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livThe end of the academic year has been really lovely, for several reasons.
My students were kind and invited me to join them for their end of year do. This took place in a flat belonging to one of the group, who had managed to conjure up gammon with all the trimmings, up to and including home-made mince pies. Much nicer than joining the scrimmage at restaurants in December! Another student, a religious Muslim, initiated that conversation I love having about what it's like to belong to a minority religion around Christmas, so we got to bond a bit. (The other religious Muslim in the group declined to attend the party; I don't know if he objected to the alcohol or to the Christian elements, but anyway, I have definitely been in that place in my life, so I have lots of sympathy with him. I don't think he particularly likes me, though, so it's unlikely we'll get to compare notes in the same way.) And I left fairly early so the students could continue to enjoy the rest of the party without feeling inhibited.
The snow was kind and listened to the students' earnest pleas and wishes for snow, with a really impressive snowfall the following day, continuing for about 6 hours and making proper snow drifts. And most of us tutors were kind and let the doctorlings out of classes ten minutes early so that they could go and play in the snow, which they did with a gusto more expected of 2-year-olds than 20-year-olds. Most endearing.
The downside was that I was supposed to be travelling to Scotland that afternoon. I prudently left an hour early to make sure to get to the station on time. But this was thwarted because the earlier bus didn't show up. And I waited in the cold for over an hour, at which point some random guy came and informed me that the buses couldn't get up the steep hill to the campus due to the icy conditions. So I went back in to the medical school to warm up and book myself a taxi, at which point the bus showed up just when I was too far away to run for it. Then I had to wait another 80 minutes in the snow for the taxi. Some employees of the science park across the road were kind and brought me hot chocolate, though, which was really touching even if it didn't quite mitigate being extremely cold and damp and stressed about my train.
Obviously I missed the train I was aiming for, and the next one (because by this time it was full-on rush hour and it took more than 45 minutes to travel the last half mile to the station). The ticket inspector was willing to be kind and let me use my Advance ticket on the wrong train, except that with all the stress I had completely forgotten to get my tickets printed. So I had to pay full fare after all, £80 on top of the £20 deal I'd been so proud to find. Actually once I got as far as Crewe it was dead easy to get to Glasgow – the travel time was shorter than for the 12 mile trip from the campus to Crewe!
My reason for being in Glasgow was thathadassah was kind and invited me to join her for a weekend break organized around her visit to Glasgow Reform community. Although I'd hoped to join her for the Friday night service and meal, actually she arrived at the B&B only just after I did.
The B&B, the Heritage, were kind and fed us a tasty tasty cooked breakfast included in the very reasonable price.hadassah had never experienced a "full English" breakfast before; she was already delighted with the selection of toast, cereal, fruit and yoghurt before she realized that eggs, beans, mushrooms, tomatoes etc were included. It wasn't really a proper Scottish breakfast (the hotel is run by Eastern Europeans), but it did have tattie scones in place of hash browns. The soft water was kind to my hair, as well.
A couple from the community were kind and offered us a lift from the hotel to the synagogue, which is in a rather awkward to get to suburb in the south of the city. However, the car refused to start. (It wasn't due to the cold; the temperature was well above freezing by mid-morning.) Happily, a stranger was kind and offered to start the car with her jump leads. We did try pushing, and managed to get the car going fairly fast for several dozen metres, but I think modern cars aren't really designed to start just by mechanically turning over the engine. Then we couldn't at all find how to open the bonnet to attach the jump leads, so we had to approach the Scottish Asian employee of an electrical shop across the road, who was both kind and knowledgeable and helped us out. We did try RTM, but it confused us by referring to the bonnet as the hood, so we couldn't find the appropriate section! In the end we were only 10 minutes late to synagogue.
The community were kind and welcoming, and several of them recognized me from when I used to attend from time to time as a PhD student in the early 2000s.hadassah's service was marvellous, of course. I really enjoyed the opportunity to participate in a service without running it. And a lovely Reform service at that! And the kindness continued when the community fed us a substantial kiddush including hot soup. Then our host couple were kind and invited me to join hadassah for lunch, at a rather pleasant Italian place just round the corner, even though I hadn't actually contributed anything. Their final kindness was to suggest that we could spend the evening at the Christmas market in town and to drop us off there.
