Warwick Castle

On our quest to see more of England than the people who live here, we ventured out for another weekend trip, this time to Warwick (this post) and Stratford Upon Avon (next post). We realized we've been here for three months and hadn't really made it to enough proper castles (we have been to the Tower of London, which is a very proper castle). So we took our first car road trip, tried our best to understand road signs to towns that mean nothing to us, mostly didn't get lost, and navigated all round-a-bouts like naturals. We headed south a couple hours to a beautiful youth hostel in Stratford Upon Avon, out in the countryside in an old estate.

Our first day out was to Warwick Castle and we had a fantastic time. The weather was bordering on rain the whole time, and partly due to the weather and just playing tourist in November, there weren't many people visiting the castle, which was a welcome change from some of the crazy crowds during out London visit last month.

The castle was beautiful, both inside and out and we all loved just being at an actual castle.


Inside many of the castle rooms were displays of one kind or another that told the story of the castle and its inhabitants and we enjoyed imagining what life was like. We went on a tour about castle defense systems, which was really interesting as well.


Tala and Noah tested out the security apparatus, and afterward, they and Mindy went on a dungeon tour that was like a Halloween scare scene. Blood, and darkness, and fake executions left them a bit freaked out. Nissa and I chose to visit the river and an old water mill.


The surrounding countryside was beautiful as well.



And at the end of the day, we returned to the youth hostel and snuggled together in a common room to watch X Factor, the local American Idol show that we have embraced in order to be conversant with our new countrymen and women. Thankfully, Jedward got voted off finally.

Half Term Break

A future post will reflect on the educational system some more (is it wise for 17 year olds to declare a permanent major and pick their career path?), but for now this post is to share the beauty of the year round school: half term breaks!

The week leading up to Halloween was the first of these half term breaks for the kids so we decided to use the time to see a bit more of England. We decided to spend half the break in London and half in Bath for an eight day excursion (6 days for me and Noah as Noah was the last to recover from the flu). It was an amazing week as the pictures below show. Some of the things not included in the pictures are that the weather was amazing (in England!), London is crazy crowded but we never lost the kids, the Underground is simple to use and figure out, intercity train travel is so awesome that it reinforces how ridiculous it is that we have such a terrible system in the U.S., we saw Billy Elliot on stage in London (in London!), and that it is hard to express how cool it is to be walking in places that others have walked and lived in for hundreds and thousands of years. Having a pint in a pub that started as a pub in 1361 is just really cool to me.

To start, that picture up top is really us really at Stonehenge. To be honest, I wasn't completely looking forward to visiting Stonehenge, but felt that we had to go since we are here. I thought it would be zoo like and not live up to the hype. As impressive as it might be, would it really be worth the time to visit large stones in the middle of a field? To my surprise, it was completely overwhelming, powerful, humbling, and just amazing. We were late in the day so perhaps the crowds were less or maybe just the path around Stonehenge was done well so that you both had close access and never felt that like a crowd was gathering around. The sun was going down, which cast an amazing light on the stones.

This picture is of the town of Lacock, once voted Britain's loveliest. It's hard to argue with that assessment. Just look at this picture - it's an incredible setting.


These pictures are in no particular order by the way, and the one below is of the Royal Crescent area in Bath. These buildings were completed in 1775, so are one year older than the United States.


Also in Bath, are these Roman Baths, the most preserved Roman Baths in northern Europe. This was also incredible to visit, supplemented by a very well done audio tour. These baths are 2,000 years old and the technology of the building and the water system is unbelievable. What was particularly interesting to me is that these baths and the building that housed them (there used to be a very high roof above the baths) were built on the western outskirts of the Roman empire and would have been radically different than anything else in the vicinity. Yet when the empire was crumbling and the Romans pulled out of Britain, all the know how of how to build these types of buildings left as well.


In London we went to the Tower of London (of course) and also had a great time. What's not to like about kings and queens and torture?


The Tower Bridge (not the London Bridge) on a perfectly blue day - how cool to be hanging out on the Thames and looking at this!


And finally (for now), here is Tala inside the British Museum, where we had another incredible day. It was quite strange to see the world's artifacts all gathered in London (does England "own" them? Can anyone own the world's history? Are they the keepers of historical knowledge? Did they "steal" these objects through coloialism or other means?), but we took full advantage of seeing some amazing things. I think we all agreed how fascinating it was to see the Rosetta Stone, as cliche as that may be. This one stone is fully responsible for understanding ancient Egyption hieroglyphs. Without it, the ancient language would have been uninterpretable.


