Gardner WebLog

I waited a little to start talking about this subject, as to make sure my parents knew my intention over here was to see London, and not spend the whole time climbing.  But I do have to cover this topic a little, it does occupy some of my time.  About a mile away there is one of the largest climbing gyms in all of Europe.  Not only are there three floors of glorious man-made plastic geological rock features in this gym, but what covers it all is an enormous castle.  It used to be a water treatment facility that for some reason was designed as a castle.  I heard sometimes they let people climb up and rappel (the brits call it abseiling) off of one of the big towers.
 

I got a student membership that lasts for three months.  Unlike everything else in this city, this deal was much cheaper than anything you can find in the states.  The most difficult part about climbing out here is the different rating system.  For those of you who have not taken up climbing yet (its never too late), the U.S. uses a system called the Yosemite Decimal System.  It comprises of different “classes,” ranging from class 1 which is walking, to class 5 which is climbing with ropes.  Class 2 is basically steeper walking, class 3 and 4 are usually called scrambling, in which you look for hand holds and foot holds.  Then, the classes get broken down once you reach class 5.  Easier climbs are around 5.4-5.7.  When you get to 5.10, we start to add in letters.  So, the difference between a 5.8 and a 5.9, is the same between a 5.10a and a 5.10b.  The reason for this came with the evolution of climbing difficulty.  No one wanted to say “I was the first person to climb a 5.11,” when the hardest rating at that time was a 5.10, so they said, I’ll call it a 5.10a.  Now, people are climbing routes as hard as 5.15a, which involves some form of superpowers.  I have not found the source of these superpowers, but my search is still on.  So, after all the explanation, I get to tell you they use a completely different rating system for routes here in the UK.  

 
As far as the UK system, I don’t know how it started, I just know it starts at 4a and goes until about 7c or so.  Here, they only use a, b, and c, whereas the YDS uses a-d.  It took me awhile to figure out what I was able to climb and what I couldn’t.  I hope I haven’t lost everyone here, I just had to clarify.  The way you climb by yourself is called bouldering.  It involves more physically demanding, powerful and shorter climbing techniques, and rarely goes above 10-15 feet or so.  Below are thick pads, so it’s soft if you fall.  In trying to climb a certain route, its often very hard to figure out where and how to position yourself while climbing, like solving some sort of a problem.  In fact, that’s what they call bouldering routes, problems.  Last week I was working on a certain problem, and ended up figuring it out with the help of a Swiss guy named Marcel.  After that we chatted for a little, thus building up enough of a relationship to become climbing partners.  He is almost done with school here in London, working on his dissertation.  So now we try to meet together as much as we can, in order to climb higher and use ropes, which is a different kind of fun than bouldering.  We climb at about the same difficulty, so everything works out.  I often go just before practice, because the gym is halfway between where I stay and Finsbury Park. 

 
For those of you who didn’t know much about climbing, I hope now you know enough and are interested enough to go try it, which you should, it’s a lot of fun and never too late.  I’m hoping to find some good outdoor places outside of London, but I’ll let you all know about that when it happens. 

Cheers,

 
Kyle      

So said one of the teachers that brought about 25 kids to Finsbury Park (our home field) to learn about the game of BASEBALL, she was pretty old.  Thursday was my first all day session, in which I ran four basic clinics, an hour each, and taught ten and eleven year olds the simple rules of baseball.  We started with basic throwing, no gloves (we used the softer balls that t-ballers use) which the kids loved…baseballs were everywhere and all over the park, fun.  Then we threw in the glove, of course every kid put it on their throwing hand to start off.  For some reason when you introduce a glove into the equation, the kids forget to still try and use two hands.  With no glove they caught it fine, two hands, no problem.  Once the glove goes on, it’s more of a swing at the ball then anything, amusing.  With some pointers I got them all catching and throwing, and having a blast.  Neil gave me some advice on how to run the session and the most crucial thing he told me was to hide the bats until its time to hit.  Every time I brought the bats out there were just stares and oohs and ahs.  The last part of the session was just hitting balls off the tee, and then everyone got to hit on the field once.  Some kids did really well for not ever playing before.