The market was great fun; it being the shortest shabbat of the year, and at extreme northern lattitudes, we had barely an hour between finishing lunch and darkness descending, allowing us to spend money. So we made havdalah over a cup of hot ginger wine – wine, spice and fire all in one cup! Then we headed over to Edinburgh, since I'd recommended that if you only have a day and a half in Scotland, the capital is more exciting than Glasgow.
It was bitter cold, andhadassah was pretty tired after an intense couple of days, so we didn't really want to wander around the city looking for somewhere to eat. I had booked us a hotel, the Cairn, at the city end of Leith Road, so we had plenty of choice. We contemplated a menu of a Nepalese restaurant, which seemed an interesting option, and as we were looking to see what sort of veggie selection was available, a very very drunk man assured us that the place came highly recommended. We decided not to bother arguing, though the cold was more persuasive than the drunk man's recommendation.
It turned out that the man came from a party of 20 builders having their Christmas night out in the restaurant. They were loud and a bit silly but not unpleasant company. When they discovered thathadassah is a trainee rabbi, they first of all tried to shock her. With little success; she is not one to be fazed by swearing, risqué jokes or origami breasts! Then a few of them tried to discuss religion with her, which she handled gamely. In they end they were kind enough to pay our bill as a sort of apology for being so loud, or perhaps as payment for hadassah's rabbinic services. The food was completely mediocre, but the evening certainly memorable!
On Sunday the weather was surprisingly kind, with bright blue skies and at least mild, if not actually warm weather. We found just the kind of place I had envisioned takinghadassah for a more authentic Scottish breakfast than what you get in generic B&Bs: a cute little gay friendly café where the tattooed, dreadlocked server made us a really beautiful vegetarian fry-up, and hadassah made friends with the toddler out for breakfast with his dads.
Then we walked up to the Royal Mile and the Castle, which we didn't quite have time to visit properly, but we enjoyed the views from the hill. We found a man in a funny little touristy shop on the Mile who was kind and helpedhadassah identify her husband's possible Scottish connections, which led to a very attractive tartan she was able to buy for him. We were still full from breakfast, so instead of lunch we had a bowl of soup and some scones in a little café on the way down the hill towards the station. We had half an hour or so to wander round the New Town and listen to carol singers before catching our train.
hadassah was kind and invited me to stay with her over Sunday and Monday night. She also cooked a tasty, Middle Eastern style soup out of whatever happened to be in the storecupboard, and provided tea and wifi so that I could spend the morning catching up with work-related reading. Then she was even kinder and agreed to come with me to pick out a fabric for my wedding dress.
We headed to Soho where we made a very poor choice of restaurant for lunch; a Manchurian place which at first glance appeared to have a decent veggie section, but actually it turned out that their definition of veggie included minced pork in nearly all the dishes (!) We managed to find something we could eat, including some interesting skewer things with pancake rolls stuffed with spring onion. And then on to Berwick St (thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
doseybat who kindly advised me that that was the best place to find fabric). The shopkeepers, some of whom had genuine London accents such as I haven't heard in a long time, were kind and patient with my total ignorance of fabric buying. I ended up with three samples, purple, blue-red and green, which I now have to decide between. And we finished up with cream tea at a Patisserie Valérie, to make up for lunching mostly on side dishes. Then hadassah was kind and carried my everyday clothes home, so that I could go to the evening event wearing a dress and unencumbered. I had intended to wear a jacket over the dress, but unfortunately I had managed to lose the jacket during the travelling. So hadassah lent me a gold scarf which offset the dress very well.
The event in question was organized by![[twitter.com profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
julianhuppert who was very kind and invited all the alumni of a summer programme both he and I attended at the Weizman Institute when we were teenagers to the House of Commons for an evening reception. This was very pleasant (and it was exciting to be in the HoC!) even though there weren't any other alumni from my year. I met some interesting folk from other years, though. One odd observation: there are portraits of various political luminaries hanging on the walls, as you might expect, but bizarrely Dianne Abbott MP is pictured stark naked. This is particularly weird choice on the part of the artist, given that one of the things she's famous for is being the first black woman MP in this country.
Anyway, I had a completely fantastic time and feel very well recuperated from a long term. Productive and generally successful, but long.
