Subject: April report Date: 07 May 1997 12:48 EDT From: "Bruce Burwell" To: jameshugh@msn.com, dg620@freenet.carleton.ca, EBURWELL@CCS.CARLETON.CA, BURWELL@PARC.XEROX.COM, "Greg Goodwin" , sdelre@interlog.com, klotz@adoc.xerox.com, davedog@wimsey.com, 105202.217@compuserve.com, Haberlp@kan.marconi.ca CC: "Janet Ogilvie" , burwell@vossnet.co.uk (WARNING - LONG REPORT) We haven't sent a report for awhile so heres the March/April report from Maidenhead. we've now been to Brittany in northern France but I'll leave that for the next report. When we left our story last we had returned from skiing in La Plagne in the French Alps in early February. In the latter part of February and the first part of March we weren't too busy. We paid off some social debts incurred around Christmas on a most of the weekends. In England Mother's day is in March and we went to Whipsnade zoo north of London to celebrate. It was an appropriate day since the zoo was full of new mothers. There were baby everythings that day ! The most spectacular was a one-day old giraffe. It was at least 7 feet tall and walking around just fine. The other spectacular thing was the elephants. Whipsnade must be very confident about their elephants behaviour since they allow them to walk around the zoo (with their trainers). You could get as close as you were confortable with. Later that day we took Janet for a mother's day dinner to a Mexican restaurant. Like most restaurants we've tried in England it was great food at twice the price you'd pay in Canada. In the middle of March Sarah arrived with Conrad (aged 2 months) on a Friday. We took off after work for Cornwall in south-east England. We had rented a cottage on the harbour of a fishing village called Polperro on the southern coast. After a long drive down from Maidenhead in the van we arrived in the village. We had detailed directions from the owner on how to get to the cottage but this was not quite as easy as you might think. Polperro was built long before anyone had conceived of a car let alone a Toyota Previa van. The oldest part of the village (where were staying) doesn't have roads big enough for cars. To get close at all to where we were staying we had to drive through an area that looked like a regular town had been shrunk to half size. The best part was when the directions told us we had to take a left turn at a point where the stone cottages were barely 6 feet apart in the road. This clearly wasn't going to work so we temporarily left the van blocking the road and went off to look for our cottage key (which was kept at a dockside pub called the Blue Peter). They told us that the directions were wrong (which we knew) and directed us back a different way. After a lot of nervous backing up and going forward a different way we got through the 6 foot gap and down to within a couple of blocks of our cottage. The cottage was a cute little stone place right on the harbour. It was on a little lane called 'The Warren' which to us meant the 'Rabbit Warren' since it was tiny and narrow. The cottage was well equipped, we had scones, jam and clotted cream (imagine something mid-way between cream and butter, imagine clotted arteries) for breakfast. While in Polperro we took walks along the beautiful coastline, ate seafood, and took drives to neighboring villages. Back in Maidenhead later that week we picked up Alex (age unknwon) and Adam (20 months) at the airport. They'd had a remarkably peaceful flight since Adam had slept most of the night. That weekend we took off for a week-long ski trip in France and left the house to the Inches. Sarah kindly dropped as off at Gatwick at some ungodly hour (4 am I think) and we flew to Lyon. This ski trip was arranged through Tori's school and Tori was to leave later in the day on a bus with her buddies. Our flight and transfer to the Alp D'Huez resort was uneventful but it didn't look too promising when we got there - it was raining, there wasn't much snow on the ground around the resort and the rooms were, well, you wouldn't want to spend time in the rooms if the skiing was washed out. Lets call it 1 star Euro-student class. The next day was glorious though. The sun was shining brightly and we found that when we took the people-mover up the mountain to where the base of most of the lifts went from there was lots of snow, most of which had fallen a week earlier. Jan and I hadn't skiied this far south, this late in the spring ever before and we both got bad sunburns that day. The rest of the week was pretty much the same every day, great spring skiing with temperatures going from just below 0 C to 15 C. The snow would start as groomed ice in the early morning and turn to heavy slush by the end of the day. Alp D'Huez wasn't as big as the resort we went to in February but it still had lots of variety and some very interesting lifts. One part of the resort was across a wide, very steep and deep valley. You take a chair lift which goes down one side of the valley and then up the other to the base of the hill. The lift was almost more exciting than the skiing on the other side. Our meals on the trip were included in the price, the only catch being that we had to eat with the 130 odd (some odder than others) students from Tori's school and its 'brother' school. As well there were about 12 teachers along on the trip, and maybe 18 parents. During dinners the teachers would get to do the policing and the parents would all sit together and concentrate on getting extra wine from the waiters. Laura ate her meals with a table of Tori's buddies and thoroughly enjoyed herself. One night we went out to a fondue restaurant with one of Tori's buddies and her mother. It was a good meal but the highlight was the chocolate dessert fondue. Sort of a heaven on earth for Tori. The students were about as well behaved as I remember being on school trips. There was some drinking going on and we collected a lot of garbage on our balcony from the floors above. But if they were noisy at night we didn't know it since a day of spring skiing followed by red wine caused most of our nights to be early. A great week of skiiing overall. When we returned to Maidenhead Sarah, Alex, Adam and Conrad were settled in and starting to speak with British accents. They'd had fun visiting friends in Portsmouth and Bath while we were away. The week we were all together went quickly. One day we went out to a local wildlife park. It was a nice day and we saw all the