            Before each session I would ask them all what they knew about baseball.  “It’s like rounders!” or “Its like cricket, but not!”  and then one misled and ignorant child remarked “It’s not as fun as football!”  I would run through the basic rules, they all could get the general understanding of the game, and everyone had fun, so I was happy.  There was a little girl though in the second session that asked another coach that helped me if the glove was leather.  He told her yes, and she immediately dropped it and stepped away as if it had just turned into a snake.  “I’m a vegetarian I can’t touch leather,” she says.  Quick thinking by Daniel, the other coach, “this one is leather, but all the other ones are plastic, handing her a new glove and covering up the “Rawlings Rawhide” label.  It was funny, the entire game of baseball is based around leather. 

            I ran practices for the club all week and they went well.  I met the team I will be coaching which is the Pony level team (under 16’s).  I was supposed to go with them to Plymouth on Saturday, which is about 4 hours away on a train, way towards the southwestern tip of England.  Some of the other parent coaches backed out this weekend however, and I had to coach a different team.  Every Mets team won this weekend, which was good (Broncos, Ponys, Men’s.)  We played the worst team in the league today, beating them twice and sending them to a 0-10 record.  I threw a no-hitter, with 13 strikeouts, they were bad.

            Last week I didn’t talk much about the older guys on my team.  One of them, Jason Holowaty, works for the MLB out here traveling all around Europe, and even into Africa.  His father is the ABCA Hall of Famer head baseball coach at Eastern Connecticut.  He’s been there almost 40 years and is one of the most successful baseball coaches in NCAA baseball.  They always are in the World Series, and have a great program.  They also always come out to play us every year, and usually lose to us, go Bulldogs.  Josh Chetwynd, the guy who emailed me first in March, is the channel 5 baseball analyst for London.  There were kids at the game last week who obviously watch any baseball news in London, because they all asked Josh for his autograph.  He’s also written two books on the emergence of baseball in Europe, and then just Great Britain specifically.  Josh and Jason are older, but are still pretty good and truly love the game of baseball, it’s great.

            On a tourist’s note, I did make it to Westminster Abbey which was of course very interesting.  I stayed for awhile and looked at all the famous chapels and tombs.  When I came around to the Coronation Chair though, I noticed there was a small dinosaur standing right underneath the seat.  I stood there and laughed a little, then checked to see if anyone else had seen it.  Every person that walked by stopped to look at the chair and then asked the person they were with if the dinosaur was supposed to be there, it was really odd.  Then I see two parents with a child come around the corner with one of the red-robed guides.  “Your toy is sitting on the Coronation Chair!” the guide said.  I guess he found it and stuck it up there.  He took it down and gave it to the child, who then looked at his new Royal Tyrannosaurus Rex.  Funny. 

            For the most part, I haven’t had a whole lot of problems with the usual English weather, it seems that I’ve brought a little California with me.  It’s been great with a lot of nice sunny days.  I’m still getting used to the sun coming up around four and going down around ten.  I’m starting to make friends at one of the kebab places down the street, they are so incredibly delicious.  There’s a lot more to talk about, but I’ll save it for another post.  I hope all is well back there, and will talk to you soon.

Cheers,

Kyle

Well it was a successful weekend for the London Mets organization.  All together, the teams won five and only lost one.  There are four different teams competing right now for the program.  The Broncos which range from about nine to twelve years old are divided into two teams and play on Saturdays.  I stayed in London and helped run the games with another coach.  There is one high school aged team which will be the team I will be coaching, but they didn’t play this weekend.  The last team is the men’s team, and we played on Sunday leaving with two victories, but I will explain the details later.

I showed up early on Saturday with the club president Neil and another American coach Steve.  He’s a great guy who just moved to London from Tokyo after living there for 14 years.  He speaks fluent Japanese (he married a Japanese woman and has two kids who play on the team), this helps with the several Japanese kids who play.  While we were setting up the field he was telling me stories about little league over in Japan, when they would spend more than six hours out on the field practicing several times a week.  Where they find this time I have no idea, but all the Japanese kids have very good fundamentals and mechanics.  One of the Japanese kids was there with his dad practicing way before the game, receiving sharp comments, rolled eyes, and sighs every time one of his pitches was inaccurate.  It was similar to the response Adam, Nathan, and I would get from our father, only that was from nearly breaking the Brown’s (neighbors) window, ruining their flowers, or barely missing their annoying little dog.  Anyways, they were very intense, but good. 

