So, this was me Friday before I was suppose to head out to the wonderous Scandanavian country of Sweden on Sunday. However, I wasn't feeling well on Saturday morning so I went to the hospital in Huntingdon and they kept me for a few hours and I came home. I still didn't feel much better after a few hours at home so I went back to the hospital. They admitted me until Tuesday. Unfortunately, this means I didn't make my flight to Sweden. So, the closest I came to getting to Scandanavia this week was a small danish pastry I had yesterday in St.Ives. The hospital was very different from a North American one. They didn't really seem that concerned about having my spelled my name incorrectly. Nor were they really strict on the NPO stuff or the payment stuff. They didn't ask for identification nor did they ask for proof of residency. I was in a ward that had six beds and there wasn't really a door leading in or out of it. It had three walls. The fourth side was open to the nursing station. Weird. The nurses were very kind and there seemed to be a lot of them around. There were at least 2 porters, 3 nurses aids, 4 nurses, and 2 student nurses during my time there. The ward only had about 20 patients so this was a lot of people. The oddest thing that they did was every 2 hours they had tea. Everyone dropped everything and the nurses would make tea. You could have tea, coffee, or Ovaltine and it seemed even the patients that weren't suppose to eat or drink were allowed to as long as it was tea during tea time. Almost went crazy while there. The doctors push this metal cart around with them full of charts, drugs, notes, water, etc. as they went patient to patient during their rounds. I don't remember them on the Saturday. They missed me on the Sunday but the on-call doctor saw me in the evening and said I could eat so they gave me plain bread and butter. The attending physician(which was a surgeon so they didn't call him doctor but Mister) said that I wasn't allowed to eat for 48 to 72 hours so they took me off of food and put the intravenous back in (the resident put it into me and it took him three tries . . . the little bastard kept poking me . . . I thought I was going to pass out). Monday passed with the doctor saying I needed another day on the iv. Tuesday, they discharged me. So, I was discharged without getting to eat anything over four days except bread. Odd hospital, really.
Because I wasn't able to get to Sweden, I spent th elast few days in Cambridge to pass the time. Nothing else to say. School begins on Monday.
ed
Friday, October 28, 2005
Trafalgar day
This is a picture of Glen, Anna, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Horatio Nelson. Glen and Anna are teachers at the Abbey and the Ailwyn, respectively, and Friday was their last day. So, they decided to hold part of their going away party at the Jolly Sailor. Friday also happened to be Trafalgar Day, commemorating the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. It is considered to be the most important naval battle in the history of Britain. The French attacked a British blockade in hopes of amalgamating the French and Spanish navys. (The British blockade was there to prevent this from happening.) If Napoleon could do join the two navys hewould hold the majority of the Naval power in Europe and then be able to conquer Britain. I think the guy on the left is suppose to be Napoleon (a far stretch if you consider his appearance but the man gave a damn fine performance . . . on the lines of Al Pacino in Taxi Driver) and the guy on the right is suppose to be the British Admiral Nelson (again, I don't think he looks much like the original Nelson but whatever).
Friday, October 21, 2005
The end of the first term
Hello all. Today is not only the last day of the week but it's also the last day of the term. We are now allowed to have ten days off to relax and get over the turmoil of teaching before we have to take on another 2 months of 'edjucat'n' the kids. Today was great. I taught the first few minutes of the class and then I showed an episode of the Simpsons. It was a great episode about the Simpsons coming to London for vacation. They loved it and I used it as a teaching tool.
Finally, the end of the day. The evening calls for a pub crawl going-away party for one of the Oz teachers that is going home. Actually, he's going to Vancouver, California, and Oregon before heading back. It's going to be a hard night, I think.
Tomorrow, I'm off to Cambridge. It's suppose to be the coldest winter here in a long time. I need a warm jacket that I can use for both school cover and travelling to Sweden, Russia, and Italy. Sunday, I'm off to Sweden. Sweeeedddddeeeeennnn!!!!
I got paid yesterday, which is only a month late. Not too happy about that but at least I have the money before Sweden. I'm happy.
The school has unofficially asked me to sign on for the remainder of this year and possibly a portion of, if not the entirety of, the next year. Hmmmmmm, not too sure what to do.
That's all. Out.
Ed
Finally, the end of the day. The evening calls for a pub crawl going-away party for one of the Oz teachers that is going home. Actually, he's going to Vancouver, California, and Oregon before heading back. It's going to be a hard night, I think.
Tomorrow, I'm off to Cambridge. It's suppose to be the coldest winter here in a long time. I need a warm jacket that I can use for both school cover and travelling to Sweden, Russia, and Italy. Sunday, I'm off to Sweden. Sweeeedddddeeeeennnn!!!!
I got paid yesterday, which is only a month late. Not too happy about that but at least I have the money before Sweden. I'm happy.
The school has unofficially asked me to sign on for the remainder of this year and possibly a portion of, if not the entirety of, the next year. Hmmmmmm, not too sure what to do.
That's all. Out.