My students were kind and invited me to join them for their end of year do. This took place in a flat belonging to one of the group, who had managed to conjure up gammon with all the trimmings, up to and including home-made mince pies. Much nicer than joining the scrimmage at restaurants in December! Another student, a religious Muslim, initiated that conversation I love having about what it's like to belong to a minority religion around Christmas, so we got to bond a bit. (The other religious Muslim in the group declined to attend the party; I don't know if he objected to the alcohol or to the Christian elements, but anyway, I have definitely been in that place in my life, so I have lots of sympathy with him. I don't think he particularly likes me, though, so it's unlikely we'll get to compare notes in the same way.) And I left fairly early so the students could continue to enjoy the rest of the party without feeling inhibited.
The snow was kind and listened to the students' earnest pleas and wishes for snow, with a really impressive snowfall the following day, continuing for about 6 hours and making proper snow drifts. And most of us tutors were kind and let the doctorlings out of classes ten minutes early so that they could go and play in the snow, which they did with a gusto more expected of 2-year-olds than 20-year-olds. Most endearing.
The downside was that I was supposed to be travelling to Scotland that afternoon. I prudently left an hour early to make sure to get to the station on time. But this was thwarted because the earlier bus didn't show up. And I waited in the cold for over an hour, at which point some random guy came and informed me that the buses couldn't get up the steep hill to the campus due to the icy conditions. So I went back in to the medical school to warm up and book myself a taxi, at which point the bus showed up just when I was too far away to run for it. Then I had to wait another 80 minutes in the snow for the taxi. Some employees of the science park across the road were kind and brought me hot chocolate, though, which was really touching even if it didn't quite mitigate being extremely cold and damp and stressed about my train.
Obviously I missed the train I was aiming for, and the next one (because by this time it was full-on rush hour and it took more than 45 minutes to travel the last half mile to the station). The ticket inspector was willing to be kind and let me use my Advance ticket on the wrong train, except that with all the stress I had completely forgotten to get my tickets printed. So I had to pay full fare after all, £80 on top of the £20 deal I'd been so proud to find. Actually once I got as far as Crewe it was dead easy to get to Glasgow – the travel time was shorter than for the 12 mile trip from the campus to Crewe!
My reason for being in Glasgow was that
hadassah was kind and invited me to join her for a weekend break organized around her visit to Glasgow Reform community. Although I'd hoped to join her for the Friday night service and meal, actually she arrived at the B&B only just after I did. The B&B, the Heritage, were kind and fed us a tasty tasty cooked breakfast included in the very reasonable price.
hadassah had never experienced a "full English" breakfast before; she was already delighted with the selection of toast, cereal, fruit and yoghurt before she realized that eggs, beans, mushrooms, tomatoes etc were included. It wasn't really a proper Scottish breakfast (the hotel is run by Eastern Europeans), but it did have tattie scones in place of hash browns. The soft water was kind to my hair, as well.A couple from the community were kind and offered us a lift from the hotel to the synagogue, which is in a rather awkward to get to suburb in the south of the city. However, the car refused to start. (It wasn't due to the cold; the temperature was well above freezing by mid-morning.) Happily, a stranger was kind and offered to start the car with her jump leads. We did try pushing, and managed to get the car going fairly fast for several dozen metres, but I think modern cars aren't really designed to start just by mechanically turning over the engine. Then we couldn't at all find how to open the bonnet to attach the jump leads, so we had to approach the Scottish Asian employee of an electrical shop across the road, who was both kind and knowledgeable and helped us out. We did try RTM, but it confused us by referring to the bonnet as the hood, so we couldn't find the appropriate section! In the end we were only 10 minutes late to synagogue.
The community were kind and welcoming, and several of them recognized me from when I used to attend from time to time as a PhD student in the early 2000s.
hadassah's service was marvellous, of course. I really enjoyed the opportunity to participate in a service without running it. And a lovely Reform service at that! And the kindness continued when the community fed us a substantial kiddush including hot soup. Then our host couple were kind and invited me to join hadassah for lunch, at a rather pleasant Italian place just round the corner, even though I hadn't actually contributed anything. Their final kindness was to suggest that we could spend the evening at the Christmas market in town and to drop us off there.The market was great fun; it being the shortest shabbat of the year, and at extreme northern lattitudes, we had barely an hour between finishing lunch and darkness descending, allowing us to spend money. So we made havdalah over a cup of hot ginger wine – wine, spice and fire all in one cup! Then we headed over to Edinburgh, since I'd recommended that if you only have a day and a half in Scotland, the capital is more exciting than Glasgow.
