England Plus Paris: Part 6

When I sat down to breakfast, the waitress (waitress? cook? I don't know) asked me, "You weren't here yesterday, were you?" No, I hadn't been. She went into the kitchen.

Monica (the proprietress, you recall) came out. She said that they had worried that something had happened to me yesterday morning. I was a bit startled. She asked me what kind of toast I wanted. "Wheat." And then she was gone.

When she came back, I said something did happen to me yesterday--I got lost trying to find the Coast Path. So maybe she'd had a premonition.

Monica asked if I'd seen anyone who "looked funny" while I was lost. I could have asked, "What, you mean looked funnier than I do?" but I just said "Nope."

But she'd been worried when I didn't come down for breakfast. And then she worried further because she had forgotten how the room locks worked, and thought that I was still locked in my room. But she'd figured things out eventually.

I asked if, in hindsight, it would have been a good idea for me to leave a note saying I wouldn't be around for breakfast. (This was my third bed-and-breakfast ever.) She said no. I couldn't tell if this was a "no" or a "of course, you idiot." And I didn't ask.

Like a Conversation at a Speakeasy Door

"A nice lady told me that if I told you that I wanted to see the Eden Project, you would make something wonderful happen."

He gave me two tickets. One would get me into the Eden Project by train and bus. The other would bring me back. (Except that I wasn't coming back to Penzance.)

Don't Don't Don't Let's Smart

They wouldn't let me take Tom's huge backpack into the Eden Project. Maybe they thought I was a bomber, maybe they had guessed what my dirty laundry must smell like. They wanted me to leave the backpack at the information desk. That was fine with me. I started to hand it over.

When she was ready to take it: "Oh! It's heavy. How did you hold that? You must be strong."

"Better if I'd been smart enough to put it down. It's better to be smart than strong."

She said, "Better to be smart than strong?" and looked at me as if that was the stupidest thing she'd ever heard.

Eventually I figured out that in England, "smart" meant "sharp-dressed", not "intelligent." So I wonder what she thought I meant when I called her "smart."

I was in the habit of telling people that they were smart. People in England must have thought I was fashion-mad.

Do What Now?

The Eden Project was a pair of giant geodesic greenhouses. (I think they were constructing more of these. But when I was there, there were just two "biospheres".) It was immensely popular with tourists. I was there on a Tuesday, and it was monstrously crowded.

If you've heard me ranting about crowded tourist sites before, you're expecting me to say how much I hated the place and how much it reminded me of Fisherman's Wharf.

There was a lot to hate about the Eden Project, but I loved it. No, really, it was awesome. It was crowded, there was some unfortunate cheeseball art, but the plants were wonderful.

I hung out in a section of tropical trees to hear a lecture. I hoped that the lecture would talk about all of the trees. But Izzy (the lecturer's name was Izzy) only talked about chocolate. She gave a good chocolate lecture, but it was all stuff I'd heard before. What about the teak? I learned nothing about teak that day.

So I wasn't fascinated. But I was the only audience for the lecture, so I felt like I should stick around. Eventually, some other people showed up, and they asked Izzy a bunch of questions. These people had such thick British accents that I couldn't understand what they said. Neither could Izzy, and she had to ask them to repeat themselves. Yet more people showed up. They asked questions. Eventually, Izzy repeated most of her lecture for them. Meanwhile, I made my escape.

Most of the people working at the Eden Project seemed pretty young. Most of the people visting the Eden Project seemed pretty old.

All Is Full Of Love

When I was in France, I'd see these election signs up. Each of the 18 parties had one of these metal panels that they could slap a poster on.

I checked in to Exeter's Telstar Hotel, which had a completely un-spacey decor. I have no idea why it was called the Telstar.

As I watched TV that night, I was glad to have left France early. Some right-wing pigeon from outer space named "Le Pen" had made it to the run-off Prime Minister election, and sane Frenchmen were rioting in the streets. I was glad to see that France had an even larger percentage of right-wing pigeons than the USA did. But I was glad that, even in France, they hadn't achieved a majority.

