Easter Feast @ the Heatherlea

About ten days ago, someone put a paper plate on the kitchen table which read, “Easter Sunday Dinner, tons of meat, donations welcome: more money = more meat.” Someone else found a lovely chalice in which to deposit the donations. The first person dumped in £5, so 4 others (me included) followed like lemmings. The £25 was down payment on the £38 = $60 worth of lamb and pork that was purchased on Saturday. Lena cooked it all. Others (not me) had promised to help, but then volunteered to work for time and a half. I figured it would be nice to bring some wine and got some on the way home from my 90 minute Easter Sunday run. This was unoriginal as there were then 4 bottles of wine for dinner. The food was quite good; all the meat and all the wine were consumed. It was also Al’s birthday earlier in the week, so the dinner ended with two different cakes.

On Thursday past, I received a package from Amy. It contained a card with the message, “It wouldn’t feel like Easter without some Peeps!” I have a deep and complicated love-hate relationship with peeps. Anyway, I introduced global representatives to peeps.

Here is Lena pointing out how she used the peeps wisely as decoration.




Here’s the Heatherlea crew. I start with the guy closest to the camera. This is Richard. He was a guest. Counterclockwise we have Jenny (Korea), Al (Scotland, Heatherlea Chief), Lena (Germany), Claire (England), Kat (Australia), Edit (Hungary), my empty seat, and Yoomi (Korea). Absent were Chica (Japan) and Essam (Egypt/UK) and the two Aussies from the basement flat.


PS: With the four bottles of wine, I decided it was unwise to head out for some whisky tasting as promised. I do however have two in the bag and will post Bowmore Darkest later this week.

Blogging is hard.

I guess blogging isn't hard if you are doing anything interesting. I'm doing things that I find interesting, but I can imagine they won't make for good blogging material. I am working a whole heck of a lot, which might just be a reflection of inefficiency. I'm learning this new programming language for GPUs which is based on C. Problem is, I didn't know C either. But I am now making reasonable headway. My goal is that I will have a program which performs Iterated Hard Threshholding on the GPU by the end of the week.

The Heatherlea has had some turnover. Rad, the polish guy, and Elodie, the french girl, have both moved out. Cat, an Australian girl, and Essam, an Egyptian - UK resident, moved in back in February. Essam was on faculty at a University in Glasgow and then moved to the University of Edinburgh in the business school. His family is in Glasgow. He commuted for three years and then decided he wasn't going home during the week. Afterall, he has to cross the entire country to go from Glasgow to Edinburgh. If you live in a major US city, it probably takes you longer to get to work than it would take to drive from Glasgow to Edinburgh. The train is 105 minutes. Cat is a young lady who just doesn't really want life to start yet so she's globetrotting. I would guess her life is similar to the life of our blog follower Elpeebee after his triumphant days at Emory.

Very recently (last two weeks?) a Japanese girl moved in, and I think her name is Chica. Her boyfriend is around often. Two nights this week, I made myself some dinner and ate it in the kitchen while they chatted each other up. It is the most amazing conversation: Chica speaks Japanese while Boyfriend speaks English. If they really want to make fun of each other (or maybe me) then they use the other person's language. At one point, Chica asked Boyfriend to get something and was trying to explain where it was. He was aimlessly shuffling around the kitchen. It was very bizarre to witness because I know where things are in the kitchen, but I had no clue if he was getting closer. I finally snapped, asked what he was looking for, and directed him to it. It was clearly not that he didn't understand Chica, I think Chica was saying something like, "No over there."

Anyway, I asked them about this and they both said that they understood the other language perfectly, but when they speak it they slow down their conversation. I can't imagine my brain working that well. Later I find out that Boyfriend has done this his entire life as his parents only speak Icelandic to him and he only replies in English. What a weird set of languages to know: English, Icelandic, and Japanese.

On that note, I am working diligently on my bilingual quest as I now understand both English (US) and English (UK), although I usually only speak English (US). {If you don't think these are different languages, look at the language options on your Facebook page.}

Coffee @ the Heatherlea

When introduced to the workings of the kitchen, I was shown a cabinet filled with teas and coffees. “Just add some to it and help yourself for any of it; it’s the community tea and coffee cupboard,” I was told. Unfortunately, all the coffee was instant. That wasn’t so surprising, but I wasn’t excited about instant coffee. I bought some instant coffee I had here on a previous trip and it is okay. It tastes like pretty good instant coffee.

A few days ago, I saw real coffee on the counter and asked how one might brew such a fine thing. Al (Heatherlea owner) shows me this interesting contraption where the water is placed in the bottom, the coffee in a filter area, that is screwed to the bottom of a tiny pot, and the entire thing placed directly on the stove burning at a constant temperature of hellfire. This turns the water in the bottom into steam, sends the steam through the coffee grounds and up through a tube and into the empty reservoir on top. This sounded fascinating. Cora, a colleague at work, warned me it would be like espresso if I filled it up completely. Anyway, I made some this morning. The coffee was Starbucks, house blend medium. I put in about two-thirds of the coffee it would have taken to fill it. It was amazing how fast it made the product. Unfortunately, the product is awful. It doesn't taste like coffee exactly. In fact, it is so weird it doesn't taste like espresso either. It simply tastes like something went wrong.

