It's All About the Food

I've discovered a common trend when chatting about missing home and going home with fellow North Americans here: we all miss the food. There's some items that are missed by a bunch of us, and then there's the personal favourites that might be region-specific, or have some special meaning for the person. Derek and I try to find adequate substitutes, as we probably all do, but these generally receive the same response: it's good, but it's not the same. Wondering what we're missing? Well, for months now Derek has been talking about how much he's looking forward to a good backyard barbecue burgers, sausages, and all the works. Me, I'm missing a few more specifics (in no particular order):

• Tim Hortons
• Pizza Pizza's hawaiian pizza
• Hewitt's Dairy Bar
• Cheetos

Tim Horton's is probably the most often mentioned missed shop by our Canadian friends. Most miss the coffee, but as I'm not a coffee drinker, I miss my usual order of a medium french vanilla cappuccino and a cinnamon sugar doughnut, although a box of TimBits would be excellent right about now. Having tried a couple types of cheese puffs and balls from the stores around town, I still haven't found a suitable replacement for a bag of Cheetos Crunchits. We do have some pizza store chains here, like Domino's and Pizza Hut, but for me nothing beats a Pizza Pizza hawaiian pizza, well-done, with creamy garlic dipping sauce. And then there's Hewitt's, with its excellent ice cream and old-fashioned Dairy Bar and grill. I'm so looking forward to my standard lunch order of a plain cheeseburger with an order of fries to share with Mum or Grandma and a can of cream soda, and a delicious hot fudge kiddie sundae.

When someone mentions that they're heading home for a holiday, the discussion usually turns to food at some point. Other much-missed items amongst friends include Kraft Dinner (the Kraft 'Cheesy Pasta' here just isn't the same), Coffee Crisps (which I didn't know were a Canadian thing until I moved here), Welch's Grape Jam, Diana's Barbecue Sauces, and stores like Seven Eleven and M&M Meats. A Harvey's cheeseburger and onion rings also sounds tempting. Family members and friends who come visit from Canada sometimes bring missed food, which is very kind. And friends returning from a trip home take orders and bring favourites back here to share with others who are missing the same stuff. The Coffee Crisps have been such a nice treat! We'll definitely be returning the favour. But we also take precautions before coming back here. Last time I brought myself back a tin of Tim's French Vanilla Cappuccino mix, and am down to the last mug or two, so I've been rationing it over the past month or two. I may just bring two tins back with me next time.

Cooking from recipes is also more complicated here. Some items that I could just pop over to Sobey's and pick up off the shelf just can't be found, including cookie crumbs for crusts, or even graham crackers from which to make crumbs, so you have to find alternatives. In this case, using plain digestive crackers smushed with a wine bottle. I also learned that fruit pies aren't common here, and thus cans of non-meat pie filling are also rare. And so when I was making my birthday cheesecake last December I ended up using a Polish cherry jam for the topping. One also needs to take time to convert measurements from cups to weight, and even to convert the oven's temperature as we now have a fan-assisted oven.

But it's by no means all bad when it comes to good food. First of all, some of my favourite snack foods are available here, including Pepsi, Doritos (although some of the flavours are different), and KitKats. I'll sometimes meet friends for a hot chocolate at Starbucks. Some have different names, such as Lays potato chips which are Walker's here (and come in a wild range of flavours). Other familiar brands make different things. Not surprisingly, we have access to a wonderful variety of Cadbury products, which makes Easter an exciting day. But there's also British and European brands of food that offer some great stuff, including Milka's chocolate bars, ChicagoTown frozen pizzas, Walker's shortbread, and pretty much anything from Marks and Spencer's food court (my favourites are their Chinese lemon chicken and their Indian butter chicken). Chocolate Soup makes the most amazing hot chocolate, although it gets way too busy during the festival season in August (it's just off the Royal Mile, so a prime spot for tourists). Jimmy Chungs does a good Chinese buffet, and the Red Fort has a good and affordable Indian buffet, although service is always slow. Overall, I'd have to admit that vegetarian haggis is one of my absolute favourite home-cooked meals, and happily we'll be having it at least once this week :)

So that's my summary of some of the more missed foodstuffs. Although I haven't included the home-cooked meals of mums' and grandmas,' which we all also miss, hopefully it's been enough to make you hungry!

Halfway? Already?

A bunch of us are now hitting that point in our PhDs where we should technically be just about halfway through, which seems pretty crazy because time has been flying! If I'd done this back home, I wouldn't have even started writing or done much in the way of primary source (material created at the time you're studying) research by this point, because the Canadian PhD system involves at least year of courses, plus another year preparing for and undertaking comprehensive exams on a library of significant secondary sources (current historical research in monographs or journals) on your topic. I knew I wouldn't have enjoyed five or six years of study, which is the average length of time a History PhD takes to complete in Canada. However, this three year programme is flying by!

