Our Church

As we get ready for Easter, I thought it might be nice to send some pics of where we go to church here. I expected to find a whole bunch of Anglican churches, but not too many Catholic ones, so it was a nice surprise to find that there were two Catholic ones within easy walking distance to our house. We visited both churches and the university Catholic community and found that the best match for us was the Cathedral Church of St. Mary -- so we're going to the church where the bishop for Newcastle and Hexham presides.

I grew up in a church with maybe one fancy stained glass window -- oddly for Ohio, it had a very southwestern feel to it with the Spanish tile roof and stucco walls. I've always enjoyed religious art, though, and even took a writing seminar on symbolism of religious art, so coming to Europe is great fun.

I just checked out the cathedral's website and apparently, it is pretty young as things here go -- constructed in 1844. When I walked in, I was surprised by the bright wall colors. I am reminded of DIY shows and trying to draw attention to decorative elements by changing background colors. I also noticed that all the windows on the left-hand side looked very different from the ones on the right. The ones to the left as you walk in are all the traditional-looking pictures of stories from the Bible and various saints.

When I looked right, though, some windows were plain and others had a much more modern look. A check of the cathedral website confirmed my suspicions that they had been damaged during WWII because they are on the street side of the building. It's hard to think about how scary it would have been to have your city bombed. However, the damage did allow locals to update the windows to reflect who they had become after 100 years. As you can see in this window, Newcastle has been an important port -- shipbuilding, coal mining and glassware are all commemorated here. Dan said it was the first time he'd seen a spot-welder in stained glass. The window next to this one is a memorial for a parishoner who died in Africa during WWII. I think windows like this are nice because if you are still adding decorative elements the community feels like it is still alive and growing.

Our church has an organ and a small choir (depending on which Mass you attend). I have been slightly tempted to join the choir because they may be the only people with the music for the songs during Mass. In some kind of effort to get more songs into the hymnal, it has been converted to a book of poetry -- no musical notation. This is great if the songs are all familiar, but many of them I've never heard before, so I have to guess my way through. I'm proud that most of the time I don't sound horribly off. I'm guessing the choir might actually have the sheet music, though, so it is tempting to consider joining. I do kinda miss being in the choir and church is only a few blocks from home, so should be convenient for rehearsal. We'll see...

In any case, have a lovely Easter and I'll see about sharing any pics we get from our short excursions over the holiday (Friday and Monday are bank holidays here, so school and work are closed, but the trains still run).

White Coat Ceremony

For those of you who can't remember why I'm here because Dan doesn't really appear anywhere in the blog, I wanted to share some pics of Dan. The White Coat Ceremony is an official induction into the study of medicine. Dan promises to be studious, to protect human life and all kinds of other things you'd like to know your doctor takes very seriously. Then some of the doctors in the program officially robe them in a white lab coat with the St. George's University coat of arms on it. It was a wonderful ceremony held in the civic center here in town. So here we have Dan meeting the doctor who will enrobe him.

Dan was really proud to have his robe put on by the keynote speaker. This guy was incredibly accomplished -- his intro describing his involvement in medicine, accomplishments, boards, etc. went on for almost as long as his keynote address. There are a number of very accomplished doctors who both teach and are graduates of the St. George's University program. The speaker had a great story about how for his comparative anatomy practical exam (which was an oral exam) he was asked to identify the animal a skeleton came from. Being quite clueless, he was relieved to note that "Penguin" was written on one of the bones and then proceeded to "reason aloud" what kind of animal it was based on its various characteristics. Having TAed comparative anatomy, I did thoroughly enjoy the story.

It was a really wonderful ceremony to kick off the school year and the location was great. I was intrigued by the names of councilmen inscribed on the walls, so you got a real sense of the history of the place. Time does pass quickly and Dan is already taking his mid-terms this week. He has three exams, Monday, today and Friday and has been diligently studying for (well it seems like forever). But I hope to see him soon as Easter break is only a few days away. He may spend some of the break studying, but I do hope to get him out to explore a little bit. Maybe then we'll have a few more pictures of the study bug.

Bede's World

When I told Dan we'd be visiting "Bede's World," he was reminded of Beakman's World , a kid's science experiment program that I think was on CBS back in the day. So he gave me a skeptical look and told me to have fun with Maria and Brent, the other med student spouses in our building.

Something interesting about a country that has been inhabited so long by people is that you trip over historic sites no matter where you go. [Native Americans have lived in the U.S. for milennia, but they were the losers when the white folks came. So their history and sites are treated differently than sites here, which are considered part of the collective history of the people who currently live here.] So, during my first visit I saw a random thatched hut where folks lived mixed in with other houses and that's pretty normal. So...I wasn't exactly surprised to find Bede's World located in the warehouse/refinery district.

