Nationality Soup

I've decided to make a list of the countries from which I have now met people while in Southampton.

1. England - there are lots of these
2. Wales - because it is separate 'country'
3. Ireland - you recall the Dublin tale
4. France - tend to be undergraduates here for a semester
5. Italy - same as France
6. Greece - oodles of Greeks, not really sure why
7. Cyprus - not sure if Greek part of Cyprus or non-Greek part
8. Iran - thinks the Americans should invade
9. China - once again, oodles
10. Japan - only person I've come across who likes baseball
11. Taiwan
12. New Zealand - but living in the UK for work
13. Malaysia
14. India
15. Mauritius - yes, an actual country, off the coast of Madagascar (I had to ask)
16. Barbados - the cricket world cup will be there next year
17. Trinidad and Tobago - 'West Indies'
18. United States - I'm up to one and a half

I know I am forgetting some. There are a couple people from Africa in my class but I don't recall which countries, exactly. But no Canadians, no Scots. For some reason I can never think of interesting things to say to people from these countries. Luckily most people in turn do have something to ask about America, or at least have an opinion on the matter. I wonder if I can make it up to 30 before the year is out...

The end is nigh

After weeks of constant work, I can feel the end of the pre-Christmas coursework crunch heading my way. Tomorrow the engineering is due and I've finally handed off my portion and can now only cross my fingers that it gets turned in before the noon cut-off. Of course, the final piece is my history of transport essay due on Wednesday that I need to write tomorrow. So I have literally spent all weekend in the library. It's sad, I know.

Moving on.

Restaurants are rather big on what they call Christmas meals. They had posters up for these at some places since I arrived in September. It took me quite a while to realize that they don't mean meal on Christmas day, they have just given a formal name to those get-togethers people tend to have running up to Christmas. It's basically just like making a reservation, but it is theoretically different than just another meal at said restaurant, and can apparently include having to pay a deposit. This doesn't all make too much sense to me as an outsider, but I suppose it seems like a good idea.

Sorry for the short, lackluster entry once again. Hopefully I will become witty again once Wednesday rolls around.

Trains!

Last week cargo, this week trains. What an exciting time!

I've learned quite a bit about trains in my time here. Aside from learning how to get around in them, I have learned how they are run and quite a bit about their history, and yesterday I got to learn about their maintenance at Southampton's Siemens rail depot.

Here is a quick rundown on how the train industry is run in this country:

- The Department for Transport and a couple of other government bodies think about the train network and how it could be better.

- The Office of the Rail Regulator (Mount up) oversees the rail network and makes sure all is operating as it should

- Network Rail is a publically owned company that is in charge of maintaining and developing the rail infrastructure (which is basically the tracks and some other little things).

- There are three rolling stock companies (RSCs) that own all of the train cars and engines and such that use the rail network

- Privately owned train operators bit for the rights to run services along certain routes from the government, and lease the rolling stock from the RSCs

- maintenance of the leased rolling stock is contracted out to companies such as Siemens, who conveniently also built the equipment and sold it a RSC that leases it to the operator

Whew!! Isn't it sad that I know all that? At the other end of things you just walk into a train station and buy a ticket and just take whatever shows up first. Oh, the train system sort of ended up like this when the industry was privatised in the mid-1990s, but things got really bad and there was a chain of bad accidents around 2000 and things have been simplified a little since then.

So my class hopped in the mini-bus and went to Siemens, who has a maintenance contract with Southwest Trains. Southwest Trains is either the largest or one of the largest train operators in the country, and their stock consists of two different kinds of trains, 450s and 444s, one of which is blue and the other white (the picture obiviously shows the blue but I don't recally which is which). Waterloo station is the real center of Southwest Trains services in London. On a daily basis, 1700 trains go in and out of Waterloo, carrying a total of 750,000 passengers. If you come visit and take the train from London, you will be one of them. Next Friday I will be one of them.

So, the folks at Siemens are required by their contract to make sure that 145 trains are available every day, and can get in major trouble for things like non-operating toilets and scratched windows. The trains are serviced every 10,000 miles, and each train covers about 500,000 miles a year.

Fascinating, I know. There is more, but there's only so much you can handle at one time, I think.

Rail depot

Today I have another field trip. In an hour I will be getting on yet another mini-bus (I fear the mini-bus) and heading down to the local train depot. Please not that it is not a dee-po, it is a deh-po. Quite frankly, I've sort of stopped noticing or thinking about all the words that are simply pronounced differently. As a stick it sort of gets old.

The English winter has still yet to kick in. For some reason, despite that having mild and at least somewhat sunny yet unnaturally windy days, there are often rather stormy bits at night. I am often woken up several times by the sounds of heavy winds and pouring down rain, and then I wake up in the morning and look outside and it's all still and quiet.

