Ein²

[Essaying England]

S&M Files, Episode 1: November 24, 1999
Introduction

England is well... England. The stereotypes are all true.

Little lanes
Wet weather
Tiny shops
Small cars
Outrageous prices
Little red chimneys
British countryside
All those silly Monty Pythoners everywhere. Two on the corner. One serving me at the store. Two figuring out how to hire a shopping cart. Help! I'm stuck in a skit.

It's like an overdone Hollywood set brought to life.

Flew in from bright sunshine and fluffy into a slow descent into wet and drizzling. Welcome to London, Stephen Dodd.

Our beautiful [temporary] home.

We have no heat. This is not a mistake. This is a feature.

Our three-storey flat is not heated. We stepped out yesterday to discover it was warmer outside. It's like walking into a room and discovering all the windows have been left open all day. But they're not. They're just single paned with no insulation. And no heating.

Well, that's no entirely true. When they fire up the deep fryers from the Fish and Chips shop downstairs, we get leftover Fish and Chip heat. Mmmmm. Fish and Chip on the brain all day, everyday. Tune into your 24 hour deep fried fish and chips channel.

Ok, the living room has two wall units that must be plugged in to work sporadically. You have to keep the living room door closed or the heaters just laugh at you. I wear thermal long underwear even in the living room.

The bathroom definitely does not have heating. It is very reminiscent of using an outhouse on a brisk Jasper morning. Actually the "bathroom" on the top floor is just that - no toilet even though there is a definite spot for one. In the middle of the night the bathtub almost looks tempting. (Note to Michelles and mums - note the *almost*. We are civilized. Yes, yes.)

It's a relatively large three bedroom flat complete with washer/dryer in the kitchen for a modest $2000 cdn (or less) a month. It could charitably be described as run down. The carpets are the color of dirty cement. Flipping a switch requires a pause while the lights consider. I'm just now realizing how immaculate our old "adventure" house was.

On the plus side, out the back between buildings, alleys and sorry looking brick gardens is - barely- a view of the sea! Out the front are double decker buses that look right into the living room as they go by. If I had a pole I could poke the bus as it goes by the window. Poke! Aiiieee!

Down the street are dozens of tiny shops including a Safeway with almost seven or eight aisles. We tried our Safeway Club Card. It didn't go no matter how many attempts the clerk made.

Downtown Brighton

Pretend you had a law that said all shops must be built on a back alley.

Now imagine careening down the alley, dodging cars, lorries and pedestrians, thinking all the time that you were about to exit onto a main street. But you don't. The alley's just lead to lanes. The lanes lead to more lanes. It's a good thing the curbs are low because the sidewalk is often needed as vehicle navigation. It's like being in a maze, minus the minotaur plus a car.

I'm glad I wasn't driving. I kept wanting to pull over to the right which would have been terrible inconvenient for my insurance record.

There are main streets. It takes two lights to cross them with a wee bit of tea break in the middle. The roads have "LOOK LEFT" AND "LOOK RIGHT" painted on them which is very handy as it seems even the locals can't quite figure out the traffic.

They love traffic circles here. Big ones, little ones. Odd ones. Whoosh. Imagine your local residential street corner with a traffic circle.

Land of Culture

Stopped at a convenience store for cell phone magazine. In one corner was the hardcore porn (can you say 144 pt "SHAG"), in the other family magazines with pictures of the Queen Mum. In between was this nebulous area of uncertain content. Blazing headlines and flesh prevailed. I had no idea if the inside would turn out to be Letters and Lovers of Better Gardening.

I would expect Pubs to be called the Crow amp; Dog or Iron Keep but the local pub bears "Spread Eagle."

Letting a House

We went to two estate agents. They both smiled and looked slightly amused when we explained we wanted to rent a flat.

One said, "oh, well it's really quite slow and what we do have is really quite expensive". You've got to be worried when a sales agent uses the word expensive.

This is Brighton. The major city south of London. 2 Bedroom flats for rent: Agent #1 - Two. Agent #2 - One.