I should say that it's also unusual to complete the three year programme in three years. The fourth year is usually used for writing up (the completed thesis will be a maximum of 100 000 words), the viva (an oral defense in front of your supervisors, an external examiner who is an expert in the field) which can be held up to three months after you submit your thesis, and, assuming you pass the viva, corrections which take two or three months. So really, a fourth year could actually drift into a fifth depending on how slow the school is to organise your viva and the extent of the minor corrections. And yet funding runs out after three years (which is only relevant to those lucky people like myself who have funding, that is), and us overseas students are faced with our UK visas running out in January of the fourth year (2012 for me), so there is extra pressure to complete, defend and correct by halfway through the fourth year. In fact, it looks like the school has finally admitted that most students will take four years to complete, and the new visas issued to students who started last September now last a full four years.

Then comes applying for post-doc and lectureship positions. This takes time. A number of the major UK postdoctorate schemes have a deadline of April, and you have to have at least submitted your thesis if not defended it, so it makes it highly unlikely that someone could apply in the spring of their third year and have a position secured for the fourth. This can then mean no income beyond tutoring for the entire fourth year -- a scary thought. Postdocs vary greatly. The Leverhulme Fellowship is the major one here, and is ridiculously hard to get, but it is a great start to a career in academia. It allows you two years of paid research at a UK university to pursue research on a new topic, thereby giving you time to put together the basis for what will become your second book (as your thesis is assumed to be your first). The pay is good, and your teaching time limited so that the school you're working at can't take advantage of your newness too much.

I can't count how many dire warnings we've received from staff, upper-year PhDs and postdocs about the bleak job outlook we're all facing. I suppose it's just like any other field right now, except maybe discount stores. We're told that the trick to getting a job is to have a book (likely an adaptation of your thesis) and, hopefully, a postdoctoral fellowship under your belt. To get a book you need to find the right academic publisher, create an exciting and convincing book proposal, and spend a lot of time re-working your thesis, because the thesis can be so technical in its referencing, definitions, methodology, historiographic examination... see? I bet I'm boring some of you already, and thus it needs to be reworked to become publishable.

Lectureships are also hard to come by. Tenure doesn't really happen in UK universities (so I've been told by profs here, anyway), so it's not like jobs are held for life here, but when professors retire or move to a new school, a lot of their positions just disappear for cost-cutting reasons. I've noticed that a number of major slavery historians have retired recently, so I do have a bit of hope, but to be honest I'm not sure that I want to be a 'slavery historian' for the rest of my life. There's so many different aspects of British history that interest me that I wouldn't want to be limited in that way, although I would be very happy to teach courses on it, and then aim my own research elsewhere, so that could be the way forward.

I was very surprised when I first came here and starting working as a tutor running three tutorials a week that I was the only grad student tutor on my course. The rest were all postdocs. I think this happens because a) postdocs can be assigned menial jobs by the school that's housing them, b) Edinburgh doesn't officially teach postgrads to teach or even want them teaching as the programme is so short, and yet provided a bunch of us with teaching awards to get us teaching... c) teaching just isn't as important when job hunting here compared to in North America, or perhaps d) postdocs nearing the end of their funded fellowship might not find work right away and need something to tide them over. Some teaching and admin. experience is important when job hunting in the academic arena, although teaching isn't as important when assessing applicants in UK universities as it is in the US or Canada. Luckily I now have three years of teaching tutorials under my belt so I should be okay on either side of the Atlantic on that front, and I gained a ton of admin. experience this year by organising and chairing a couple postgraduate workshops and sitting on a number of committees as a student rep. A fellow PhD-2 and I are also in the early stages of organising a one-day academic conference for the fall, so stay tuned.

I suppose the final complicating factor when looking towards the future is knowing that we really have to be willing to go where the work is, because work is so hard to come by. This could mean a lectureship in England, a postdoc in Canada or the US, or maybe we'll head farther afield to Europe. Universities in a number of countries in Europe, including in Scandinavia, teach first and second year courses in English, and give their academic staff several years to learn the native language. That's pretty exciting stuff. And I'm all for looking beyond academia towards government or private positions with national heritage bodies or in museums, but the nature of my degree and my qualifications will steer me towards the academic environment.

The uncertain nature of the next few years is a little bit daunting for someone like myself who likes to be organised and have a plan. With regards to the near future, we've made an educated guess that we'll be here in Scotland until at least late fall, 2011, to allow me to complete my writing up and probably my viva and corrections, although if I found a position elsewhere I could fly back for the viva and likely make any corrections at home. If Derek was working then I would probably tutor in my fourth year and we'd stay until April 2012 (we should both have British passports by then and therefore not need our visas anymore, but that's another blog). With Derek still job hunting our future's more flexible at the moment then we'd expected, but we're on a very tight budget. A postdoctoral fellowship (which is what I really want) or a first-year lectureship, and time to work on my book proposal and maybe write an article or two, will hopefully be how I spend 2012-2013, and that sounds pretty good to me.

