of the valley and, using the Cathedral as our landmark, made our way safely home.

That night, we went to the Jolly Sailor pub and watched an NFL game. It was not, despite our hopes, the Chicago Bears, but we did get to see Brett Favre set the new touchdown pass record. British coverage is provided by Fox, but it is a single feed without the ability to cut to the studio for halftime recaps or to other games. There are no commercials, either, which is odd. Usually, during a timeout, the screen goes to a message announcing the game would resume in a moment. The first time, though, we got to listen to the two booth announcers talking with a producer about what they needed. At the same time, the sideline camera that was “live” was pointed by a clearly bored cameraman at his shoes, at the crowd, at the backsides of cheerleaders and, finally, at the field. I was hoping for more random shots as the game went on, but that was all we got.

Finally, on Thursday of this past week, we celebrated our 32nd wedding anniversary. It was the most exotic locale for an anniversary since our third when we camped along the Mississippi and spent a day knocking over dead trees—a practice that has become a family tradition passed on to our children.

We did not indulge our woodland ritual this year, but we did have a nice dinner at a restaurant where, a week-and-a-half earlier, we had been the very first customers. As I had predicted to Beth on the way there, we were treated by the owner to a bottle of wine. So, true to my word to the owner, Olean: Whenever you’re in Canterbury, be sure to have dinner at Amantia. The food is great! And the service is outstanding!
Cheers!

The Weekly Dispatch No. 2:In Which We Get Lost Again, Begin To Earn Our Keep,
Visit The Cathedral, And Entertain Dutch Visitors

Our second week here was every bit as enjoyable and educational as our first. We learned, for example, that Wednesday night is “sport night,” which means that large groups of students gather at pubs—including the one at the Student Union, which serves the cheapest beer in town—to watch football/soccer games and then roam the streets in various states of drunkenness. We learned this when a “bobbette,” which I believe is the correct term for a female police officer in this country, came to our door and informed us that there would be a closed circuit television van parked in front of our house to videotape the hooligans when they came storming out of the college’s gate. As it turned out, the CCTV truck was a deterrent and the only thing the police had to watch on their monitors that evening were Beth and me waving at them and pretending to throw rocks through neighbors’ windows. We also learned that the famous “British sense of humour”—particularly that of the local constabulary—does not include pantomime and that the British spell jail gaol.

This was also the week that Beth and I became “employees” of CCCU, though we have yet to be fully recognized as such—evidenced by our inability to obtain library cards from the university because we have not yet received staff ID numbers (though we do, now, have our computer usernames and don’t have to go to the Two Sawyers pub when we want to check our email). On Tuesday morning, I met with Mandy Cooper, Programme Director for the American Studies Department at CCCU and my “co-teacher” for the semester. As she explained in that meeting, the course—American Literature from Pre-Columbian era to about 1820—would be taught by me but that she would be available to supplement the course content with presentations on visual arts from the time and to help schedule visits by computer and library folk. She also explained that most of their academic undergraduate programs are three years in length and that students begin from the first semester with major field courses; there is no equivalent to our general education course requirement. We also talked quite a bit about students, a chat which reassured me that the students I would be meeting on Thursday would probably be no different from those I was used to teaching—except for the language barrier, of course.

That afternoon, Tuesday, we decided to take a heritage walk. Mandy had given us a booklet with a dozen or so of these hikes—most between two and six miles—and we picked one that would keep us in Canterbury rather than one that would send us out into the countryside where, as we had learned the week before, we would surely lose our way. So, guidebook and ordinance maps—the ones that show every road, path, etc.—in hand, we began our walk inside the city walls (which we are learning to pronounce “the city wools”) and ambled along past historic buildings and through tree-shaded parks. The book then sent us up a steep hill to the campus of the University of Kent, a larger, more modern campus than CCCU with an impressive theatre/movie house with an even more impressive list of films and plays, and took a quick rest stop to see where we were headed next.

At this point, as we read the directions, our confidence waned, and we were back in the strawberry field. Rather than following streets with names, here is what we were told to expect (and this is word-for-word from the guidebook):

Cross Giles Lane, through gate and ahead towards chestnut paling fence. Through gap by stile and ahead along right-hand field boundary.

At wire fence turn left through narrow gap in hedge, then immediately right to wooden fence.

On reaching corner of school grounds look left to view southern portal of tunnel. Take first right of two possible paths.
To this day, I still do not know what a chestnut paling fence is, nor am I sure that we took the first right of two possible paths. We did travel along a very narrow footpath that we were told by a fellow traveler was one of the footpaths taken by pilgrims on their way to the cathedral, and were afforded spectacular views of the Kentish countryside as we descended into the city centre again. We were “off-map” most of the way, but the rather prominent cathedral bell tower kept us moving in the right direction. We also, quite accidentally, came across the Canterbury City Cemetery and visited the grave of Joseph Conrad where, in a fit of literary pretension, I gazed thoughtfully at our surroundings and quoted—or maybe paraphrased—Marlow in Heart of Darkness: “And this, too, was one of the dark places of the world.”

