Lovely Exeter!

From the 14th to the 18th of January I was a meeting in Exeter, held at the UK MetOffice headquarters. (This is sort of equivalent to Environment Canada's offices in Downsview, except that Exeter is a bit out of the way, in the Southwest of England, and the MetOffice is actually part of the Ministry of Defence in the UK, so security is taken a bit more seriously.) This was my first time to the UK, so I was quite excited.

Unfortunately, when one has to travel from a somewhat out-of-the-way town in Germany to a somewhat out-of-the-way town in England, it can take quite a while, even though the total distance isn't so great. And so I ended up getting up at 3:15 to catch a train at 4:06 so that I could finally end up at my hotel at around 6:30 pm. (This was composed of a slow night train to the airport in Berlin, which took 3.5 hours instead of the usual 2, and then waiting there for 3 hours, and then a 1.5 hour flight to London Stansted, and then a 45 minute train ride into London proper. After that, a few tube transfers (more than usual because of construction on many of the lines on a Sunday), and then I could catch a 2.5 hour train from Paddington station. This finally brought me to the Exeter St. Davids rail station, which isn't quite in central Exeter. I'd managed to make it this far without actually having any pounds, using only visa, but this meant that I didn't have change for the bus. Still, I decided, I'd been sitting all day, why not walk? Not realizing that the train station was about 3.5 km from downtown, and that my hotel was a further 3.5 km in another direction. And it was pouring rain. The rain actually soaked through my suitcase and damaged a couple of books I had with me, not to mention soaking through my leather coat and jeans.)

And so I arrived at the lovely Red House Hotel, wet, cold, and tired.
The staff were lovely, as were the few men drinking at the pub downstairs. I went up to my room to shower and change, and then came back down for supper and to call Jeremi, using the wireless available in the pub. The waitress mentioned that at 8:30 there was a quiz, and that sometimes it was quite fun, so I had another beer and waited to see what would happen.

That was certainly the best decision of my time there. The quiz, like most trivia contests in bars in Canada, was played out in teams, and I was invited to join a team by one of the locals who showed up for the contest. I have to admit that I wasn't much help in the first round, which was all based on British TV trivia. I did a bit better later, with geography and history questions, but the British pop culture ones left me stumped. (I just don't know the names of BBC presenters from talk shows in the 1970s.) My team didn't win anything, but one of the team members was nice enough to invite me out later in the week. And so I had someone to go out for beers with on Wednesday and Thursday evening, getting an insider's view of the nightlife of Exeter. It was fantastic! And people were so friendly (at least as much as in Halifax)! And they all spoke English! I don't think I'd realized just how much I missed understanding everything that was going on around me.

But of course I wasn't just there to drink delicious ale and to revel in the novelty of having full-speed conversations with strangers. I was actually there to work, and that side of things was pretty good too. It was a good chance to talk to people who I collaborate with, who I ordinarily contact only via email.

The MetOffice's headquarters are only 5 years old, and are still quite shiny and new.They have a few really geeky touches in the building, not least of which is this patterned mirror-thing, which was mounted on a round wall where we had our coffee breaks and lunches.It's hard to photograph, partly because it's a mirror, but also because there's text written both on the reflective backing, and on the top surface of the glass. This makes it hard to read as well, as the eye tries to focus on the two depths simultaneously. And what are the words? Most definitely based on computer code. At first I just thought that it was their numerical weather prediction code, or maybe part the code from the Hadley Centre's GCM, not least because they had subroutines with names like "SOIL MOISTURE MODULE". But upon closer inspection, one could see that they'd altered the code to include the names of MetOffice employees, with both their names and job titles getting incorporated into the text. (If you blow this picture up, you can see a bit of this.)
And as you may be able to tell from my reflection above, there was something of a fun-house aspect to these mirrors - my legs aren't really that asymmetrical. And for those of you wondering, yes, I really am allowed to wear such casual clothes to international project meetings. Sometimes I really love my job.

One other funny thing about visiting the MetOffice was the evidence of their recent "rebranding". Their old logo was blue with a yellow wave pattern on it, instantly recognizable. They decided to pay an advertising firm untold sums of money to modernize this somehow, and from what I can tell, they changed the blue to black, the yellow to something closer to chartreuse, and put together a bunch of management-speak to publicize what the MetOffice is doing. These small banners are just the tip of the iceberg.
There were many, many larger banners, with similarly inane phrases, though many were less grammatically correct. I understand the need to make the public aware of what governmental agencies are doing with tax money (in fact I recall at CCCma in Victoria they looked to the Hadley Centre as a model of how to improve public relations), but they seemed to just gloss over so much of the important research that is being done there in favour of a new colour scheme and modernized graphics.

And finally, a couple of pictures from the rest of Exeter. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me when I went to visit their beautiful cathedral, but Wikimedia has supplied me with a couple of pictures to fill that void. It really was quite impressive, though not quite as sunny while I was there.In fact, it was more than just "not sunny" while I was in Exeter. While I did get a few moments of sunshine, that was more than balanced by periods of torrential rain. On the train on the way there and back I passed by fields completely submerged in water. Here's the river Exe, rushing over some dams that are hardly holding anything back any more.
Though it's not clear here, many of the trees along the sides have water well up their trunks.
One historic sight in Exeter that I did manage to tak a picture of was the old bridge. This bridge was a at one time lined with houses and shops, and served as the main trading centre of the town. This led to problems as the town's economy picked up due to a lively trade in wool, and eventually the bridge had to be replaced. I think they also redirected the river at this point, as what's running under the old bridge is really just a stream. (I didn't get around to asking anyone, as I was on my way to the train station when I thought of this, and I was running late and mightily hungover.)
In sum, Exeter treated me like a lady. The people were lovely and the town was beautiful. If anyone is considering a trip to the Southwest of England, I would heartily recommend it.