An Education at Exeter

In Herbie's, a restaurant, I learned that in England "flapjack" means an oatmeal cookie. It does not mean pancake.

Herbie's had one of the hardest-working waitresses I ever saw. She just went non-stop. I think there was a continuous half-hour in which she didn't stand still at all.

Itinerant Scholar

At breakfast, when the professor said "good morning," I answered "howdy" and somehow he figured out that I was from the USA. I asked him where he was from. He was from Exeter. This begged the question: why was he at a hotel?

The day before, he'd been at a meeting at London. The meeting hadn't started until after 6. The academic types in London didn't want the meeting to interfere with their afternoon work. So he hadn't got back to Exeter until after midnight. And after midnight, he had no way to get home from the train station.

I wasn't sure what I was doing in Exeter. When I was in Penzance, Oxford had seemed too far away to reach in a day; Exeter seemed like a good place for a break. I kept forgetting that England was so tiny.

Not-So-Memorable Memorial

The Albert Memorial Museum was a fine place to wait around while waiting for the local internet cafe to work out a Linux problem. It was not wildly exciting.

There was a stuffed giraffe that was looking pretty threadbare in places. I wondered if people rubbed its legs. The legs looked pretty worn.

There was a Roman surveying tool called a groma, useful for laying out grid-based camps.

Continuing Education

A "cheese and pickle sandwich" was more like a "cheese and chutney sandwich". Yayy.

Underground

Exeter has some underground passages. They were tunnels which housed water pipe. They had a history. They were dark. They were among the more interesting things to see in Exeter, but that says more about Exeter than it does about the underground passages.

This is Not The Way

I wandered onto the campus of Exeter University. I walked past some dorms, then came to a sign that said that persons wanting to walk in the grounds must have permission of the warden. So I left.

Finally, I found an entrance at which there was a sign directing people to some theater. This must be an entrance for the public. I wandered over some boring university grounds. Trying to find something interesting, I tried following the flow of students. They were flowing towards... a student union area where they could shop. Not so interesting.

I wandered further. I wandered along a fence. I came to a stile over the fence. Walking the paths of Cornwall had involved a lot of stiles. So I wasn't surprised to see one here. I used it and walked through a lumpy field. I wondered why the field was so lumpy.

As I crested a rise, I found the cows. Their hooves had made the ground lumpy. I was surprised to see the cows. They were surprised to see me. I walked back up to the fence. I was far from the stile, so I did a clumsy vault/clamber to get back on the road. People were actively not-staring at me.

I couldn't parse this place. I'd gone looking for something interesting, and I'd ended up in a cow pasture.

Good Dinner

The dinner at Ganges was pretty good. I ordered something that was marked VERY HOT on the menu. "VERY HOT" is how they say "spicy" in Exeter. If you go to the Ganges in Exeter (and you should), and you're a Californian, you can order the VERY HOT things without fear.

Exotic Foreign Foods

Back in my hotel room, I had a Horlicks, mostly because it had a naughty name. It was a packet of powder to mix with hot water. The powder was made of malted wheat, powdered milk, and sugar; as such, the name was the most exciting thing about it.

More Exotic Foreign Foods

Weetabix box (National Science Museum).

In the breakfast room, there was an assortment of breakfast cereals. I was familiar with most of them, but knew Weetabix only by name. The hotel had Weetabix. I would try Weetabix. This would be a great experiment, a breakthrough for science.

I'd wanted to try Weetabix since I'd heard of it. That -ix ending sounds so tasty. Like Bendix, a pioneer of laundry-machine manufacturing in the UK. If you read the history of the laundrette, Bendix is all over it. I'd read a history of the laundrette, and was thus primed for product names ending in -ix.

The first surprise was the... I don't know what you call it. The gross manifestation? The delivery system? Weetabix is a cereal, but it doesn't consist of loose flakes or loose anything. A serving of Weetabix shows up as an oval puck of grain.

I put one of these pucks into a bowl. I poured milk over it. I thought it was amazing, as the puck sagged--it was falling apart just enough so that I'd be able to eat it as a cereal. I wonder how they kept it crunchy.