different animals and were close to leaving when we saw a bouncy castle. For those who don't know a bouncy castle is a feature of any children's entertainment location in Britain (and we've now also seen them in France and the Canary Islands). Its just a large flat inflated ballon, usually with three walls and 'turrets', 'drawbridge' etc so that it looks like a castle. The kiddies take their shoes off and bounce off the castle walls to their hearts content. But the bouncy castle in Beale Park was different, it was more like a bouncy country manor that was totally enclosed. The kids went in one end and climbed through narrow bits up an incline, into a ballroom etc. The problem with it was that there were few or no ways for adults to see what was going on inside and so we had to wait at the far end of the manor for the kids to slide down the exit ramp. So when we put Tori, Laura, and Adam into the manor eventually Tori and Laura came out but no sign of Adam. They reported that Adam was blissed out in the ballroom and wasn't keen on leaving. So we sent Sarah into the bouncy manor on a commando mission to rescue Adam and navigate her way out the far end. She managed to squeeze through all the tight, child size spots and reach Adam in the balls but he wasn't interested in leaving. So she invoked the parental perogative, picked him up and headed for the far end. But she hadn't counted on the final challenge in the manor. In order to have a really exciting exit slide the bouncy castle had a very steep incline just before the slide. This had thick ropes laid along the side for kids to pull themselves up on but was otherwise smooth and steep. But the designers hadn't considered the plight of a parent attempting to climb this with a screaming two year old tucked under one arm and therefore only one hand free to use on the rope. So it was only via a hurculean effort and some un-bouncy castle-like language that Sarah managed to rapel herself up the mountain and hurl herself and Adam down the exit slide. Most of the rest of the Inches week here was pretty quiet. One night we went out to an Indian restaurant a couple of blocks away from our house and had a great meal. The funny thing was that we met a friend of Jan's and mine from Queens U. in the restaurant. We shouldn't have been too surprised at seeing Liz since she also works for Nortel but we didn't know she was visiting England so it was quite a surprise. At the end of the week I dropped the Inches at Heathrow and we then got ready for Ellen and John's visit. The first day Ellen and John were here we had Jan's cousin Kate, who lives in north London, and her two girls over for a bar-b-q. T+L quite enjoyed this since Kate's girls are exactly their ages. Kates husband Roger couldn't come since he was working for a Labour candidate in the general election. The next day we all went to Brighton for the day. This was a lot of fun, we got to see the spectacular 'Royal Pavillion' and then spent time on the pier doing rides and spending money in the games area. Tori's favorite ride was 'bumper boats'. Imagine a giant tank of water on top of the pier with ten motorized inner tubes with a kid or two in each tube. During the week Ellen and John entertained Tori and Laura for a day and then went off to the Cotswolds to visit friends of Johns. The day after John had left we went to visit Hever Castle in Sussex. This was quite nice but the day was memorable mainly because we managed to get spectacularily off-course on the way to Sussex due to driver and navigator error. Although we knew where we were at all times we managed to get pointed in the wrong direction on the motorway and went so far in the wrong direction that we pulled off the road and thumbed through the tourist books looking for something to visit in the area that we were accidentally headed towards. Ellen had a good week of visiting but her activities were somewhat limited by the IRA. They phoned in various bomb threats which disrupted the transport in London. One day when Ellen was in London Jan and I went in on the train to see a play with her in the evening. It had a serious topic, conflict between the generations in an east Indian family in Britain but was actually quite funny in a lot of parts. The next weekend we mostly tried to catch up on our bills/income tax/laundry that had been piling up with all the visitors. One day was very sunny and warm and I tried out a bike tour map book that I got for Xmas and biked through the Chilterns, a mostly green, somewhat wooded area of small hills near here. And the weekend after that we went to Brittany in northern France on an overnight ferry but this is getting too long so I'll cut it off here and report on that in the next report. cheerio Bruce p.s. Special bonus feature this month - Top Ten (or so) British words I never knew in Canada : Well of course I knew that a trunk was a boot and a flashlight was a torch but I didn't know the meaning or usage of these words : Oy : As in 'Oy there...wot you up to then.' Much the same meaning as Hey in Canada. Brilliant : As in 'Well thats brilliant then' or 'Brilliant' meaning wonderful, fantastic. Never used in the sarcastic way it would be in Canada. Faggot : A meatball made of pork liver. I bought 'Six Faggots in A Creamy West Country Sauce, brought to you by Mr. Brains' at the frozen food section in our local Sainsbury's (equivalent to Loblaws). I bought it mainly for the label, but did eat two of the six. Fete : All the fetes I've heard of have been sort of a community party cum fair. Dosh : Slang for cash. Naf : Slang for bad as in 'Thats a naf pub'. Fags : I knew this one of course but I never expected that I would never hear the word cigarette. However, Sarah, I have not yet heard the expression 'Got a lucifer for me fag ?' except from Tori. Me : My as in 'You got me fags mate ?' Cheers : Most overused word in England. Used to conclude every personal transaction e.g. in place of thanks, fine, good-bye. Often has both the connotation of thanks and goodbye. P : Pence. But no one EVER says 20 pence, they say 20 P. Bacon : Well OK the raw materials going into the bacon look the same but thats where the similarity ends so I'm still hoping that there is some other word which means 'Bacon which gets crispy' which Sainsbury's will recognize. Knickers : Like fags, I had thought this was a cute thing that people in Britain had said 100 years ago. But its the default word for undies.