On Wednesday, suffering from a few thorn scratches and tired legs, Beth was put to work. She—actually for the second week—led a discussion seminar that is a part of the Modern Britain class all of us, students and faculty, are required to take while we’re here. Our seminar group includes all of us from Illinois—community colleges, North Central College, and Illinois State—and a lone student from Arkansas State. They’re an outstanding group, and Beth—as expected—got them thinking about the notion of British Identity (our topic for the first couple of class sessions), as well as about the idea of an American Identity. In both cases, coming up with a single definition is impossible, which was the point our lecturer, Nathan, was trying to illustrate. As he pointed out, the images and ideas that were British in the past—tea at three, stiff upper lip, and all that—are, in fact, of the past and do not reflect modern Britain at all, except among those who cling to tradition.

My class the following day was dubbed a “taster.” According to Mandy, students can sample classes the first week or two before settling on the courses they want to take. I have to admit I cringed at the idea because we have worked so hard at ECC to eliminate that sort of thing and get right down to business. Here, however, that jumping around is mitigated a bit by their tutor system; every student has a faculty member with whom he or she meets regularly and, in the case of late-enrollers, that faculty member works to bring the student up to speed. Mandy told me that on rare occasions students have entered classes as late as November. It should be remembered, too, that these courses do not really end at the conclusion of a term. The class I am teaching, for example, will continue until early May.

Knowing that we had to mount something of a “dog and pony” show, Mandy and I worked out an hour-long session that would give the students a chance to look over the syllabus, ask questions and get a sense of what would be expected. We also worked in an ice-breaker and took some time to introduce ourselves. Other than a couple of places when a student said something, and I needed to look to Mandy for translation (I did apologize in advance for any misunderstandings and told them to feel free to ask me to repeat something they didn’t understand), the class went well. The students were a little more willing to discuss a couple of poems we asked them to read than our my students at home but, again, these are students who are already committed to a major field of study and have a lot of experience discussing literature. There were also three returning female students, which also gave the classroom a familiar, community college feel. All in all, I’m looking forward to the class and to working with the students.

Friday was our first school-sponsored field trip. Naturally, the cathedral was our destination. Knowing that we would be visiting the place—and not wanting to waste any of the sunny, un-English weather that we are still enjoying—we have avoided any sites that we can see during the gloomy, dank days we are continually told will be here soon enough. The day we visited the cathedral was no different, but, as we soon learned, it was a good thing that the sun was out because it illuminated the stained glass windows and allowed us to see them at their brilliant best.

At the cathedral, we were divided into two groups, each assigned a guide for about a ninety-minute tour. My group had Vivian, who loved the building, while Beth’s group had Lenny, who loved the stories associated with the place. As a result, my group got to see nooks and crannies Beth’s group did not see, but they were given far more dramatic and—in the case of Beckett’s murder—more gory renditions of the history. The place is as astonishing and awe-inspiring as any place I've ever visited, and although we have dozens of pictures, until I've learned how to blog more effectively, you'll have to wait until we get home or until I've posted them on a photo site to see them. I'll keep trying...

After the cathedral, everyone except me went to the Canterbury Tales, a very cheesy tourist attraction featuring the “sights and smells of Chaucer’s Canterbury” with the emphasis, according to Beth, on the smells, which she figures is less a marketing gimmick than an excuse for not cleaning. Our students, to a person, were unimpressed with the place, though some were intrigued by the promise of “animatronics,” which turned out to be a spring-loaded plywood cutout that flapped up at the right time.

While the rest of the crew were enjoying that experience, I was welcoming our first guests: Tom and Astrid von Krimpen and their foster-baby, Mattanya. Tom and I were exchange partners last year—he visited ECC for two weeks in the fall; I visited ID College in May—and became good friends. They stayed with us until Monday morning, allowing us to show them around Canterbury and, on Sunday, to do a little traveling through the English countryside. I did the driving on Sunday, which was not as frightening as I thought because Tom’s car is a left-hand drive, so it just meant my having to be next to the curb as we traveled. That wasn’t much of a problem except when we got to roundabouts and I couldn’t really see cars coming up on my right. Aside from a couple of near-misses, it was a piece of cake. The highlight of the day was a visit to Rye, a hilltop town where Henry James lived and wrote. At the very top of the hill is a church and at the very top of the church is a bell tower, which visitors can climb up to see the countryside. I bravely agreed to accompany Tom and Beth, but halfway up, my fear of heights and accompanying vertigo hit me, and I had to bail out. While I might have found the view stunning, I’m growing very used to living happily on the ground, looking up.

All in all, it was a very pleasant week, and an even more pleasant weekend.

Before I sign off, I have to tell this story:

Sunday morning, as we went out to find some fresh pastries for breakfast (an impossible mission, we found), we rounded a corner and came face-to-face with a horde of German tourists, all bearing down on the cathedral entrance. Because it was early, the gates were locked, so the visitors had to mill around outside. One man, apparently too impatient to wait for a view of the cathedral, went to a bookstore where a book opened to a photograph of the building rested in the window, and he videotaped the picture of the cathedral through the glass. I’d like to be sitting in his home as he explains to his guests that piece of footage.

More next week.

Cheers!

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…