Ed
Thursday, October 20, 2005
aheadonboatams
Before we headed out of Amsterdam, we decided to take a canal boat ride. This was my view during the entire ride. And he smelled funny, too.
amsterdam8
Odette having a break at an outdoor cafe in Amsterdam. We had great weather during our stay. The hostel, the flying pig, was a great hostel. If you're thinking about staying in Amsterdam, check out the pig. They have the best beds in the world. Well, in Europe, at least.
annfrank2
This is me waiting in line for the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam. It was really, really long and when we got in they told us we weren't permitted to take pictures.
aredlight1
Well, I went with Odette to Amsterdam last weekend (15th) and it was pretty fun. We saw a lot and did a lot. I don't remember much but Amsterdam is a very neat place to visit. I think.
lincoln5
This is the dwarf in the same lookout in the Lincoln Castle. You can see more of the slit here, can't you?
lincolncastlefi
This is Fiona inside the Lincoln Castle. The area she's standing in is the look-out for the castle. Behind her is a 6 inch wide slit-window that allowed them to look out but prevented them from getting hit with anything.
lincolncath3
This is a great picture of the Cathedral from the wall of the Castle that's in Lincoln. It's super, monster big.
lincolncath11
We went to Lincoln a couple of weeks ago. Lincoln was a fort town and Lincoln has the third biggest cathedral in the UK. This is a picture of the dwarf in front of the cathedral. It's a very, very big building but it wasn't open when we went to visit. I have no pictures of the interior of the building.
party25
This is a picture of the dwarf making Fiona a cup of tea. Fi is staying at my flat for a while. She's looking for work. She'll be happy today. Apparently, she became an aunt today.
marmite
Here's a picture of the Marmite that my students gave me the other day. We were doing a unit on microbiology and we were trying to list microbial-made foods. Marmite is a yeast extract bread spread that tastes somewhere between salted fish and dead fish. It's really strong and not that great. Actually, the students told me that I ate it incorrectly the first time. You are suppose to toast the bread lightly, put on loads and loads of butter, and then a little dab (smaller than the size of a Canadian dime) of marmite. I'm thinking, if the amount that you need is, like, nothing than it can't be that good, right? If you need a bottle of marmite, you can have mine.
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
cheekydwarf
So, I've been here for about four weeks now and it's starting to grow on me a little bit. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Lori from the hospital came to stay with me last weekend and we did Cambridge and Ely but we probably didn't do as much as we should have considering I was still trying to get my lessons down for Monday. I've joined the gym here but I've only been once. The other teachers and I have figured that we can only go at 0630hrs because any other time of the day the students are crawling all over the joint. I've fallen behind in marking and the class websites however I hope to get them back up tonight. I'm trying to get out of town more often. Visited St. Ives and Cambridge and they are very nice places. They have early buses out and late buses back so I'm thinking about going to these sites every Saturday. We may have a car soon as one of the teachers here has a brand new skoda but neither she nor her partner have a driver's license. I may be driving on the left hand side of the road and passing lorries in no time at all. Fiona's with me now. She's moved in for a time until she can get a job in Cambridge. No problems yet nor are there any foreseeable ones anticipated. I signed up for NASN, a cable sports channel that only shows North American Sports. They actually show all the CFL games. I'm a little pissed, though, because it hasn't been installed yet and the hockey season starts tonight. Well, I'll have to make some more phone calls to them later today I guess. That's all for now. I'm booked for a pub crawl on Friday, Amsterdam next Friday and Sweden the Friday after that.
tittyho
This is Lori reading the local paper in the Jolly Sailor Pub in Ramsey. She seems very involved with a particular article.
elydome
This is the inside dome of Ely Cathedral in Ely. It's proportedly the biggest church in England and I've been told it's bigger than Notre Dame in France. It took us 6 hours to get to and that was totally not good. But it only took us 30 minutes to get back because we ran into Len and Carol. They live in the flat next to me and they gave us a ride back. If we only had a car . . .
dwarfbusdriver
This bus driver arranged it so we wouldn't miss our connecting bus. He on purpose, by mistake missed about ten stops along the way to guarantee that we'd catch the last bus back home from Huntingdon. When we got to the bus station, our connecting bus was there idling and this bus driver got us onto it. The next bus driver didn't seem very pleased about the missed stops but he was very pleasant with us during our trip. The bus driver proudly holds dwarf like he's just won the Ashes. Good on ya, Mr. Bus Driver Man. Not just anyone gets to hold my dwarf.
theeagle2
The most famous pub in Cambridge is the eagle. It's just around the corner from Cavandish College Lab, which is the lab that James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA in. The patrons of this pub found out about the structure of DNA three months before the scientific community because after they figured it out they went to the eagle and had beers while telling all of those inside what they'd just discovered. The magazine Nature, which published their paper, came out three months later. This is dwarf with the plaque on the eagle pub.
dwarfinquad2
I went to Cambridge on Saturday. Very impressive. It is amazing how big it is yet very small college feeling. There are 52 or so different colleges in Cambridge but we only got to about 4 or 5 of the big ones. This picture is the dwarf in the quadrangle of King's College. Each college has it's own cathedral and King's College is the most famous and the largest one in Cambridge. Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to take pictures of the inside of the church but I do have lots of pictures of Cambridge itself. Just click on this picture.
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