Hangin' in Hatfield

So my latest business trip brought me to England for the first time, to the mostly industrial town of Hatfield. Located about 60 kilometers northwest of London, Hatfield happens to have a rich history of British aviation, as some of their very first commercial airplanes were designed, took flight and manufactured there. In fact, I'm told that my company offices are located on what used to be the runway of the airfield. Now, Hatfield is mostly office buildings, shopping centers, apartments and suburban homes.

It was a short trip, only gone for a total of about 48 hours, so as you can imagine, there was little time to rest or see much. I left for the airport from my office in the late afternoon on Wednesday the 5th of May, and proceeded to sit in almost 2 hours of traffic while traveling to JFK. I'm glad I wasn't driving. After boarding, the flight was delayed because there were 3 people that had checked in luggage but didn't show up at the gate. These days that's potentially not a good thing, so the crew was trying to locate all of the luggage that these passengers had checked. Ultimately, though, those passengers turned up, not sure what the holdup was, but we were able to leave without further incident, about an hour late.

I did manage to sleep for a couple of hours on the plane (yes, my company did pay for a business class seat for me and yes, it was pretty awesome). We finally arrived at Heathrow Airport in London at 8:00 in the morning, so of course it was time to go in to the office. I cleaned up a bit in the airport restroom (called the "Toilets" instead of Restrooms), combed my fingers through my hair and off I was to work for the day.

While at work, I realized that the power adaptor that I purchased at Radio Shack earlier this week so that I could charge my laptop and my cell phone, and that the salesman swore would work in the UK, even though I pointed out to him that the package said that the adaptor was for "continental Europe" and I asked him if he was completely certain that this would work in the UK because the UK is an island and not part of continental Europe and he assured me with a confident nod that it would absolutely work in the UK without any question, was WRONG, and they didn't work (OK enough venting). Of course the IT department didn't have any adaptors for me because when people from the UK travel, they need something that will convert to the U.S. or to the other parts of Europe, not the other way around. I wound up having to walk around Hatfield for a while until I found a store called Asda (which turned out to be kind of like a Walmart with a supermarket) that had them. Even though I had to wander around a bit, the store turned out to be a brisk 10 minute walk back to the offices.

While traipsing around Hatfield, I did find a place that advertised what looked like chicken, beef, pork and lamb kebobs. It was lunchtime, and I was hungry, so I stopped in and ordered one made of chicken. Since they were called kebobs, I expected them to come on a stick. The meat was cooking on those spits that you see when you buy lamb gyros at the Greek festival, where they slice off the meat with a big carving knife. It turns out that I didn't get any sticks, the guy stuffed a bunch of the perfectly grilled chicken into a sort of pita pocket and then topped it off with shredded lettuce, diced tomatoes, onions, sliced cucumbers and a yummy garlic sauce (I'm literally salivating while typing this). It was very good.

I worked until about 8 PM that night and then got a lift from a co-worker to the hotel for the one night that I stayed over. I turned on the TV to see if I could find some sports scores as I felt out of touch for the last day and a half. I thought I found something when I came across a channel that showed an indoor stadium full of people chanting and cheering, many of whom were holding up homemade signs of support for their favorite stars. I thought it was a basketball game, so I continued watching for a bit. It turns out it was a competitive dart throwing tournament. Who knew? The crowd was raucous and they appeared to take their dart throwing heroes very seriously. As you can imagine, the 2 competitors in this “athletic event” each had physiques that looked like they had spent a considerable amount of time at their local pubs, no doubt downing many, many pints in between their rigorous training to hone their craft. It was somewhat amusing, and I was pretty impressed at the accuracy of the guys playing, but I quickly lost interest. I honestly can’t imagine spending time and money going to this type of “sporting event”, but I guess some people say the same thing about baseball (shame on you if you do, you poor, unenlightened souls).

Some things I observed about the UK:

-Very small parking spaces in the airport. It was so tight, the driver that picked me up had to go back and forth about 15 times so that he could squeeze the relatively small car out.
-The yield signs are red instead of yellow and say “Give Way”
-There are traffic cameras with radar detectors everywhere, as the taxi drivers pointed out to me. I saw numerous speed traps where the speed limit went from 50 to 40 and back to 50 within about half a kilometer or so. Good thing I didn’t attempt to drive on this trip
-French fries are called “chips”. Thick cut french fries are called “chunky chips”
-Any woman that appeared older than me called me “darling” or “dear”
-In our company office buildings, nobody has their own office. Everybody sits at long tables which are sort of in the middle of the floor and if you need to hold a private meeting, you have to find a conference room, which are located around the perimeter of the building
-I didn’t pay any sales tax, if something was advertised as £4, that’s exactly what you paid
-I did struggle a little bit with the accents when I was at a store or in a restaurant. I think people must make a better effort to enunciate when in a business setting, because I almost never have any issues when meeting with my co-workers from the UK

It turns out that Thursday, May 6th was the national election day for prime minister in England, held every 5 years from the point that the last prime minister first took office. So on the way back to Heathrow, I asked the driver about the results. There were 4 main candidates, each representing a different party, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, the Labour party and the British National party. I got the impression that, loosely, the Conservatives hold similar views to Republicans in the U.S., the Labour Party is like the Democrats, the Liberal Democrats are somewhere in the middle and the British Nationals are something of an “ultraconservative” group that is extremely focused on keeping jobs and investments of money within England instead of letting companies outsource to other countries or move money to offshore bank accounts. In order to win, your party must win a majority of the seats in Parliament, which are sort of like the number of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. The winner needed to have won 326 seats, but the party of the current leader, David Cameron of the Conservatives, only won something like 306 seats in Parliament with Gordon Brown’s Labour party winning about 250 seats. If there is no party majority, this is called a “hung Parliament”, which hasn’t happened since the 1920’s, and there is no clear prime minister elected. It sounds like the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats might make a deal to combine their votes, but of course the Conservatives are going to cry foul over that. There’s actually quite a bit of chaos over this right now, something akin to the Bush/Gore election in 2000, should be interesting to keep an eye on what happens.

On the flight home on Friday, May 7th, one of the pilots came out to show us that we were flying about 60 miles northeast of the volcano in Iceland, so we got a pretty good view of the top of the volcano through the clouds as well as the gray smoke and clouds that are still shooting up from it. The pilot told us that the original flight plan had us flying south of the volcano, but because the clouds and ice are currently moving southeast, they decided to change so that we would fly north of it. We were told that this was as close as airplanes are permitted to get to the volcano these days.

So all in all, not a bad trip. Unfortunately, though, as anyone who travels for business will appreciate, in addition to the work done for the purposes of the trip, work back at home still keeps coming and people need answers and decisions (the marvels of modern technology where anybody can ask you anything at any time, day or night, and expect you to answer right away because we have the technology that permits it). After I had already planned the trip, a co-worker pointed out to me that Mandy was pretty pregnant, and questioned whether or not it was wise to leave her at this time. Of course, that potential issue completely escaped me, but lucky for me that I have a wife that tends to save my bacon when I make commitments without considering all of the ramifications (thanks for hanging in there, hon!).