A Visit to the North Sea

As far as beaches go, I'm told that these are not the best in England.  And by "not the best," the English mean "the mist covers a multitude of ex-coal mining village sins."  Apparently, they used to push all the waste from the coal mines into the ocean with bulldozers.  It looks like God has redeemed the place quite a bit in the last 20 years, eh?

We were invited to church in Peterlee, lunch, and a walk on the coast by the headmistress at Durham High School for Girls, Mrs. Templeman, and her husband.  Nathan and I met her when we came in March.  Mrs. Templeman visited my last school, Whitefield, a couple of years ago when she was doing some research on private schools in the States.  She also was connected to us through some friends from Christ Church in Atlanta.  It was a lovely service, a lovelier lunch, and the loveliest walk.  Lovely, lovely, lovely.
  

 Also with us was Paul, Mrs. Templeman, and Naomi, all who work at the school in Durham.

This is Mr. (Dr.?) Templeman and his 87 year-old mother-in-law, Mrs. I-didn't-quite-catch-her-name.  She and I talked for probably two of the three miles we walked, and she was so interesting.  She told me a sad/touching story about a black American GI who asked to walk her home from her job in London at the Royal Mail in 1943.  It was the first time she'd actually met a black person, and she was scared to death about what her mother might think, but he said, "I don't mean any harm, but it's just that it's illegal to walk down the street with a white girl where I come from."  She agreed ("I think he liked my red hair," she winked.), and she never saw him again after that.  


What an amazing day...  Thank you, Templemans, for your hospitality!


If you want to win a prize, leave a comment.  You have until Friday morning (in England) whenever I decide to wake up. :)

Blog Feedback from a Brit

The following is an e-mail from a certain British friend living in Atlanta.  He will remain unnamed, but he and his wife have the same names as a certain long-standing famous General Hospital soap opera couple. :)

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Enjoying the blog … keep it up. Oh and Nathan, fewer jeans-white-tennis-shoe combos – it’s like carrying your Passport in a big frame.

Well my little numismatics, I couldn’t let you not see this picture:

Isn’t it wonderful? It’s the pattern that all the new coins make. You have overwhelming nuclear superiority and the world’s largest everything, and we have cute coin patterns. Oh well.

Thank You, Amy, for Following Directions, But...

Just to clarify, you can comment on ANY post from last Thursday the 7th to this Friday the 15th to be eligible for the prize, NOT just the New Blog Features post.

Amy, I appreciate you being extra attentive to directions, just like any good middle school Language Arts teacher would be.  I acknowledge that my wording was a little ambiguous.  Sorry about that.  AND, I want to thank you for your Letterman style top ten (but it was really five) list.  It warmed my heart.

I suppose now would be a good time to show you how providentially wonderfully Amy's little gift matches our new Ikea bedding.

And, no, I don't normally have an over-sized teacup and saucer on my side of the bed.  

It's normally on Nathan's side.  

That was totally a Nathan joke.  

What's become of me?

My Very First Contest for Readers

Ever since I posted about the new blog features I've had a few interesting things happen.  First of all, my 10-year high school reunion post shot up from #10 to #1 in popularity.  That was strange...  The power of suggestion.  Let's see if I can get you to put my first post from England ever on the charts.  

Secondly, my sister had this to say on my Facebook wall today: 

While looking at your blog history that you set up it has been quite interesting to "hear" your writing voice go from, Californian, to a southern accent, and now to a British one. Will the real Nicole Sampley please stand up???? :)

Amy agreed in a comment below hers, and Allison had the nerve to "Like"!  What the heck?  Is it annoying?  It's not like I'm trying to imitate an English person when I write.  My mom used to (badly) absorb foreign people's accents when talking to them, especially on the phone with Romanians.  I'll blame her!  

However, I can trace this habit through my whole life.  It's kind of a mishmash of every one else's accents I started out poking fun at my whole life, starting with Kelee's "flag, bag, tag" Seattle to Lorena's "Oh my god, the poor cat!" Colombia to Kristin's "car, mom, class" Michigan to Katie's "say 'bye bye bye' Oliver" and "I just can't live without my channels" Birmingham (Alabama, not England) to Otha Lee's "That's one of them crazy bikes!" deep South to the classic English "shocking" (said with a heavy dose of irony, of course) and "a total nightmare" and "quite right."

Just let me know if it's coming off as, well, I'm-sooo-English-now-I-just-can't-help-it-after-only-six-weeks-here.

Lastly, I've had more than a few blogstalkers confess to reading and not commenting - from India to Ireland and lots of places in between.  It turns out we many of us have some great memories and/or bloggy friends in common.  Come on Halifax, Fort Meyers, Oakland, Fresno, Van Nuys, and Hendersonville (and anyone else who's been on the blog in the last four hours of this writing).  It's your turn to 'fess up!  You too Atlanta!  You too Bakersfield!  I taught you how to comment.  I don't care if you're a complete stranger.  DO IT!