I have had a few run-ins with what they like to call American football the last few days. On Tuesday night I saw a guy walking down to campus carrying shoulder pads and a helmet, and yesterday in the computer lab I saw some random middle eastern guys looking at NFL clips on the internet, and another guy came in wearing a jacket that said 'American football' on the back. I took this to mean that he played on the school's 'American football' team more so than showing support for the sport in general. Sometimes I feel like I should make comments to these people, but then I realize I don't have anything to say.

Speaking of sporting events, the Ashes are going on right now. And apparently they are a really big deal. Basically, the English are playing Australia in cricket and the games are in Australia so they are in the middle of the night here. Things are heated. But I don't understand cricket so it's all the same to me. Oh, but the games last five days. And the Ashes will go on until February. And they occur every other year. Don't ask me why it's such a big deal.

"German" markets

A couple of weeks ago, the main shopping street in Southampton ('Above bar street', don't ask me what they mean by above, it's not above anything), which is 'pedestrianized', become suddenly unnaturally over-run by a bunch of little stalls. The English like to think of them as mini-German Christmas markets. There are a few that sell random wares, one that sells dried meats, one with Belgian waffles and mini-pancakes, some with candy, and the largest and busiest one sells hot mulled wine and German sausages. This is all well and good, I suppose, except for the fact that it turns an overcrowded walkway into a complete mess. And unfortunately for me, to get to Boots you have to pretty much walk all the way down the street past the mulled wine. The last two weeks this has been proven to be very difficult and time consuming. It's probably only going to get worse in the next few weeks...

One thing that has also for some reason suprised me is the presence of Christmas trees on campus. They have suddenly sprung up in quite a few places. Yesterday I left the library around 2 and went back in around 4 and a Christmas tree had popped up in the lobby bit. I suppose there is no reason for there not to be trees around. Of course, my confusion is helped along by the fact that it's not particularly cold, there was no Thanksgiving, and it in no way feels like Christmas.

It's been a long while since I have listed some American/British translation, so here goes:

'Doing the dishes' = 'Doing the washing up'
'Dish soap' = 'Washing up liquid'
'Laundry soap' = 'Washing powder'
'Coupe' = 'Coup-eh' (it has an accent on the E)

Oh, and the two washing machines that I have seen have been in kitchens. Like where a dishwasher would be, under the counter. And neither place had dryers, but students live there. They are apparently more common in parental residences.

Europeans

The English like to keep a bit of a distance from mainlane Europe, both geographically and culturally. While to you and I the English tend to be quite European, they seem to still be having regular debates about this issue. In fact, I get the feeling that they sort of see themselves as being the America of Europe; an English speaking nation that doesn't quite go along with what everyone else wants to be doing (e.g., they're not willing to transition to the euro).

There is also the debate on whether they feel like they're European. Apparently there is the general feeling that those on the continent are willing to call themselves first and foremost European, and then their own nation as secondary, while here they are English first, British second, and then European. It's all very odd. Of course there are all those little habits and styles of doing things that I see as being rather European but I don't think they are aware of, but again I suppose these are somewhat watered down when compared to the French or the Italians, etc. I suppose there is clearly no answer about what they really are, and I suppose that is part of their national identity. A country that's just a bit quirky.

The Port of Southampton

So yesterday was the long awaited field trip to the port. Quite frankly, more time was needed. Our statistics lecture had to be cut an hour short to allow us to go, and we only just made it back in time for the policy lecture.

The trip was broken up into two parts. The first was basically just driving around the east and west parts of the port with a tour guide lady. Southampton has three big Cs: cars, containers, and cruises. That means that there are huge portions of land taken up at the docks by brand new cars waiting to either be shipped away, or being brought into the country. There weren't any cruise ships in, but there were some container ships in. Oh, and they also bring in bulk goods, like barley and wheat, that are stored in a giant granary, plus there is a tomato importing facility, and then a Bacardi importing facility. The Bacardi one is quite interesting because they have some pipes set up to transfer the liquids from the ship to their bottling facility that is conveniently located within the port.

The second part of the trip was a presentation at the container facility and then a little drive around that portion of the port. It doesn't necessarily seem like it would be interesting, but the pure logisitics involved in shipping containers is really something. Plus they have two really cool machines just for moving containers. One looks kind of like a forklift, but instead of moving pallets of mayo at costco, they move empty containers that are stacked up like, six high. And then there are these things called stradle carriers that move the loaded containers around, putting them on the backs of trucks and things. There were containers EVERYWHERE at this place. It's amazing that they can keep track of them all. It's sort of strange to think that most all of your posessions were in one of those things at one point in time, that all these man hours have been dedicated to getting your dvd player from point A to point B in an organized and time efficient manner.

Woo. I've totally gone nerd. Sorry.