Our First Place
For our first month in California were we given a furnished apartment while we sorted out a place of our own. It was great to have a whole month to do this however with Hugo’s imminent trip to China and mine to the UK a little later we actually only had one week with us both in the country to find somewhere to live. Our relocation consultants’ first available slot was on the 26th October but given that we had to vacate on the 28th October we declined this kind offer and started ploughing through a list of possibles ourselves as soon as we arrived.
In the meantime the furnished apartment did give me an insight into Californian culture. The kitchen was fully equipped including a fancy electric tin opener but amazingly (to me anyway) with no kettle!
Now I like to think of myself as a moderately practical kinda girl but I don’t think I am particularly unique in having the ability to operate a manual tin opener. Boiling water in my hands however is definitely a step beyond me. There was one of those coffee filter things you find in diners but this is no good for tea. So we boiled water in pan (of which just 2 pretty old ones were provided) hastily washed between meals to remove any traces of bolognese sauce until we had a chance to buy our own kettle. Lovely.
This leads me to believe that people here don’t really cook very much. This view is strengthened by the position of the microwave and the lack of development in the ergonomics of the American cooker. In most of the kitchens I’ve seen so far a huge microwave is situated directly above the cooker where the fan should be. Some cookers even have the microwave built in, dominating the cooker and just about allowing a pan to squeeze onto the ring. There is absolutely no way you can stop the inevitable steam and splashes which you will have if you actually use you kitchen to cook rather than simply reheat food. If we saw an apartment which included the words “European Style kitchen” it always got a second look.
I can understand why reheating food is so popular though. We went out for a curry to a restaurant we hadn’t been to before and despite not falling for the usual error of ordering a starter (Huh! We're not amateurs!), we were both fit to burst after barely impacting on our meal. Taking the rest to go is positively encouraged and seems to be the standard reply to asking for the bill. The remainder lasted us 2 more days! It would have been longer but couldn’t take the same meal 4 days in a row and so reluctantly I threw the remainder away.
Now this throws up another cultural (age) difference. I find throwing away a perfectly good meal really difficult. Maybe it's being brought up by parents who really did have a very limited diet both during and after WW2, but to leave anything on your plate just seems wrong. Of course there are many cultures where not leaving a small amount of food on your plate is a sign that you feel your host has failed to provide enough sustenance, however I think having to leave 75% of the food is probably a little more than is strictly necessary to show you've had a good meal.
Still, it gives us an excuse to eat out lot more under the guise of investigating which restaurants to find those which serve a sensible amount of good quality food rather than vast amounts of cheap food.
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Battling with technology
Having a Geek in your life is a mixed blessing. On one hand you have as much help as you could possibly want on those technical irritations, on the other life appears to be far more complicated than I ever remember it being. Before meeting Hugo I lived on my own. My technical life was simple: I did not have problems programming the video because I didn’t own one ( or a telly for that matter) or lights which went on & off per a complex computer program which varied them according to day, seasonality and weather conditions.
Don’t get me wrong – I do appreciate the enhancement these things bring to my life. I was burgled as my house was swathed in darkness when I was late home from work and I couldn’t turn on the manual light timers via the Internet. I wasn’t aware of Sex in the City or Top Gear (life without Top Gear just doesn’t bear thinking about). And I couldn’t video call my friends & family for free.
It’s just that I’ve got used to all this now, so when it’s taken away I’m stranded and don’t know how to sort it out. You’d think (being my husband) my help would be 24/7 but it’s not. More often than not he is at work, often in another time zone which means at the critical time he could even be asleep! Disaster. And my fumblings usually exacerbate the problem. You see I don’t really do instructions so I just continue pressing buttons until said item breaks or decides finally to co-operate.
Take the time I was listening to Woman’s hour on the BBC’s listen again service (without which I really don’t think I could survive here – but US TV & radio is a whole kettle of fish for another time) when my domestic duties took me to another room in the apartment. I carefully moved my Mac but in the process pressed a key which turned off the sound. Being a lifetime PC user who has recently turned to the Mac (funnily enough at the point where Hugo started receiving the Apple discount) I’m still finding my way through the buttons and decided in true PC style that rebooting would be the best course of action. Said Mac came back to life with exactly the same settings so I pressed all the function keys. The sound returned I’ll grant you as did the robotic voice who described everything I did. I can understand how useful this could be if you have impaired vision but for me at the moment having a Stephen Hawking type robotic voice talking over Jenny Murray is becoming a little tedious.
Of course IT support did get back to me in the end though. ☺
Hugo: There's fn-f3 (mute), fn-f4 (vol down) and fn-f5 (vol up). If you do vol up it should come back
Hugo: There's an icon of a speaker at the top right of the screen which shows how loud it is
Sent at 5:49 PM on Tuesday
Claire: Thanks.