Here it seems quite common to purchase a floor of a house with other people owning other bits and pieces. I can't quite figure out who then repairs the roof or fixed the foundation. I suspect the answer is "not".

We did find a listing for a nice detached house (an uncommon thing) for rent for only £3400 / month ($8500 cdn).

The market's going crazy. My relatives insist we should buy instead for the same price. I'm tempted.

Shopping Carts

Sometimes it's the little things.

The shopping carts have independent back wheels. This makes it very easy for parallel parking. Very difficult for turning to avoid little old ladies or navigating heavy groceries up a steep inclines - like where we live. Yikes!

The Phone Company

BT Telecom at great expense put out an elaborate booklet and CD-ROM with a free phone number to call for questions about signing up with them. So I call the phone company and get "bzzt...This service is temporarily unavailable. <click>" Somehow it just seem appropriate. :)

Having Fun

No don't get me wrong. I'm not bitter. It's all rather amusing. Quite crazy actually but that's alright; you have to be to live here. I'm starting on it now. :)

Tomorrow, I see the sea. From here you can hear the Gauls.

Miss you all.

Cheers!

[Evolution of Eingang]

One of the questions I get asked fairly frequently by people is "How did you come up with Eingang as your nickname?" Here explained are the mysterious origins of "Eingang" or "Ein."

Once upon a time, in a cold, beautiful land, there lived a quirky blonde sysop named Michelle. Michelle had a long history of using electronic bulletin boards in the early 1980s, long before the days of Internet popularity. Among her many first pseudonyms or nicknames were things like The Admiral, Irish Coffee, or Desiderata, although most of those were for specific clandestine purposes. She often just used her own first name and a fine name it was. However, she had quickly discovered that using her own rather feminine name was prone to bring unwanted attentions upon her. She flitted electronically amongst a mostly (hormone-laden) geeky male world like a ghostly angel of the aether.

When the day came to join the ranks of the Internet Relay Chatters (IRC) in 1992, she didn't feel comfortable in using a feminine name. She wanted something vaguely male sounding or non-gender specific. At the time, she was travelling quite often between her beautiful, cold land and Switzerland. The areas of Switzerland she was in were German-speaking, and the word "Eingang" appeared all over the place: on the entrance to the highways, above doors into malls or buildings, everywhere!

This word appealed to her. It appealed to her a lot. So "Eingang"--entrance--she became. German speakers know "Eingang" is a masculine word, and English speakers generally don't know, so she didn't ever suffer from those unwanted attentions. Later, she decided, in retrospect, that her nickname should really fully be "Eingang des Chaos"--the entrance to chaos--which, for those of you who know her well, is very appropriate.

Now, many many years later, far away from her beautiful, cold land, she's still the Eingang or the Ein, and there are many EinThings. You might say that she has her own Eindentity!

[Student Standards]

Even though I'm working on a Ph.D. and have been for several years, I want my home to feel like a home, and not like the remnants of a free-for-all jumble sale. This is especially important when you consider that I spend almost all of my time working from home. Order, organization, cleanliness, and comfort are definitely my bywords and clash strongly with my recollections of days of living off of $3.25 (CDN) an hour in a shared apartment, sleeping on the floor, and eating instant noodles. That's the student experience. It's definitely over-rated! I don't miss those years at all.

If I'm going to live the student lifestyle, I'd rather do it more in a Gilmore Girls fashion, with designer desks, cozy carpets, and swoopy stereo equipment. I mean, how can you be expected to work or study without decent tunes and sound. Now that the first blush of youth, as we say, is gone from my cheeks, it's time to do some serious nesting. Let there be coffee tables, cushions, and CD racks. Amen!

[Weeping White]

I woke up this morning in Edmonton and the sky was weeping white, coating the trees, the hills, and brown ground with a soft carpet. The main streets, while mostly plowed, were somewhat devoid of traffic, so there was a hush, appropriate to the virgin wool coat of the world. Little flakes dance like dust motes caught in an errant sunbeam. The sky is an even snowy grey, so unlike the darker, drearier skies of our Brighton home. On days like this, it is so easy to feel at peace and one with the world, believing that perhaps people and places are not so bad after all.