They didn't. Weetabix isn't crunchy. Weetabix is a mass of soggy, stringy grain in milk. I don't know. Maybe I wasn't supposed to pour milk over it? Maybe it's a sort of cross between a biscuit and a granola bar and the "whole wheat cereal" label on the cover is meant as a joke?

From Juxtaposition, Realization

"Horlicks" kind of ends in "-ix", if you say it out loud. I didn't notice that until I wrote all that down.

Jaded

The ticket seller told me that I'd need to change trains at "Redding". I considered correcting her pronounciation of "Reading," but decided against it.

On the train from Exeter to Reading, I wrote, "I don't care if I never see another hedge-bordered field of pasture for as long as I live."

How Does a City "Fill Up"?

I had big plans for Oxford. I was going to take a day trip to Milton Keynes. I was going to spend a day biking along the Thames. I wanted to stay four nights in Oxford. But Oxford had other plans.

The third hotel said that they'd be full on Saturday night. And then the proprietress said: There's a Big Match on Saturday, and every place is full up. But I could stay two nights.

Okay, so the day trip to Milton Keynes wasn't going to happen. And the bike ride wasn't going to happen. And I probably wouldn't make it to Blenheim Palace.

Waitaminnit, did this mean I was lugging around lots of UK-bicycling information, and I wasn't going to go on any bike rides in the UK?

Not an Endorsement

Everything Is For The Best In This Worst Of All Possible Worlds

There weren't enough tourists, though. That is, there weren't enough tourists to justify all of the buses. There were a few tour bus companies. These companies wanted to allow their customers to be able to jump off of a bus, explore a place, then hop back on a bus to go to the next place. So each company ran several buses around town so that they could gurantee short waits for their customers. But there weren't enough customers to even come close to filling up any of these buses.

So there were a lot of buses creating lots of traffic and spewing lots of diesel fumes all over the place.

Most of the tourists weren't on the buses. Most of them were clogging the sidewalks, gawking at postcard shops.

Occasionally, one or more tourists would cross the street, speed up to get in front of me, and then slow down, forcing me to slow down. As I walked behind these people, they were always speaking French.

Over the course of my time there, I became glad that I hadn't arranged a longer stay.

Science is Hard

I have no idea.

The nice lady said that the museum of the History of Science at Oxford was new, and that was why almost nothing had any interpretive text.

I didn't learn much about these calculating machines. However, I don't remember seeing other calculating machines like these at other history-of-science museums that I went to.

Some things were labelled, and I was glad to learn of the existence of the ashadar (Nepali clock-spear). The medical Geissler tube was interesting. This museum had cool stuff. They just needed to hand their material over to the Cambridge Museum of the History of Science to get more interpretation done.

Accelerated Garden Viewing

I wriggled into the Botanical Garden right at the last entry time. After the Eden Project, this garden was not impressive as a garden. The thing that impressed me was the lack of people and diesel buses. It was a nice refuge for 20 minutes before the Gardeners kicked me out.

Look at that lack-of-a-crowd. After a short time in Oxford, that feels pretty precious.

Gratuitous Photo

These people were playing croquet in the University Parks, near the science area.

Noticeable Flavor

I had dinner at Chutney's. I ordered one of the hottest things on the menu. It was hot enough such that I wouldn't recommend it to people who aren't into that sort of thing.

Gang Aft Aglay

My plan was to visit Milton Keynes over the weekend. First, I needed an internet café to research Milton Keynes accomodations. Lonely Planet pointed me at an internet café near the train station, which had become a ghastly-looking restaurant.

Since I was next to the train station, I went to look at the time-tables to find out when the direct trains to Milton Keynes left. There were no such trains.

According to the Ordnance Survey map, there were train tracks. According to the schedule, there were no trains.

Later, I finally reached Bletchley Park at Milton Keynes. According to a tourguide there, Bletchley rose to prominence partly because it was on the now-defunct rail line between Oxford and Cambridge. "Now-defunct" would explain it.

Departures: England Plus Paris: Part 6

While You Were Out