Feb 2009

Even if you haven't read my last blog entry on the Superbowl and the walk home in the falling snow afterwards, you are probably aware that England has been getting some snow.

I know that you are probably aware of this because I haven't gotten a number of emails from people who don't read my blog commenting on the snow. So obviously the news in other countries is covering the fact that London and the rest of England has snow. It's been the top story all week here, usually billed as "Breaking News!"

Most of the emails I have gotten from friends in Canada and the USA tended to ask the obvious question for a North American, "London gets a couple inches of snow and the entire city shuts down? What the hell is wrong with you over there?!? Are the Brits really that fragile?"

At work this week also a few of my English co-workers have made comments about the reaction to the snow. "Being from Canada, you probably think we're all daft and over-reacting, don't you?"

The answer is simple. The answer is no...

...but, yes.

The answer is no because if there is one thing you learn living in Canada, it is that winter is all about preparation. In Canada, when I had a car, I used to carry a scrapper, a snow brush and a small shovel in the trunk. The city of Toronto budgets $67 million a year to remove snow, and has a massive array of sanders, salters and plows to take care of it. Most Canadians own parkas, boots, mitts and toques. The reason we do these things is because it snows a lot in Canada.

Here in England, they don't get much snow. The snow that fell on London on Sunday night / Monday morning was more snow than the city had received in 18 years. This weeks winter weather has maxed out the budgets of most cities here in England, and lots of places have run out of sand for the roads. I see people walking around in sub-zero temperatures in light jackets and trainers, shivering. They aren't prepared for the snow because they don't get this much snow, usually.

So, no, I don't judge the Brits too harshly for dealing badly with the snow.

However, I do think they have over-reacted somewhat.

On Monday, for example, there was no getting around in London. The buses were all cancelled, and most of the tube lines weren't running. I understand parts of the transport system not working, but basically shutting the entire thing seems overly extreme. Some reaction was warranted, but they just basically said, "that's it, let's just shut down the city."

And this week a lot of people didn't make it into work, at all. Partially this was because most of the schools were shut all week, so parents were forced to either find child care of stay home. But I know a few single folks that just didn't bother going into work at all. In the places that really got socked in, like the high altitudes or the South-west, I can understand, but even in Sheffield, which didn't get much snow at all, some things shocked me.

Yesterday a number of shops on the high street closed at noon because of the snow. The thing is, that it wasn't snowing. I had been snowing, and Sheffield could a couple inches, but by noon the snow had shopped. Yet the shops still closed up, putting up signs saying that they were shutting due to the snow.

It has been interesting to live here through this week here in the UK as a recently immigrated Canadian. I can understand why folks are reacting to the snow, but it has been a touch humorous to watch some of the over-reactions to the snow. Often as a new arrival in a new country, I have spent a lot of time feeling a bit like a tool, still learning how to act in my new country. For the first time, though, I feel like I know more than the locals.

For this week, at least, England has decided to become a little more like Canada, and make me feel at home.

“The smart thing to do is to stay home and watch the game on TV,” I said to myself on Saturday afternoon. Superbowl is well covered here in the UK, showing on both BBC and Sky Sports. It would be no problem to watch it on my couch. And as the game starts at 11:30 PM local time and I had an 8 o’clock train to catch up to Sheffield, staying in seemed like the smart move.

But this is the RELAUNCH of the Superbowls Around the World blog series. After making a big deal of it in a blog entry I posted, I couldn’t just wind up saying that I ended up sitting on the couch in my apartment watching TV. No, I need to do it right.

So I searched on line and found that a surprising number of places were staying open to show the game. The NFL is actually more widely covered here than I would have expected. In the regular season games are shown on Sky Sports, and the regular season tilt that has happened for the past two years at Wembley is always a big deal.

I choose to forgo the sports bars and their cover charges and head instead to a party put on by the American expat Meetup group. The party, with an expected attendance of 800 people, was to be hosted in Islington. Islington is far from my place in Isle of Dogs, but close to St. Pancras station, where I needed to get my train out the next morning. With the game ending sometime around 3 in the morning, heading back to Isle of Dogs for a couple hours of sleep and then heading back to almost where I just was didn’t make much sense.

Therefore, I decided to splash out and get a hotel near St. Pancras. I headed out to the hotel around 4 pm, and decided to take an afternoon nap, as I knew sleep wouldn’t be something I got much of later in the evening.

I woke a few hours later and looked out my window. I opened the drapes, and wondered if the hotel had somehow moved across the ocean to Canada while I slept. There was snow on the ground. Lots of it.

London and the south-east of England was in the middle of a winter storm, which by its end would dump more snow on the capital than it had seen in 18 years.

The snow, however, didn’t stop those wanting to see the game from heading out. The Superbowl party hosted by the American expat group had over 1,000 people in attendance, watching the game on a projected screen in what appears to be a dance club in its other life.

There were fans of all stripes there, with Arizona and Pittsburgh being represented equally (by the sound of the cheering). A few folks even were actually from those cities represented…

Oddly, there were a lot of people wearing jerseys from other teams, even across other sports, including a guy in a KC Royals jacket. I guess wearing something American sports related was in the spirit of the night.

The expat group had managed to stream the video of the NBC from America, so we had all the American commercials, the American commentators and all the half-time show, including Bruce Springsteen.

In the end, Pittsburgh won what ended up being a very close game. I had been cheering for the Arizona Cardinals as I had just spent 2 months there, so I was slightly disappointed by the outcome, but happy to have actually bothered to go out, rather than staying at home.