What do I have to do?  Tap dance?  Stand on my head?  Give you a prize?  Hm... a prize... everyone likes prizes...

In fact, if you've commented from my original "WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE?" post last Thursday until Friday morning of this week (since I'm 8 hours ahead of the West coast, I'll give you guys the rest of Thursday to enter while I'm sleeping), I'll put your name into a little top hat and I'll draw a winner on Friday afternoon.  I'll mail you, O Lucky Winner, a treasure from England, no matter where in the world you are.  Best of luck.  

In an effort to not be too English, I chose a picture from Google images of "prizes" that had words in Arabic.  Salaam.

I Guess It's Not So Bad

For all my ranting about red tape, I couldn't fairly be complaining about how ugly Durham is.  I took this picture on the Palace Green after dropping off my umpteenth job application.  Autumn leaves are here!

England=Red Tape

I think this was best put by our neighbor, Maggie. "Nothing is ever really straightforward, is it?"


1) Our cell phones don't get good reception at our house.  It costs 3p a minute to call the States, but 25p a minute to call anywhere in the UK.  We have to pay this ridiculous price because we can only "pay as we go" instead of get a contract because we have no credit history here.  


2) We've lost quite a bit of money because they didn't tell us we had to dial "424" before the international code and the number, and they charged us regular international rates for those first few calls to our parents.  Grrr...  


3) Nathan tried to circumvent this by buying and using a calling card, but he didn't know that they charged him 25p a minute to route the call through London before sending it to the States.  We want to buy different phones and service through Tesco, but we have to have a local billing address first.


4) We wrote a substantial check in dollars from our American bank account to deposit into our new British bank account (HSBC) to establish the said billing address.  We were told that it would take 6-8 weeks to clear, during which time Nathan needed to move some money from another American account into the one from which we wrote the big check to cover the cost.


5) The check cleared a day before the money made it into that particular account (much, MUCH sooner than 6 weeks), therefore causing the very first check we wrote to our new account to bounce.  Both banks charged us separate fees for "insufficient funds."


6) We've since resorted to paying the American foreign ATM fee for taking the maximum allowable amount out of the ATM at HSBC and depositing the cash into the bank after standing in two lines... every day for two weeks.


7) HSBC, our new bank, still has not sent us debit cards.  We cannot pay any bills from this account because we do not have checks either.  We cannot apply for any local credit cards until this is done.


8) Our credit cards from the States are charging us an international conversion fee every time we use them to buy groceries or make any purchase.


9) Calling these local places (banks, phone companies, etc.) from home has proven impossible.  Our phone company, BT, was supposed to start service (land line and internet) on October 4.  We never got it.  We have dial tone but cannot call any numbers out.  We tried to call to figure out what was wrong, but my mobile phone call got sent to India for customer service, and the Indian taking my call put me on hold until my cell phone service got cut off for lack of sufficient funds - 25p a minute, remember?


10) The Indian fellow tried to call me back, but he called the neighbor/landlord instead.  The Mrs. picked up, but she had no idea what he was talking about and hung up.


11) Shortly thereafter, our neighbors/landlords could not receive any calls.  The couldn't get any internet.  It seems that BT had overtaken their Sky phone/internet service, and several wires were crossed.


12) We just got a bill in the mail from BT charging us for service from 17 September, which is ridiculous because we still don't have service.  


13) We are UNHAPPY campers.


And I haven't even gotten into registering for the National Health Service, getting a National Insurance Number (like a SSN, you have to have one in order to get a job), registering for child protection classes, and getting a CRB check (similar to a criminal background check). 


My internal American self is screaming, "Who is responsible for this craziness?  Where's the apology?  Where's the accountability?  Where's the honesty?  Where's the customer service?  Where's the justice?"


If these stone walls weren't really, really hard and twice as old as America, Nathan would punch a hole in one.


God save us from more red tape!


P.S.  We just got back from registering with the doctor's office here.  Other than the facts that the nurse didn't use gloves when testing our urine samples and the doctor we saw looked about TWENTY, it was just lovely.  No complaints.

Nathan's Matriculation Ceremony

After all of the induction business - a complete waste of time in Nathan's estimation - there was an official matriculation ceremony in Durham Cathedral.  Thousands of graduate students were inducted a the same time.  There was only a handful of people there to watch the ceremony, and I got a front seat in the back, if that makes sense.  There are no pictures allowed in the cathedral, but I snapped these two before I remembered that.  I remembered that when a very stern looking man caught the guy sitting next to me taking pictures.  Oops!

 Students filing in the front

 My handsome husband after the ceremony outside on the Palace Green

 It was a beautiful but blustery day!

 He wanted to take a picture of himself, of course.

Afterwards we went to Vennel's (Hannah's favorite place for cake, which I read after we went there.  Cool, huh!) for some treats: a flapjack - not like an American pancake - and some hot chocolate for Nathan, and some peppermint tea and chocolate cake for me.

After a few attempts at the self-taking pictures, a nice man came over an offered to take our picture.  I love this wall with all the lavender flower pots.