I managed to fix it myself in the end but have managed to turn on Stephen Hawking whilst I was pressing every button on the keyboard. Lovely though it is to be told everything that’s going on - how do I turn him off? xxxx
Sent at 6:33 PM on Tuesday
Hugo: Go to the control panel, go to universal access, and turn off voiceover
Claire: Thanks
Hugo: x
Sent at 7:21 PM on Tuesday
Claire: Err…Where is the control panel? xxxx
Sent at 8:05 PM on Tuesday
Hugo: It's the thing on the bottom of the screen with an apple and a switch?
it's called system preferences
Claire: Ah OK - got it! xxxx
Sent at 8:34 PM on Tuesday
Having a Geek in your life is a mixed blessing. On one hand you have as much help as you could possibly want on those technical irritations, on the other life appears to be far more complicated than I ever remember it being. Before meeting Hugo I lived on my own. My technical life was simple: I did not have problems programming the video because I didn’t own one ( or a telly for that matter) or lights which went on & off per a complex computer program which varied them according to day, seasonality and weather conditions.
Don’t get me wrong – I do appreciate the enhancement these things bring to my life. I was burgled as my house was swathed in darkness when I was late home from work and I couldn’t turn on the manual light timers via the Internet. I wasn’t aware of Sex in the City or Top Gear (life without Top Gear just doesn’t bear thinking about). And I couldn’t video call my friends & family for free.
It’s just that I’ve got used to all this now, so when it’s taken away I’m stranded and don’t know how to sort it out. You’d think (being my husband) my help would be 24/7 but it’s not. More often than not he is at work, often in another time zone which means at the critical time he could even be asleep! Disaster. And my fumblings usually exacerbate the problem. You see I don’t really do instructions so I just continue pressing buttons until said item breaks or decides finally to co-operate.
Take the time I was listening to Woman’s hour on the BBC’s listen again service (without which I really don’t think I could survive here – but US TV & radio is a whole kettle of fish for another time) when my domestic duties took me to another room in the apartment. I carefully moved my Mac but in the process pressed a key which turned off the sound. Being a lifetime PC user who has recently turned to the Mac (funnily enough at the point where Hugo started receiving the Apple discount) I’m still finding my way through the buttons and decided in true PC style that rebooting would be the best course of action. Said Mac came back to life with exactly the same settings so I pressed all the function keys. The sound returned I’ll grant you as did the robotic voice who described everything I did. I can understand how useful this could be if you have impaired vision but for me at the moment having a Stephen Hawking type robotic voice talking over Jenny Murray is becoming a little tedious.
Of course IT support did get back to me in the end though. ☺
Hugo: There's fn-f3 (mute), fn-f4 (vol down) and fn-f5 (vol up). If you do vol up it should come back
Hugo: There's an icon of a speaker at the top right of the screen which shows how loud it is
Sent at 5:49 PM on Tuesday
Claire: Thanks.
I managed to fix it myself in the end but have managed to turn on Stephen Hawking whilst I was pressing every button on the keyboard. Lovely though it is to be told everything that’s going on - how do I turn him off? xxxx
Sent at 6:33 PM on Tuesday
Hugo: Go to the control panel, go to universal access, and turn off voiceover
Claire: Thanks
Hugo: x
Sent at 7:21 PM on Tuesday
Claire: Err…Where is the control panel? xxxx
Sent at 8:05 PM on Tuesday
Hugo: It's the thing on the bottom of the screen with an apple and a switch?
it's called system preferences
Claire: Ah OK - got it! xxxx
Sent at 8:34 PM on Tuesday
Sunday, October 08, 2006
Electricity
To be honest I’m beginning to doubt the safety in electricity supplies here. Call me old fashioned but I find the flash of blue light which accompanies plugging in any electrical device really disconcerting. The power lines hang heavy with cables thick due to the low voltage and the posts all display a characteristic lean.
Hugo says things like “Don’t use any of your appliances with this adapter it’s not got an earth”. Now I’m no technician but I do know that electricity likes the earth, it’s always trying to get there, and if it doesn’t have a nice copper cable to get there it may try something else – like my leg.
To be honest I’m beginning to doubt the safety in electricity supplies here. Call me old fashioned but I find the flash of blue light which accompanies plugging in any electrical device really disconcerting. The power lines hang heavy with cables thick due to the low voltage and the posts all display a characteristic lean.
Hugo says things like “Don’t use any of your appliances with this adapter it’s not got an earth”. Now I’m no technician but I do know that electricity likes the earth, it’s always trying to get there, and if it doesn’t have a nice copper cable to get there it may try something else – like my leg.
Packaging
Now to me bright packaging says "artificial and to be avoided at all costs". In England it seems the healthy option sits smugly on the shelf saying “I know you’re going to find me in the end so I really don’t need to make an effort here”. They are calm and understated. I guess I’m used to this system and it works for me: brown buy, bright beware.
