Service Project, Food, Driving, and Language

English Garden Clean-up

Since our last update our young single adults held a successful service project, bringing some order to a once-beautiful English garden that had declined along with the health of its owner in his later years.  They demolished a dilapidated shed, cut overgrowth, pulled weeds, scraped weeds from cracks in the pavement, and removed a good deal of rubbish  [Vocab lesson:  it’s rubbish, not trash; dust bin liner, not trash bag; laundry peg, not clothespin; nappy, not diaper].  The project was followed by an American-style barbecue, including West-Virginia-style hot dogs at our flat.  

Shed Demo Crew

Post-project Barbecue

 Connie fixes refreshments and/or meals several times a week to feed young adults or our local missionaries, and Paul helps.  We have met with several young adults whose health or other issues have kept them from participating in the activities and lessons, and are working on getting them involved.  We attended a couple of beautiful baptismal services for young adults last weekend, one for an African man and one for a Mainland Chinese.  A good number of students from countries where the Church has little or no presence are converted here and then return home, which we believe is the foundation for growth once their homelands open their doors for the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Food:  Most types of American foods are available, but with different brand names and some variations in composition and taste.  Less sweetening is used here.  Many items have less or no salt added.  Hot dogs, depending on the brand, taste like either American hot dogs or breakfast sausage.  Major chains have plenty of sweet pickles, but we have found dill pickles only at a Polish market, where also we learned kielbasa is the Anglicized Polish word for sausage, so it is insufficient simply to ask for kielbasa there.  Applesauce comes almost exclusively in half-pint or smaller sizes.  Rhubarb is popular here, and is available in yogurt and crumble (dessert) dishes.  We haven’t found butterscotch pudding (the kind you cook, for a yummy recipe of Connie’s) anywhere.  Seafood sauce is mayonnaise-based rather than tomato-based.  Eggs are displayed in room-temperature parts of the store, not refrigerated sections.  Connie continues experimenting to make tomato sauce taste American.  We drove 50 miles to the nearest Costco but found no foods that were on our unavailable-here list.  American brands of food are available from Amazon.co.uk at quite high prices.  Food vocab lesson:  chips, not French fries; crisps, not chips; biscuits, not hard cookies; courgettes, not zucchini; aubergine, not eggplant.  There is some truth in the following statement, variations of which have been attributed to George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill, and Oscar Wilde, among others, “The English and the Americans are two peoples divided by a common language.”

Flat news:  we had noticed 4-5 stepping stones overgrown with sod in our back yard, and decided to raise them up to have a few dry spots when the rains return.  Upon investigation, we found there were 10 rather large ones, which Paul has now elevated slightly above lawn level, making it possible to reach the tool shed when things are soggy.  Over the weekend we looked at our place on Google Earth and found its picture was taken before the stones were covered, as it shows them clearly.  If you should wish to see for yourself, good luck, as Google Earth and Google Maps put our address about 5 blocks east of where it really is (we are at 12 Quob Farm Close, Southampton, which is just on the other side of the row of trees along the east side of Quob Lane).  Paul also replaced the 4 square stones in the center of the yard, also visible on Google Earth, with dirt and planted grass there.

Driving Terror

Driving:  Connie has tried driving more and more.  Last week she drove home from the big Tesco store and from the Southampton chapel, both several miles and 3 roundabouts away.  After the first such adventure she had a headache and Paul had to pry her hands off the steering wheel.   And lest we ever get overconfident, a local has told us these roads are much better than in Wales, where 2-way traffic goes 60 mph on 1-lane roads.  Now that sounds scary.  The current price of petrol is about $8.55 per US gallon.  Driving vocab lesson:  petrol, not gasoline; car park, not parking lot; way out, not exit; dual carriageway, not divided highway; give way, not yield; motorway, not freeway; caravan, not mobile home; queues, not congestion; lorries, not trucks.

One more vocabulary lesson:  Dodgy means risky or bad, posh means rich or rich-looking.  Shortly before we arrived, two of our missionaries were mugged by CHAVs in a dodgy part of town.  It probably wouldn't have happened if they'd been in a posher area.  CHAV stands for council-housing-associated-violence and is slang for perpetrators of it.  Council housing is low-rent government housing, of which there is quite a lot.