For those of you not intimately familiar with early English history... the Venerable Bede could be your best friend. After the Romans left (it was just too tough holding this rambunctious outpost called Britannia), there was a lot of in-fighting. The native Britons had really liked all the cool innovations and order that the Romans brought, but the various "barbarians" surrounding them on the British Isles threatened order (for example, the Picts whom the Hadrian's Wall was designed to keep back in Scotland). In any case, the Britons invited their friends in France, Denmark and other nearby countries to come over here and help them beat back the barbarians. Um...yeah...those guys were the Angles and the Saxons, I think precursors of the Vikings. So... when they came to help, they kinda helped themselves to lots of the areas in the east and south of England.

By 600 or so, which is around when Bede lived, the Catholic Church was stepping up as the new factor around which things were organized. A monastery would be the center of learning, trade, culture, etc. Apparently, Newcastle's location on the coast had helped it become kinda big beforehand. In Bede's day, there was a pretty good monastery here. We got to see the remains still standing at the riverside here. The monks here did some amazing Bible illuminations (good enough for someone to happen to swipe the inscription page and put his own signature on to give as a gift to the Pope). Bede was a monk here and took it upon himself to document the history of early England. So he's why I can give you the quick and dirty history above. His book was one of the most popular in Europe -- tough to be a continent's most popular author when each book copy had to be hand-transcribed. They were busy monks. Bede happened to be the mentor for a number of bishops (some of whom have names similar to local saints, so I'm not sure if they are the saints).

So we had fun walking around the abbey ruins, checking out the museum with all its artifacts of life back in the day and exploring the Anglo-Saxon farm. So here are Brent and I trying on monk habits. They were a little tight, so might have been intended for kids. They had some great reconstructed Anglo-Saxon houses behind the museum. When we walked inside, I noticed they had quite a few structural features in common with the houses at Sunwatch -- wattle and daub walls, wooden decor, thatched roofs (though I doubt they're using Kentucky Bluegrass) and the obvious poor ventilation. I did notice their thatch didn't seem quite as thick as back home in Ohio. Hmmm...

There were also some lovely farm animals that were supposed to be breeds common during Anglo-Saxon times. You can almost tell from the rather windswept sheep how truly strong the wind was that day. I believe this was the day we had the 75 mph gusts. Unlike us, most of the animals who had shelter were smart enough to stay in it. So we never got a really good look at the pigs and had to walk into the pen for the chickens and ducks. It was cute, though, because each of the animal pens was also a little thatched hut. The wind quickly brought a storm directly overhead, though, and drenched us on our 0.75 mile or so walk back to the Metro. The picture above of the abbey was the last in this sequence, so you can see it went from sunny to overcast and then to pouring pretty quickly.

So now you know how the folks for whom the country is named (Angle-land became England) got into the country. And who can be thanked for letting us know how it happened -- the Venerable Bede. Who knew our city was home to so many important events and people!!

New job

Based on our poll, it looks like more people had been in earthquakes than had not been in them. No one else like me who managed to sleep through them, though. It's impressive, because I don't know a ton of Californians or other people in earthquake-prone areas.

Tomorrow is my official last day at National Express. It has been my privilege throughout the month of February to stuff thousands of little orange train tickets into big white envelopes for people across the UK. Thanks to my mindless dedication, people will be traveling on business, visiting relatives and going on holiday. It was an excellent source of income (minimum wage here is about $12 USD), but the possibilities for repetitive motion disorders are obvious. Plus the work atmosphere was dusty and somewhat disgruntled.

My lovely new position involves smiling, asking people if they're willing to pee in a cup and generally orienting them to participating in a national research project. The Biobank (http://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/) project involves collecting samples, measurements and responses to a fun questionnaire from about 500,000 Brits ages 40-60 or so. This pool of data will be made available to approved research projects having to do with various health issues. If people agree to fully participate, their medical records in perpetuity will also be available to researchers (benefit of a national health care system). Anyone who uses the data will be required to publish their results, contributing to public knowledge about a plethora of health concerns. I really like the potential for long-term studies of a variety of health concerns! My role is small, but important as I make sure the participants realize what they're getting into -- they will not benefit at all from this because their data is made anonymous and they won't get any results back on anything. It's a big commitment and it's exciting that so many people (more than 100 a day at my center in Newcastle) are stepping up to the invitation.

So I'll start on Monday at my new receptionist gig, where the people are friendly, my main responsibility is to smile, my hours are long, but I don't have to work five days a week or nearly as many weekends as I did at the train company. I'm looking forward to it. Plus, Maria is a technician, so we'll get to work together to some degree.

were amusedJust a quick update and a lovely picture to leave you with. We by the steam. It is cold here often enough that the signs assume it would be a steamy pile, not just a pile you'd be cleaning up. This was a lovely sign we saw on our trip home from the Roman fort. Stay tuned for other fun British signs...I'm sure there's quite a few left to find...