I said to Lina (German, 20ish) and Claire (English, 40ish), "At home, you can just set my coffee maker to start the coffee before you get up so that when you walk down stairs the coffee is hot and ready."

They laugh, then Lina says, "That is exactly how I dream of America."

Claire says, "He's not serious.... wait, are you serious?"

"Yes, I'm serious," I tell them. "You just set the time you want the coffee maker to start. It's not a big deal, we could buy one of these at Sainsbury's."

"NO!" Claire yells. "You can't buy that at Sainsbury's; you live in the future!" And she walked out the back door to have a cigarette.

I almost died laughing, a bit at her response, but mostly that they still aren't sure if I am kidding about a crazy coffee maker that starts when you tell it to.

I'm still drank my yucky coffee after bringing it to work with me. Actually by then it was cold AND bad, a winning combination. Jared and Cora, my two main collaborators here, have since given me a French coffee press. I'll try that. I bought some coffee tonight, but it wasn’t specifically marked for a French press. I’ll update you if it comes out like coffee or like Turkish coffee.

Quick Updates:

-turns out Al’s partner’s parents actually own the Heatherlea.

-it was a B&B pretty much since the end of WWII when the US confiscated it. Al says four years ago, there was a knock at the door, and three old men asked if they could come in a sit around for a while; they had been stationed in the house during WWII.

-whisky (or whiskey in our language) is expensive; I’ll get there. I did one and I’ll post something about it soon.

-spending too much time getting you acquainted with Edinburgh to tell you about math; I’m not sure if you care. Maybe I’ll write about math when I have nothing else to say.

-when shopping this evening, I checked at Sainsbury's and you can NOT in fact purchase a drip coffee maker with a digital clock, let alone one that is programmable. How much more would that cost, 94 pence? (where pence are like our cents)

The Heatherlea

One especially quaint aspect of living in Edinburgh is that all of the houses are named. At this point, the preponderance of these very large houses have been split up into flats, but still the names remain, usually etched on the glass above the main entrance. It’s pretty amazing actually that these names have carried on through the years.

I live in the Heatherlea. The Heatherlea has not been divided into flats, rather the Heatherlea served for a long time as a bed and breakfast. A few years back, the owner decided on a new business model as there are roughly as many B&Bs as people in Edinburgh. It is now a B&make-your-own-B. He rents the rooms long term. According to Al, he runs an "English school." He seeks international residents who come to study or work in Edinburgh for an extended period of time. This way, no one knows English and they can all learn English from each other? The English School isn’t exactly accurate. Yesterday, while I ate dinner in the rather small kitchen, there were two conversations going on, one in Polish, the other Korean. There were two people in a different room speaking English, but that was their native tongue.

I chose to live in the Heatherlea for a few reasons. It was convenient to already have internet set up and such. I would have access to the kitchen and nothing to worry about when traveling. It would give me time to find a nice place for the family. It would save me money in a variety of ways, not the least of which is rent. In Edinburgh, rent is the same in magnitude, or possibly a bit higher, than in say St. Louis. Unfortunately, the scale is different as the Pound Sterling is (today) 1.63 times the US Dollar. So, a rent of £700 per month is unfortunately $1141 per month. Plus, you have to pay a zillion taxes to the council, which is apparently an elected trash collection agency as I see no other services provided by this piece of government.

Anyway, the Heatherlea has the added benefit of being, well, very international and often entertaining. The current occupants are mostly between 19 and 23 years old I would guess:
Elodie – a French woman
Lina – a German woman
Claire – an English woman (probably about 40)
Jenny – a Korean woman
Yumi – another Korean woman
Edit - a Hungarian woman
Raddick – a Polish guy
Jeff – a fantastically handsome American (probably not yet 35)

Then there is the owner Al and his partner, who might be named Amanda. She’s nice, but was the first person I met. When she told me her name, I was more concerned with if I had found the right home. She made me pasta and I forgot my own name, let alone hers.

Oh, the Heatherlea has a flat in the basement which is rented to two Aussies, probably around 25; I think they’re married. They appear at random in the kitchen. Jaime and Gwen I think.

I argued for and received a clean, small mini-fridge, got some cupboard space, and have cooked for myself precisely once. That lasted two meals. Otherwise it has been the three S’s: sandwiches, salads, and cereal. This taking care of yourself is not all it’s cracked up to be. It is fantastically time consuming. I’m not that experienced on this front as you might already know since I married Amy six weeks after moving out of the dorms. Since then either Amy, the Army, or a restaurant has fed me. Okay, not exactly, but pretty much.

Tonight I decided I would cook some stir fry, chicken and prepackaged veggies. Then I went into the kitchen, saw that I still had lettuce, cut up some cheese and lunch meat, and drizzled on some oil and vinegar. Salad two nights in a row.

So that’s where I live. I hope the Heatherlea is a source of entertainment to my two blog followers and the occasional passer by.

Here is a the ad for a room to rent which I post if want to see pictures of the Heatherlea. A few notes, that’s not my room and I can’t see Arthur’s seat from my room (i.e. the view shown is not what’s out my window).


Tomorrow, coffee @ the Heatherlea!