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.

Our Young Adults & Local Sights

Our Young Adults

We are having fun getting to know the young adults with whom we work.  They put on a fine farewell party for the Andrews, the local missionaries who started up the Center for Young Adults here and who now have completed their two-year mission.  See accompanying photo of the group at the party.

Royal Victoria Military Hospital Chapel

Netley Abbey

Netley Abbey

This weekend we decided to go to a church picnic at the last minute when the forecast changed from 80% to 10% chance of rain.  We were late and nobody was there, so we had a pleasant lunch together in the car and took some pictures of the local sights.  The chapel is all that remains of what was once the world’s largest military hospital (Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone in 1856).  The abbey, across town from the chapel, was built in the 1200s for Cistercian monks.  Henry VIII shut down all the abbeys in the 1500s (known as The Dissolution, following the Act of Supremacy by which Parliament made him supreme head of the Church in England) and he gave this one to a friend, who converted it to a manor house.  It was abandoned in the early 1700s.  It is still impressive.

A couple of items of interest about how things work:  we opened a local bank account the day after our arrival by depositing a check from our US bank account.  It finally cleared, eight weeks to the day after we deposited it.  We are told the delay has something to do with preventing money laundering.  It has just about cured us of depositing a US check again. 

The other interesting thing is the TV license fee, a $230 annual fee for each household that watches or records TV programs as they are being shown on TV, whether on TV set, computer, or phone.  Calling up old broadcasts over the Internet is apparently permissible without a license.  We responded that we do not watch TV and have been informed that we may get a knock on the door to see whether we are telling the truth.  The fees go to the BBC.  Please do not pass this news on to NPR.

Tower, Winchester, and Missionary Olympics

Patti & Dave at Tower of London, Tower Bridge with Olympic Rings in Background

Dave, Patti, and unknown tourist at Tower of London

The highlight of the past two weeks was a 3-day visit by daughter Patti and husband Dave Edwards on Dave's way to a combustion conference in Poland.  Our fears of congestion problems the day before the Olympics proved unfounded, as they breezed through customs and immigration with no waiting whatever, thanks perhaps to extra staffing and the immigration-officer strike being called off a day earlier.  We toured the Tower of London, where Thomas More and some of Henry VIII's wives served time or were executed, and viewed the armory and royal jewels displayed there.  We also toured Winchester, England's capital city prior to William the Conqueror's arrival in 1066, with its beautiful cathedral.  Their last day here, we saw the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum and got a nice view of Big Ben glowing in the evening sunlight and the outsides of Westminster Abbey (which closed early), and Buckingham Palace.  It was a pleasant 3-day tour, though a couple more days would have been nice.

Westminster Abbey

Winchester Cathedral

Big Ben in Evening Sunlight

 The young missionaries with whom we work here are a remarkable group.  They are spiritually mature and serious about their work; they also know how to have great fun with simple things.  Last week, for example, our little district of 8 plus us held our own Olympics, with us as photographer and scorekeeper, having a hilarious time with such contests as a raw-egg-in-a-tablespoon blindfolded carry, marshmallow-eating contest, and Kleenex contest (how fast can one empty a tissue box one-at-a-time with one hand?).  Ok, it sounds silly--you had to see it to appreciate it.  If you had, you too would pity people who resort to alcohol to have a good time, if you don't already.

Nearly Settled

Our landlord, having just returned from vacation two weeks ago, checked out our complaint of pet urine odor in the carpet, and we had new carpet 48 hours later (great response!).  While the old carpet was up we treated the worst spots on the floor with vinegar, then baking soda, but the odor returned when the new-carpet smell faded.  However, sprinkling half a pound of baking soda on top of the carpet and letting it work its way in may have finished the odor, though it’s a bit early to declare victory.   Febreeze helps too, but we’re giving most of the credit to the baking soda.  Why put this in a mission blog?  Well, you may need to know it someday.

With the carpet replaced, we have now added a dresser, a wardrobe, and a permanent bed to our furnishings.  Our Vauxhall station wagon is very handy for hauling furniture home.  We really feel for the couples in London with unfurnished flats and no cars in which to haul furniture.   On the other hand, gasoline (petrol) is a bit over $8 per US gallon.