We played a doubleheader, two six inning games.  We lost the first one and won the second, by a lot.  There a few mini-A.Rods on our team (including Daichi, not sure if I spelled that right, the kid who showed up early with his dad.) I forgot how great little league baseball was, just watching kids play baseball and have fun, simple as that.  The great thing about the London baseball league is that it provides an alternative sport for kids who don’t want to play soccer (or were told they weren’t good enough to play or go anywhere with it) because soccer is by far the most dominant youth sport in England.  It also provides a positive time for the kids, which some of them don’t get while at home.  I noticed there really weren’t a lot of parents at the field all day, the kids just showed up on their bikes, or walked to the park.  You can tell the kids really just like just spending time having fun playing a sport.  It was great to meet the kids and have fun coaching a little.

Neil gave me a ride down to Croydon, where we played on Sunday.  The field wasn’t too bad for a baseball field outside London.  We took BP, had a warm-up pregame, and then got going right at noon.  The umpire was American and not all that different from SCIAC umpires, cream uniform, oakleys and all.  I started in center and batted third, here comes the big American slugger…not really.  I really didn’t hit that well, not adjusting well to the slower than usual pitching you see in the SCIAC.  I had a few base hits, but I have had my better days.  One of the highlights of the day for me though, had nothing to do with the game of baseball.  In between games, a WWII British Lancaster Bomber took off from an old airfield right behind the trees from the field.  It flew around very low to the ground in big figure eights for about fifteen minutes.   Even the British players were frozen staring at the plane just cruising around.  It was great.

I pitched the second game and struck out around ten players in five innings.  The team we played was in the division below us, so I guess it was a good warm-up after not pitching in over a month or so.  There is a slaughter rule after five, so the game ended quickly.  I’m still really sore even from throwing only five innings, and not many pitches.  I’m lucky we only play every Sunday. 

After I got back I threw some stuff in a backpack and took the bus down to the south bank to see Big Ben, the London Eye, and all that good stuff.  There were tons of people around, including an odd mini-British techno rave on the beach near the river, on a Sunday night… I just kept walking.  After a snack and a beer I headed back to Stoke Newington which is where I live.  It’s in Northeast London.  Well that’s all for now, sorry this post was incredibly long, I had a busy weekend.  If any of you are interested, my address here is:

48 Chesholm Rd.
London N16 0DR 

Talk to you all soon, cheers. 

Kyle

Well, it was an interesting transit, but I’m here.  Let’s just start out by saying we’ve all taken for granted the times when we go through immigration and it takes under 5 minutes.  Everything was going great, the weather was fine in LA, we were there early, and there was even an empty seat next to me on the plane with a full flight!  Sleeping on the plane was difficult because I was running through my head all the possibilities and excitements of living in London.  We fly into London, the skies are blue, nice and sunny, and everything is looking spectacular. 

This is where the private tour of the United Kingdom immigration office happens.  Starting with “are you traveling by yourself?” and ending with “and what are your plans after you apply to graduate school in February?”  The immigration officer asks me questions for about 20 minutes, calls the woman who’s supposed to pick me up, and then comes back with the old “excuse me sir, there’s been some discrepancies between your answers and her answers, we’re going to need to ask some more questions, search your bags, finger print you, and take you’re picture.” (you hear that all the time you know)  “Sure!!! How bout the color of my underwear while you’re at it! Apparently the United Kingdom was worried about my reasons for traveling, and wanted to make sure I didn’t stay and work for five years or something. 

Twelve tiny cups of water, eight tiny cups of juice, two London gossip newspapers (because I couldn’t read my own magazines sitting in my luggage in the other room), and three episodes of the British Deal or No Deal, I am allowed to enter the UK, sweet.  The wife of the man who asked me to come out here picked me up and felt horrible that I had to be stuck in the UK Immigration Detainment Facility for five hours.  She was nice and gave me a detailed drive of London on the way back.   I’m living with a mother Sandra, her two daughters Bryony and Anna (pronounced Bryny), and then another housemate Shea, who’s Irish.  They’re all really nice and I’m not worried about the living situation at all, except they’re all “mostly vegetarian,” so I’ll learn some good veggy meals to cook.  After I dumped my stuff off I met Neil (Gail’s husband and the club president) and we went up to the complex where the fields are, which are nice for baseball fields in Northwest London.  They took me out to dinner, welcomed me with a nice English beer, and were very nice.  But that’s all for now, I need to finish unpacking and head to bed, I’ve been awake for almost 40 hours. 

It was interesting, but I’m here. 

Kyle’s London experience so far:  three cups of tea, watched a man in a top hat and a long coat say “cheers, enjoy the rest of your stay,” at the restaurant while he was leaving, and heard the words “bloody hell” about a dozen times – more to come.