Here as everything sits on the shelf it’s singing & waving its pom poms in the air. I have to concentrate so hard because I don’t want to miss out on the good stuff just because it’s in a luminous orange carton. Shopping takes ages. I was 10 minutes trying to select some milk. I just wanted some organic milk, just milk. I didn’t want added vitamin A or extra vitamin D or flourine or whatever else is the health vogue of the moment. Eventually I found what I thought was organic milk pretty much from the cow. It was local too so I felt very smug about food miles and it came in a recyclable glass bottle so you can imagine how proud I was by the time I got home.
“You’d never believe how hard it is to find just milk here” I explained to Hugo when he got home from work “pretty much every brand has something added but I found one in the end” “Oh goody” he said then looking at the small print on the little paper ring around the top of the glass which I’d failed to notice read: “Ingredients: Organic Reduced Fat Milk, Vitamin A Palmitate”.
It’s a similar story with apartments. We trawled the areas we were interested in moving to looking for the “Now Leasing” signs outside apartments. Now to be fair a couple of balloons bobbing in the breeze is pretty helpful in attracting your attention to a sign way down a side street - however there are limits and we quickly came to the conclusion that the fewer balloons attached to the sign the nicer the apartment complex. One sign had a dozen balloons bobbing around in the breeze – one look at the dark depressing block and we just drove on by.
The apartment we finally settled on was so nice the sign just sat there saying “Phah! Balloons who needs those – I just *know* you want to live here”
Now to me bright packaging says "artificial and to be avoided at all costs". In England it seems the healthy option sits smugly on the shelf saying “I know you’re going to find me in the end so I really don’t need to make an effort here”. They are calm and understated. I guess I’m used to this system and it works for me: brown buy, bright beware.
Here as everything sits on the shelf it’s singing & waving its pom poms in the air. I have to concentrate so hard because I don’t want to miss out on the good stuff just because it’s in a luminous orange carton. Shopping takes ages. I was 10 minutes trying to select some milk. I just wanted some organic milk, just milk. I didn’t want added vitamin A or extra vitamin D or flourine or whatever else is the health vogue of the moment. Eventually I found what I thought was organic milk pretty much from the cow. It was local too so I felt very smug about food miles and it came in a recyclable glass bottle so you can imagine how proud I was by the time I got home.
“You’d never believe how hard it is to find just milk here” I explained to Hugo when he got home from work “pretty much every brand has something added but I found one in the end” “Oh goody” he said then looking at the small print on the little paper ring around the top of the glass which I’d failed to notice read: “Ingredients: Organic Reduced Fat Milk, Vitamin A Palmitate”.
It’s a similar story with apartments. We trawled the areas we were interested in moving to looking for the “Now Leasing” signs outside apartments. Now to be fair a couple of balloons bobbing in the breeze is pretty helpful in attracting your attention to a sign way down a side street - however there are limits and we quickly came to the conclusion that the fewer balloons attached to the sign the nicer the apartment complex. One sign had a dozen balloons bobbing around in the breeze – one look at the dark depressing block and we just drove on by.
The apartment we finally settled on was so nice the sign just sat there saying “Phah! Balloons who needs those – I just *know* you want to live here”
Fish & Chips at the Sea
Our first trip out, after I'd filled the fridge from the organic supermarket (dangerous) and Hugo had been to the electrical mega warehouse, Frys (even more dangerous), was to say "Hello" to the sea. After a quick dip (of the hand ... well we don't quite know the shark situation yet) we saw the most amazing sight of pelicans skimming a couple of inches above the rolling wave looking for surfing fish.
To cap the day off we saw our first real life police chase* on our way home with a real felon on a sports bike, a cop car and a CHIPS bike weaving their way through the traffic! Cool!
* No police cars on their roofs though and no Keanu Reeves either unfortunately.
Our first trip out, after I'd filled the fridge from the organic supermarket (dangerous) and Hugo had been to the electrical mega warehouse, Frys (even more dangerous), was to say "Hello" to the sea. After a quick dip (of the hand ... well we don't quite know the shark situation yet) we saw the most amazing sight of pelicans skimming a couple of inches above the rolling wave looking for surfing fish.
To cap the day off we saw our first real life police chase* on our way home with a real felon on a sports bike, a cop car and a CHIPS bike weaving their way through the traffic! Cool!
* No police cars on their roofs though and no Keanu Reeves either unfortunately.
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Getting here
After a whirlwind of sorting out my desk at work, leaving do's, sorting out the airfreight, selling stuff and all those other jobs which we really should have done over the past 3 years but needed a looming deadline to kick us into action, suddenly it was 5.30am and time to leave for California.