In the past two weeks we’ve met with local church leaders to receive further direction on our assignment with the Center for Young Adults and have met a number of the young adults with whom we’ll be working.  We spoke in church on Sunday.  There are roughly 200 young adults in the three congregations with which we are concerned.  We are greatly impressed with the caliber, vision, and commitment of the church leaders here.  When we mentioned to the stake president that we are without Internet access until Aug. 1, he pulled a cellular wi-fi hotspot out of his pocket and said, “Here, use this.”  Talk about being prepared for everything!

New Forest Free-ranging Horse

The Andrews, our hosts and guides for most of the past month, took us to their place at the beach in Dorset via New Forest, a large park and former hunting ground of kings, where horses and cattle roam without fences.  The beach reminds us of the Oregon coast, where one may need a jacket in the summer.  A distinctive feature of this beach is that it has ocean-going swans.

Ocean-going Swans with Isle of Wight on Horizon

The Shopping Mission

We enjoyed our first meeting with our younger missionary colleagues this week.  I am very much impressed with their abilities, enthusiasm, and spiritual depth.  To me they seem better qualified for this work than I was at their age.  We also spent 2 evenings at the Southampton Center for Young Adults, being oriented and trained by Elder and Sister Andrews.

Our Living Room

Shopping:  We have spent most of our first 10 days in Southampton shopping to furnish our "flat" or townhouse (unsure whether a townhouse is a flat), with considerable success, acquiring a sofa ("settee") from Ikea, a nice used oak table and chairs, dishes, utensils and miscellaneous other items needed to fill a home.

Wheels turn slowly...  We should have Internet service in 2 weeks, until which time we get by with wi-fi at the church or by infrequently renting BT wi-fi for £5/day.  A week after opening a local bank account, we received a letter saying our initial deposit in the form of a check in US dollars would be credited to our account in 6-8 weeks, which seems rather slow for the 21st century.  We withdrew cash from an ATM with our US debit card and deposited it in the local bank in order to have a balance with which to qualify for Internet service.

Our Home for the Next 17 Months

We are settling in to what will be our home for the next 17 months or so.  We have a car due to the size of our area (a stick-shift Vauxhall station wagon).  Paul, due to some perverse genetic mutation, or perhaps just from being a guy, actually prefers a stick shift for driving in England, where the roundabouts require constant shifting.  An interesting detail about driving we learned last week:  a US driver’s license will do for 12 months, but after that we have to have English licenses, which involve mandatory lessons, expensive tests, and perhaps a 6-month effort to acquire.  This requirement seems to be safety-related until one learns it doesn’t apply to Canadians driving here.  One may perhaps be pardoned for suspecting that it’s related to an incident that occurred in the colonies in 1776.

Our House (blue door, on right)

Our house is quite nice, about 12.5 ft wide inside, two storeys (English for stories), two bedrooms, a washing-machine hookup in the kitchen, and a fenced back yard.  It was unfurnished (that includes nothing in the kitchen but an oven and hob), so we’ve done some shopping [understatement] and still have a lot to do.  We ate our first home-cooked meal here today, on a table consisting of two upside-down suitcase and a microwave box. Translation:  we have some pots and pans, dishes and silverware now; we do not have any furniture except a small chest and two patio chairs loaned to us by the Andrews family and two air mattresses we bought the first night (in retrospect, we should have also bought blankets and figured out how to turn on the heat the first night). We are trying to scout out used furniture stores, but they are widely scattered so shopping takes a long time.  Thank goodness for GPS!  And with church / mission responsibilities starting this week, we are hoping we can find something quickly.

Our Back Yard

Our address is

12 Quob Farm Close

West End, Southampton

England SO30 3HE

We have an inexpensive cell phone issued by the mission, the number of which is 07800 61 5397.  I believe to call from the US you precede it by 011 44 and drop the first 0 of the English number.

The church members here have been wonderful.  The Andrews, a local couple who have been working with the Young Single Adult center here, have fed us, showed us the stores and charity shops we are and will be frequenting for furniture; given us furniture and a refrigerator and dishes; helped us get established in every way, even offering us space in their home until we get settled (which we declined because we wanted to rough it just a little); and introduced us to church members.  Everyone we have met has been very gracious and kind.