It was bitter cold, and
hadassah was pretty tired after an intense couple of days, so we didn't really want to wander around the city looking for somewhere to eat. I had booked us a hotel, the Cairn, at the city end of Leith Road, so we had plenty of choice. We contemplated a menu of a Nepalese restaurant, which seemed an interesting option, and as we were looking to see what sort of veggie selection was available, a very very drunk man assured us that the place came highly recommended. We decided not to bother arguing, though the cold was more persuasive than the drunk man's recommendation.It turned out that the man came from a party of 20 builders having their Christmas night out in the restaurant. They were loud and a bit silly but not unpleasant company. When they discovered that
hadassah is a trainee rabbi, they first of all tried to shock her. With little success; she is not one to be fazed by swearing, risqué jokes or origami breasts! Then a few of them tried to discuss religion with her, which she handled gamely. In they end they were kind enough to pay our bill as a sort of apology for being so loud, or perhaps as payment for hadassah's rabbinic services. The food was completely mediocre, but the evening certainly memorable!On Sunday the weather was surprisingly kind, with bright blue skies and at least mild, if not actually warm weather. We found just the kind of place I had envisioned taking
hadassah for a more authentic Scottish breakfast than what you get in generic B&Bs: a cute little gay friendly café where the tattooed, dreadlocked server made us a really beautiful vegetarian fry-up, and hadassah made friends with the toddler out for breakfast with his dads. Then we walked up to the Royal Mile and the Castle, which we didn't quite have time to visit properly, but we enjoyed the views from the hill. We found a man in a funny little touristy shop on the Mile who was kind and helped
hadassah identify her husband's possible Scottish connections, which led to a very attractive tartan she was able to buy for him. We were still full from breakfast, so instead of lunch we had a bowl of soup and some scones in a little café on the way down the hill towards the station. We had half an hour or so to wander round the New Town and listen to carol singers before catching our train.hadassah was kind and invited me to stay with her over Sunday and Monday night. She also cooked a tasty, Middle Eastern style soup out of whatever happened to be in the storecupboard, and provided tea and wifi so that I could spend the morning catching up with work-related reading. Then she was even kinder and agreed to come with me to pick out a fabric for my wedding dress. We headed to Soho where we made a very poor choice of restaurant for lunch; a Manchurian place which at first glance appeared to have a decent veggie section, but actually it turned out that their definition of veggie included minced pork in nearly all the dishes (!) We managed to find something we could eat, including some interesting skewer things with pancake rolls stuffed with spring onion. And then on to Berwick St (thanks to
doseybat who kindly advised me that that was the best place to find fabric). The shopkeepers, some of whom had genuine London accents such as I haven't heard in a long time, were kind and patient with my total ignorance of fabric buying. I ended up with three samples, purple, blue-red and green, which I now have to decide between. And we finished up with cream tea at a Patisserie Valérie, to make up for lunching mostly on side dishes. Then hadassah was kind and carried my everyday clothes home, so that I could go to the evening event wearing a dress and unencumbered. I had intended to wear a jacket over the dress, but unfortunately I had managed to lose the jacket during the travelling. So hadassah lent me a gold scarf which offset the dress very well.The event in question was organized by
Anyway, I had a completely fantastic time and feel very well recuperated from a long term. Productive and generally successful, but long.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-22 07:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-02 06:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-22 08:21 pm (UTC)(Around halfway through each iteration of kind began to toll like a Buddhist gong.)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-22 11:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-02 06:15 pm (UTC)Also, dig your scorf icon!
(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-22 11:57 pm (UTC)Sounds like a lovely break.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-02 06:18 pm (UTC)How is your dress coming along?
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-03 12:27 am (UTC)R and I are meeting with our designer tonight. R is going to have a pirate-y coat, and I'm going to have a green dress, but of course I'll know more after the meeting.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-23 09:35 am (UTC)Oh, and happy fun times too. Sorry that you had all the travel d00m :(
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-02 06:19 pm (UTC)The travel wasn't too bad; it was 3 hours of being cold and stressed, and £100 I hadn't budgeted for, but I'm fortunate enough that both of those are liveable with.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-23 12:12 pm (UTC)Oddly, I stayed in the same Heritage Hotel on a trip up to the University in September. Small world :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-02 06:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-02 06:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-23 02:17 pm (UTC)Says the person who I saw play in the snow like a two-year old when she was a doctoral student herself (whilst I played in the snow like an eight-year-old...).
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-02 06:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-26 09:50 pm (UTC)Thank you so much, Liv. A great time was had by all.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-02 06:23 pm (UTC)exoticum, exciting.