David’s aunt and uncle are set to arrive in St. Andrews this afternoon from New Jersey and will be staying with us over the weekend. Unfortunately, a rather large rainstorm has the same schedule. Our only other houseguests (David McCabe and Franny, who arrived in mid-March) were equally unlucky, and suffered through a week of torrential rain. Immediately upon their departure, the clouds parted and the ground dried, and we proceeded to have one of the warmest and driest springs that the Scots can remember. In fact, one of the lead stories on the BBC this week—aside from the resounding defeat of the Labour party by the Scottish National Party, of course, as I’m sure you’re all aware— is that a series of wildfires have been burning throughout the UK as a result of the lack of rain. There was some other big story last week on the BBC, I seem to remember—one which got quite a bit of airtime here in the UK—but I can’t put my finger on what it was. Hmmm…oh, well. No matter.
Anyway, our plans for a weekend of beach visits and hill walks with Sutton and Carol have been washed away (no pun intended…) so we’re scrambling to come up with some indoor activities. The customary thing to do here in St. Andrews on a rainy day is to hit the pub for a pint, but Emma and John aren’t yet big fans of that, so we are looking for alternatives. Some of Emma’s friends from school are in a production at the Byre Theater tonight, put on by a professional acting school that many of them attend called Dazzle. Emma was interested in joining Dazzle when we first arrived, until she learned that they met twice a week after school in Dundee, that it was quite similar to the Odyssey of the Mind program that she does at home, and that tuition was the equivalent of about $50 a week (actually, she didn’t know that…but it was the deciding factor for me, certainly!). There’s also a show in Glenrothes which is happening this weekend—the women in my Thursday morning badminton group were discussing it yesterday. At least, I think it was in Glenrothes. The woman who was doing most of the talking about it has such a thick Scottish accent and rolls her rs so distinctly that she could have been saying Glen Rosa instead of Glenrothes…they sound exactly the same to me when she speaks. So, that option is out...
Because we’re having house guests, I have spent the morning cleaning a bit, and have been struck once again with the difference between the size of cleaning products sold in the UK and the US. After cleaning the guest bathroom, I had already used about half a bottle of window cleaner and half of one of the paper towels rolls that are sold in a two-pack here. A two-pack! I can’t remember the last time I was shopping in the States and saw paper towels sold in a quantity of fewer than eight! That goes for toilet paper and tissues here as well. Actually, it extends to all kinds of food products, and is a perfect illustration of how the concept of “super-sizing” applying to almost everything in the U.S., and has not yet made its way across the Atlantic. Eggs are sold in a carton of four here! I can buy 100 grams of green beans! Cereal boxes here are the same size as a box of tissues in the States!
I’m thinking about the whole issue of size for another reason as well. Yesterday, I had to turn in our petite little Vauxhall Astra for a car that seats seven, in anticipation of two weeks of visitors who will need to accompany us on our weekend trips. When I went to pick up the new car, the woman at Enterprise said that the bigger cars were harder to find here, but they did manage to find something they called a mini-MPV, which stands for something like "multi-person vehicle" (aren’t all vehicles…save bicycles… multi-person vehicles, I wanted to ask her…). And when I saw the car, which was of course a Chevy, I was shocked! It was huge! When I got in, I felt like I was towering over the road, and that there was no way I was going to be able to squeeze through the tiny streets of St. Andrews in such a monster. Out of curiousity, I went home to google the dimensions of the new car and compare it to the Honda Pilot that I drive at home. Sure enough, the new car is nine inches shorter than the Pilot, and six inches narrower! And yet it still feels huge! Then of course, I made the mistake of looking up the size of the gas tank to calculate how much it would cost to fill the tank. Since gas here is £1.39 per liter…which is the equivalent of…make sure you’re sitting down now…$8.78 per gallon, I needed to shell out about $175 to fill up the tank on the new car! So, it turns out that I’m wrong and the concept of super-sizing does indeed apply to at least one thing in the UK: the price of fuel!
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