Leaving the venue around 3 AM I was hoping to catch a night bus back to my hotel, but never saw one come along, and ended up walking the 25 minutes back to my hotel. I found out the reason for this the next morning as I woke up. The snow had hit London hard. All the airports were closed, none of the buses were running, most of the tube lines were shut or suffering serious delays and many of the trains were running delayed schedules.

The next morning, having stayed in a hotel right by St. Pancras station, I was able to walk to the station and catch my train up to Sheffield. East Midlands, the company that runs the London – Sheffield train, was one of the only companies in London that wasn’t delaying their schedule, and the train left right on time, though mostly empty, as very few people could make it to the station with few tube lines or buses running.

So, had I done the smart thing and watched the game at home (or even the really smart thing and went to bed early), I wouldn’t have made it to work on time this morning (if I could have made it at all). Only through choosing to go out did I ensure that I could make it up to Sheffield. I arrived in Sheffield, in “Northern” England, to find less snow, though they are expected to get it tonight. Luckily my hotel is only a 3 minute walk to the office.

So, I end with a few pictures from last night and this morning of the snowy scenes in London. I hope no one accuses me of bringing the snow here from Canada. I promise you all, when I moved here I really had hoped to leave the snow behind.

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For other experiences viewing "The Big Game", check out the rest of my Superbowls Around the World blog entries

One week ago, I was putting on a t-shirt to go to bed, and heard the sound of ripping. I pulled the shirt off, and saw that the small tear on the back had torn across the entire shirt.

"Damn," I said. "That was my favourite t-shirt."

Not only was it comfortable, and had a big hockey puck on the back, but it was one of my favourite travel souvenirs.

I don't often bother with souvenirs, and very rarely come back with anything I have purchased. Occasionally, though, there is something that captures the essence of my travels. Generally, it is something that I had with me throughout my travels rather than something that I picked up. When those things break or wear out, they desire a more fitting send-off than just being thrown out with the day's trash. For example the poem to my broken roller bag or a post about my shoes.

I never travelled much before I headed down to Denver in 2000 for work. I'd been to a few places in Canada and the USA, but really didn't understand the big deal about travelling, or living abroad. I had liked Toronto, and didn't see much point in leaving it.

1999 through the mid-part of 2001 wasn't a great couple of years for me, though, and I had frankly become quite depressed living in Toronto. As I talked about in a blog entry on New Jersey from 2006, Denver seemed fresh and new...

I had just left a job that I didn’t like so much that I was pretty sure it was making my physically ill. My stress level certainly was quite high. I was still dealing with the death of my mother less than a year earlier, and my family was in transition as they learnt to interact in “the new normal.” I was out of shape. I was having trouble with relationships – both with women (which hasn’t changed) and also with my friends. I was angry a lot of the time.

All very different problems, but all connected in a very important way. They all took place in Toronto. The air was heavy with the ghosts of my recent past. I felt trapped in the city. I felt like I wanted to change, that I wanted to be a different person than I was, but it was too hard. It’s much easier to just fall into familiar roles when confronted with familiar people and places then it is to try and change. It’s too confusing for the people you deal with and it’s too confusing for you.

I was asked to get on a plane and fly to Denver for a short project. I stepped off that plane and felt like a heavy weight was lifted off my shoulders. Denver was geographically and architectural different than Toronto, with it’s mountain backdrop, lack of significant bodies of water, wide streets and shining sunshine. Nothing looked the same, and I didn’t know a soul. I was free to act however I wanted to, not to just fall into the familiar roles of the past. It allowed me to re-invent myself completely.

Denver, sunny and warm in the summer, was the perfect remedy for my aliment. Sometimes, as they say, a change is as good a rest. I would argue that a change could be better than rest. Not only was it just that Denver was new to me, it was also just new in general. That's not to say that Denver doesn't have much in the way of history, because it does, but architecturally most of it is recently built, or at least recently renovated.

I lived in the area called LoDo (lower downtown), which was a mix of new buildings and renovated warehouses. I had an apartment that looked west, over Mile High stadium and at the Rocky Mountains, which shone bright in the morning as they reflected the rising sun, and provided a dark, jagged-toothed grin as the sun set in the evening.

Two blocks from my apartment, in one of those reclaimed warehouses, was a sports bar called the Sports Column. I would usually find my way down there a couple times a week where I would pull up a stool at the bar, watch baseball, football (American, of course) or hockey on the big screens while eating they really tasty chicken wings. It was the start of what would become my bizarre focus on Superbowls Around the World and was the first bar that I had that felt like a "local" to me.

I'm not alone in this feeling, by the way. The Sports Column has been named as one of the best sports bars in America numerous times, including being one of the top 10 Baseball Bar & Grills (as per ESPN.com) and one of the top 20 Sports Bars In America by Sports Illustrated Magazine.

The t-shirt I won one night during a hockey broadcast, exactly how or why I no longer remember, but I wore it proudly. Over the years, as it ripped and tore, it was relegated to the being worn only to bed and on lazy days hanging around watching TV, until its garment-ending tear that occurred last Sunday.

It made me sad, not because I don't have a number of other partially moth-eaten t-shirts to take its place, but rather because it was always a reminder of the start of what would become my desire to live abroad.

I'm sad to see the t-shirt be turned into rags, but at least it got to live long enough to see me fulfil the dream to live abroad that was incubated into life in Denver.

...And, of course, all that means is that some point in the future, I will have to make sure to make it back to Denver to get a new t-shirt from one of the best sports bars in America. Save a seat at the bar, flip to the Colorado Avs' game on the big screen and put in an order of hot wings for me.

I'll be there... eventually.