Our kids were great. They truly do find interest in the learning aspects of our travels (although Noah and I didn't fancy the fashion museum as much as the others). We also include plenty of chocolate to keep spirits up. One youth hostel even had a Wii, so that was a nice break from having to pay attention to the world.

We have some upcoming trips planned as well, including: Mindy and Tala to Paris this weekend, an overnight trip in the Peak District at a youth hostel that used to be an estate mansion, Mindy and me seeing Cat Stevens (!) unless the place I bought tickets from was a fraud, a week in Edinburgh and another 4 days in London. That brings us to mid-January. Still to plan are two weeks in April and one in June, plus some weekend adventures as well.

I think that is enough writing. Cheers.

The Duke's House and the NHS

We had a great English weekend last weekend, enjoying the beautiful grounds of Chatsworth House, a current residence of a Duke and Duchess, and subsequently a visit to the hospital and a first hand exposure to the National Health Service (NHS). The two pictures here showing the grounds and the inside of Chatsworth House speak for themselves. The acres of grounds were incredible, the manor immense, and the insides stunningly ornate.



While wrapping up our walk across the many gardens, my dad, who was visiting, slipped on a stone step and put a gash on his forehead. Socialized medicine to the recue - would it be a good or bad experience? First, one of the tour guides of Chatsworth House, and a former medical assistant, met us at the place of injury and did a thorough examination and completely dressed the wound. He didn't think a visit to the hospital was required, but also thought a second opinion would be proper.



After driving back to Sheffield (we bought a 1998 Peugeot and we drive it to visit the countryside) I took my dad to the local hospital. We walked into the "Minor Injury" unit (doesn't that make sense!) at about 6pm, walked right up to the reception desk, gave my dad's name and my local address and phone number, then we had a seat in the waiting room. Being socialized medicine, we should have had to wait for hours if not days, but within 10 minutes, we were called to a room by a nurse to be seen. My dad sat down and immediately was evaluated, original diagnosis confirmed, and new dressing applied. Instructions were given for proper caring of the injury as well as what to look out for if things turned unexpectedly worse. Ten minutes later we were done with the nurse, we waved good bye to the receptionist, and we went home.

There was only one thing missing from this whole thing. There was never any discussion about money, insurance, ability to pay, or anything. There was an injury and it was cared for. That was it. How anyone can be against a system like this is beyond me.

Educational Resolution

One month in, with the admissions process ancient history, I am happy to report that the kids are all enjoying their respective schools. Tala's school, a humongous combined middle and high school had a wonderful performance today called "Taste of Asia". Her school really values the arts so they decided to suspend all required classes for Year 7 students (her year) for two days and instead teach all the students about various aspects of Asian dance, stories, music, art and drama. After two days of intense instruction and engagement, the students put on an hour's worth of performances in all these areas from China, Indonesia, and India. It was really an incredible statement of the value of arts education.

Noah and Nissa all of lots of friends with a chorus of kids saying hi and bye in the morning arrival and afternoon departure. The boys are a bit rougher here than back home, so Noah has taken some time to figure out the male pecking order and how to play without getting run over. Nissa came home today with a school-wide award for just being a positive influence on the school!

Academically, we were afraid the kids would be a bit behind their local counterpart, but so far it is the opposite. Homework is light to non-existent, which is a pleasant change for us the parents. Noah begs for homework, but instead we just go to the park and work on his football skills.

So all is good with schools and we still don't know how things worked out, but we are glad they did. The picture on this entry is of the playing field that is adjacent to the kids two schools, and a third middle school. About 3,500 kids descend on these three schools each day, which is fun to watch.

Screwy Educational Admissions Process

So we moved here to Sheffield for a year in part because being awarded a Fulbright is a great honor and conducting the research and teaching as part of the award should be very rewarding. But we also decided to make this trip as a family for the experiences of our three children (ages 7, 10, 11). So, getting them into a local school was an important part of this international experience for them.

We wanted our kids to go to a “state” (or public school) so we naturally found a house a short walk from both a senior school (for Tala) and a Junior School (Noah and Nissa). We think being close to school and having our kids walk there is important on a lot of levels, from making friends, to the physical activity, to the fact that I do some research on children walking to school.

When I went to figure out how to enroll them, this is what I found out. For the Junior school, the staff at the school were on holiday (through most of August) and weren't scheduled to return until September 7th, the first day of school. The school, I was told, was full, but likely there would be some vacancies if I just brought them to school on the first day. I was then to fill out an application and hope they could start that day or the next. Most people said this should work out, but we wouldn't know until the first day of school so we couldn't even tell the kids if they had a school to go to.