It was a wonderfully sociable morning as Mum & Dad (who seem to spend much of their retirement on route to Chichester harbour where Dad keeps the boat he'd always hankered after), and Hugo's Mum who was in London were able to meet us for a coffee at Heathrow before we left. In a wonderful coincidence friends of ours were also on the same flight so we had an opportunity to catch up on the plane. It made leaving so much easier, particularly for Hugo who wasn't returning to England 2 weeks later as I was.
However the very early morning was made slightly worse by some classic Claire planning which meant we were out clubbing for my work's "Claire's not quite leaving do" until 2am. It was a great night though, and as we were lucky enough to have Virgin Upper Class tickets included in the relocation, the in-flight bed with pillow and duvet and 4 hours sleep certainly eased the pain (after a nice steak of course).
Never before when the pilot has said we're an hour from landing have I thought* deep down "no please fly around a bit longer - I haven't had time to enjoy all this luxury yet" I am so going to struggle back in Economy now - no bed, no duvet, no food on demand, no table cloth, no dinner opposite your loved one, no "would you like a glass of champagne"!
* Not very environmentally friendly but please see section on planting trees.
After a whirlwind of sorting out my desk at work, leaving do's, sorting out the airfreight, selling stuff and all those other jobs which we really should have done over the past 3 years but needed a looming deadline to kick us into action, suddenly it was 5.30am and time to leave for California.
It was a wonderfully sociable morning as Mum & Dad (who seem to spend much of their retirement on route to Chichester harbour where Dad keeps the boat he'd always hankered after), and Hugo's Mum who was in London were able to meet us for a coffee at Heathrow before we left. In a wonderful coincidence friends of ours were also on the same flight so we had an opportunity to catch up on the plane. It made leaving so much easier, particularly for Hugo who wasn't returning to England 2 weeks later as I was.
However the very early morning was made slightly worse by some classic Claire planning which meant we were out clubbing for my work's "Claire's not quite leaving do" until 2am. It was a great night though, and as we were lucky enough to have Virgin Upper Class tickets included in the relocation, the in-flight bed with pillow and duvet and 4 hours sleep certainly eased the pain (after a nice steak of course).
Never before when the pilot has said we're an hour from landing have I thought* deep down "no please fly around a bit longer - I haven't had time to enjoy all this luxury yet" I am so going to struggle back in Economy now - no bed, no duvet, no food on demand, no table cloth, no dinner opposite your loved one, no "would you like a glass of champagne"!
* Not very environmentally friendly but please see section on planting trees.
Just in case anyone has stumbled across this blog rather than being friends & family who have been guided (read: frog marched) here we should first introduce ourselves. I’ll leave Hugo to introduce himself; in the meantime I’m Claire.
I am a Chartered Accountant*. A vaguely interesting accountant if you can imagine that, but an accountant all the same. I say “I am an accountant” when I should say “I am an accountant on hold”. Hugo, my husband has accepted a job with Apple so we have moved from Silicon Fen to Silicon Valley, and I have moved from a demanding but fun job to being wife of an H1 visa holder. I can’t even complain that I’m just a number as I don’t even get one of those.
So - what to fill my time whilst I can’t work in the US (and judging by the way things have started, while I don’t get to see terribly much of Hugo). Definitely some mountain biking, some surfing in the summer (sorry - despite being English I am a complete wimp in the cold these days) and up to Tahoe in the winter. Learning Spanish is a must – I had a good try to learn the basics when I went to Peru in 2000 but the altitude had the affect of switching my brain back to my O Level French… which was great, until 3 days later both languages disappeared completely as I acclimatized. Stanford is near so study is a possibility and I can work for charity, however to start with, and to keep my brain working we have our blog.
*I didn’t always want to be an accountant in true Monty Python style and in fact started life as a Geographer before embarking on my life of eternal examinations.
I am a Chartered Accountant*. A vaguely interesting accountant if you can imagine that, but an accountant all the same. I say “I am an accountant” when I should say “I am an accountant on hold”. Hugo, my husband has accepted a job with Apple so we have moved from Silicon Fen to Silicon Valley, and I have moved from a demanding but fun job to being wife of an H1 visa holder. I can’t even complain that I’m just a number as I don’t even get one of those.
So - what to fill my time whilst I can’t work in the US (and judging by the way things have started, while I don’t get to see terribly much of Hugo). Definitely some mountain biking, some surfing in the summer (sorry - despite being English I am a complete wimp in the cold these days) and up to Tahoe in the winter. Learning Spanish is a must – I had a good try to learn the basics when I went to Peru in 2000 but the altitude had the affect of switching my brain back to my O Level French… which was great, until 3 days later both languages disappeared completely as I acclimatized. Stanford is near so study is a possibility and I can work for charity, however to start with, and to keep my brain working we have our blog.
*I didn’t always want to be an accountant in true Monty Python style and in fact started life as a Geographer before embarking on my life of eternal examinations.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)