An Olympic Wrap-Up

What a Games, eh? I must have watched twice as many hours of Olympic coverage than I've ever done before (and it certainly wasn't due to the quality of the commentary...). I'm so thankful that Canada was the host nation so that other nations like Britain kept tabs on our athletes as well as their own. We were able to see coverage of almost every competition in which we won gold (or were in contention). Of course, this also meant that we got to watch some of our gold-medal-favourite athletes throw the gold away (women's curling & skeleton -- the 'bob-skeleton' as they call it here -- come to mind). And we even got to watch three medal ceremonies where we won gold.

And then there were our spectacular stats, shown off even more nicely by BBC ranking their nations by the number of gold medals won rather than total medals. As I'm sure everyone knows very well by now, by winning 14 golds, Canada's now won more golds at a Winter Olympics than any other nation ever has. Of course, one needs to take into account the new events that get added every four years, but it is still a great achievement and something I bet we're all proud of. Of course, I'm now wondering if the funding will disappear now that we've had our day and our games. At least the facilities will remain, and Canada's golds will be added to the history books. They were awfully pretty, too, those gold medals.

I can't summarize our experience of the Olympics without mentioning the game. In the days leading up to Sunday BBC was already touting it as a game that, for Canadians, would be the most important one in the past 50 years. And wasn't it spectacular! We were on the edge of our seats when the USA tied it up with less than 25 seconds to go. 25 seconds! We should have had those golds safely in our hands! But no, we all had to sit through a depressing end of the period, BBC's 'analysis' of the game so far (I should mention that instead of Ron Maclean and Don Cherry, we had a Canadian skier (their token Canadian for the entire Games), a British track athlete as host, and a British rower who said he'd 'seen some games'), and then another 7 minutes before Crosby saved the day and our men's team's reputation. We were shouting in celebration, but only temporarily, as we were watching with American friends who were anything but thrilled with the outcome.

As our little party finished and we were on our own again, I found myself in tears for only the second time since the Games had begun. Everything in me was telling me that I should have been home, shouting and celebrating with everyone else as part of a nation who'd just earned the greatest prize we could in our Winter Olympics: the double gold in hockey. Friends here said they felt the same way. We watched as Facebook's status updates from both sides of the Atlantic celebrated the victory, and each of ours did, too. I was noticeably happy the next morning in tutorial and told my students all about it (I think only my 3 American students had watched the game). I'd teased them a bit the week before in my Thursday class, reminding them that the hockey game would be on at 8pm the night before their essays were due so that they should be sure to factor that into their writing schedules, knowing that maybe 1 or 2 would even know what I was talking about. One of my students did tell me that Canadian students had poured out of the pubs on George Street over in New Town after the game finished, shouting and singing and celebrating the victory, so that's pretty cool.

All that was left was the closing ceremonies, which were on too late for us to watch live, so watched them on Monday afternoon. I loved the opening of them, making fun of the torch not rising properly from the ground, and giving our fourth torchbearer the chance to light her leg of the torch. I thought Neil Young's acoustic performance while the fire went out was lovely. We were excited to see Alanis Morisette, and I agreed with the BBC commentator's surprised sentiments that Avril Lavigne wasn't going to sing Sk8ter Boy. We felt bad for Catherine O'Hara who got next to no laughs, and were so happy to see Michael J. Fox! Personally, I thought the giant beavers, inflatable moose and sexy mountie ladies dancing around Micheal Buble on a giant mountie hat was pretty darn funny, although I suppose we just have to hope that the larger international audience gets that it really was a joke, and that that's not what Canada really is.

BBC wasn't always the most polite in their discussion of the Canadian athletes, and seemed to harp on our 'Own the Podium' program quite a bit as the golds continued to come in. They would comment on how Canadians showing that they really want to win just isn't very Canadian, and that our reluctance to give extra practice runs to foreign athletes beyond the required practice time was unfair to their British athletes. When the two married British skeleton medal hopefuls came in far from the medals, both whined to the BBC about not being allowed enough practice time on such a demanding track. However, the women's competition was won by the second British athlete who said she loved the track (and whom BBC had completely discounted in the run up to the Games) while the Canadian favourite with 'hundreds more practice runs' had bombed. They were also really upset when a British short-track speed skater was disqualified (for twice knocking over the Canadian skater next to her by skating directly into her after the gun went off), and managed to bring up this 'unfair' disqualification at various times throughout the rest of the Games. Regardless, the Games wrapped up with us feeling even more proud to be Canadian, a phenomenon I'm sure that was stirred up in the minds of Canadians around the world.