For the senior school, all senior schools in this area were currently full. There are catchment areas like in Eugene and all residents that pay a council tax (kind of a residential head tax that we pay as well) are legally entitled to a public education, but you are not guaranteed to get that education in your catchment area. The policy has nothing to do with equity and trying to offer school choice through a lottery like system. Even if your child was in a feeder school for a certain Senior school, if that school was oversubscribed, then the child would have to go elsewhere.

The process for enrolling Tala in a school in an area where all schools are full was extremely stressful. I had to formally submit an application to a central city department of education. Because I knew her application would be rejected outright (the schools in walking distance were full) I simultaneously submitted my appeal of the rejection.

On the Thursday before school started, we received word that Tala's appeal hearing would be on October 1, three weeks after school started. In the interim period, she would have no place to go to school. Actually that's not true; she was offered to go to a failing school on the other side of the City that we couldn't get to and had no interest in sending her to (Sheffield is the size of Portland). If her appeal were denied, we could do a secondary appeal, but that wouldn’t happen until November, meaning she would be out of school the entire first term.

Imagine your two stresses of being in grade school – showing up at school naked and being walked into class for your first day, after the term has already started, as the new kid. Needless to say, this was stressful for the kids even though we were trying to be as optimistic as possible with them. We tried to channel all of our Fijian lessons of relaxing and letting things work out.

We were also trying to use all the resources at our disposal to get around this silly bureaucratic situation. Imagine the shame to be felt locally when an American Fulbright Scholar who specializes in children walking to school can’t get their child in a school within walking distance of their home?

When we found out two days before the start of the term that Tala's appeal wouldn't be until October 1, we ramped things up because we would seriously have considered leaving the UK if the kids could not get into school. We did not come here to home school them, and while we were open minded to the opportunity for all of us to travel, we also quickly rejected that idea. Our kids want a life here and that is dependent on them making friends, which is highly correlated to them being in school. When we spent three months in Greece two years ago, they were not in school, and while we all had a great time exploring the country, the kids didn't make any friends and get the cultural learning that comes from the normal day to day things of living somewhere.

On that Thursday morning (two work days before school started), we went back to the Junior school to see if any staff had arrived, and indeed they had that day. We filled out an application for Noah and Nissa, but left the office not knowing if there were places for them. Thankfully, late in the day we learned that the two younger kids were indeed going to be admitted.

But there was no place for Tala and we wouldn't know about her for three more weeks. That night, we decided to put out an appeal for help and sent an email to as many people we had made contact with in our short stay in Sheffield. The contacts included the school departments, the Vice Chancellor and the head of my department at the University of Sheffield, a Governess of the University, three local city councilors, the local Member of Parliment, and the Fulbright Commission, and a variety of people back home at all levels of the University of Oregon and Congressman DeFazio's office.

I'm not sure we will ever know what happened between 11pm Thursday night and 9am Friday morning, but first thing Friday morning we received a phone call that there existed a clause in the school admissions policies that allowed for Tala to be admitted to school given her special circumstances in the country. So we went from seriously considering leaving to rushing out to buy school uniforms (well, first, figuring out what the uniforms were, which is not as straight forward as you would think).

I can't explain the admissions fiasco. While everyone we spoke with in trying to work this out was extremely friendly and sympathetic, no one could provide any help. And while I hate to generalize, many people gave us the explanation for our situation that there is a strong adherence to both bureaucracy and queues in England and that we were just stuck in a school admissions process that we couldn't get around. How did we get around it then? The best explanation for that is that as much as bureaucracy and queues are important, so is being perceived as rude hosts. Perhaps our final plea for help made clear that a door was being potentially shut on a visiting family and that ultimately, that was too rude to bear. At this point, I'm not sure I'll ever know what happened, but I'm glad that things worked out.

Introduction

Greetings from the UK. Here I hope to post thoughts and commentaries about planning and policy issues as I see them while here in the UK for a year. I am in the UK at the University of Sheffield as a Fulbright Scholar and will be teaching and researching on topics of active transportation, city design, and citizen engagement / participatory GIS. With this blog I hope to capture initial reactions to things I like and those that seem a bit curious, even if my reactions are brief and naive glimpses into how things work here. Many of these things will become mundane and just accepted as I just live day to day. So, highlighting issues that I have not yet come to accept as the way things are and should be, will hopefully provide some interesting insight and perspective, if not to you, then at least as a record for me over time.

For those interested on the family and personal side of our UK year, Mindy will be creating a separate blog that you can link to when it is up and running. Some personal items will slip in here of course as well.

Cheers,

Marc

PS - The image above is NOT from the UK - it is from Oregon and a reminder to me what real mountains are.