Another Day in London

The museums in London are quite something to behold.  Those that I have seen are housed in gigantic, beautiful buildings that make your jaw drop when you walk through the front door.  And they are free.  Yes, you read that right.  The publicly funded national museums anyway, such as the British Museum, the Science Museum, the National Gallery, the Tate – I could go on. 

Such is also the case with the Natural History Museum, which is where we found ourselves the second morning we were in London.  This was a break from school for the kids after all.  We needed to do something they would thoroughly enjoy and who doesn’t like a good Natural History Museum with dinosaurs and all sorts of good things you don’t normally get to lay your eyes on.   

We jumped on the underground early because the Natural History Museum in London is a popular place and we thought if we got there before they opened, it would be smooth sailing for us.

Outside the magnificent Natural History Museum, along with all the other people.

Wrong.  Why oh why did we think we would be the only parents taking our primary school aged kids to the Natural History Museum during their half term break from school?  Apparently half the country of England decided to visit the Natural History Museum that same day.  We were there, the girls were excited to see what was inside, so we sucked it up and did what Eric and I normally hate to do and would have caused us to run in the other direction - we got into line.  A long line.  One of three long lines to be exact. 

To be honest, I wasn’t all that concerned about the number of people waiting to get into this great Museum.  If you could see the size of it in person, you would understand.  It is enormous!  And this Museum crew has obviously been around the block before.  They were like a well-oiled machine herding people into neat lines (or queues as they say here in England) at three different entrances.  Within ten minutes, we were inside the vast halls of the Natural History Museum and if I thought the outside of the building was pretty amazing, the inside of the cavernous lobby was even better.  

The first stop was the mammal hall where the skeleton of a blue whale hangs from the ceiling, along side a life-size replica of a blue whale.  

Have you ever seen a blue whale?  You see the big, dark creature suspended in air on the left in the picture above?  Below him and to the left you will see the butt of a hippo.  Let’s just say this blue whale could easily fit three of those full-sized hippos in his mouth at one time.  Blue whales are ginormous.  When you see this guy, it really is hard to believe there can possibly be something swimming around the ocean that is that big. 

We wandered around from room to room for a few hours and spent some time up on the top floor gazing around the magnificent lobby in the Museum.  

This one, beautiful, humongous room could be a Museum all by itself. 

We spotted a trapdoor way down below and watched to see if anyone fell through it.  They didn't.  

We saw as much as we could see with the ever-growing crowd squeezing in around us until we decided to head up the street to the Science Museum in the hopes that there would be less of a crowd.  It was a bit less crowded so we roamed the halls looking at spacecrafts and airplanes and learning about the Industrial Revolution.  The picture below is a dining room table sized exact replica of an early factory. 

 

By midafternoon, we were all museumed out and in need of some fresh air.  Just up the street was Kensington and Hyde Parks, two of London’s eight Royal Parks that actually butt together and cover almost 600 acres plucked down in the middle of London.  We strolled through a good portion of Kensington Park, home to a number of famous landmarks.

The Albert Memorial in Kensington Park

This is one of them - the Albert Memorial, unveiled in 1872 and commemorating Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband who died of typhoid fever at the age of 42.  She must have really loved him because this enormous gold gilded memorial is quite something to behold.  It’s 176 feet tall, took 10 years to complete and cost the equivalent of $15 million back on the 1800s. 

Most of the trees were still bare in the Park, but there were a few flowers blooming.  

These are camellias.  A large green bush covered in bright pink flowers was a rather strange sight to see on such a gloomy, cold, windy day in mid February as you stroll through the park with your hood pulled tight around your head.  We’ve seen these beautiful flowering bushes in white and pink a few times since then.  Apparently they don’t mind the cold weather as much as I do. 

Our reason for heading to Kensington Park was actually to find a playground.  After spending most of the day squeezing through the crowds inside the busy museums, Ellie and Leah needed to be free to run and play and this Park just happens to be home to the Diana, Princess of Wales’ Memorial Playground.  Despite the cold weather, the playground was bustling with activity too, but that didn’t stop the girls from skittering from one play area to the next, including spending some time on the centerpiece of the playground, a pirate ship. 

It was late afternoon, the sun was sinking quickly and we were all hungry.  We jumped on the Underground for a short train ride to the Covent Garden area in London where we knew there would be some great restaurants.  Some of the Underground trains we rode on are not just a little ways underground – they are waaaaaay underground.   

This was a long escalator that made Leah’s eyes bulge from her head when she first saw it.  There is nothing as thrilling as a good escalator ride for a seven year old. 

Once we were back above ground, we wandered the streets for a bit trying to decide where to grab a bite to eat.   

To be honest, I knew nothing about Covent Garden so I was pleasantly surprised to find cute streets lined with cafes, shops, several theaters with huge marquees advertising their long running shows like The Lion King and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and then we stumbled into this beautiful glass covered market, formerly the home of vegetable market.  

It’s now filled with high-end shops and restaurants, and street performers.  You see that tiny little lady standing below the staircase on the right with the white hat on?  She is an opera singer and she was belting out song after song in the most beautiful soprano voice that filled this huge space to the rafters. She would be performing later that evening at the Royal Opera House down the street.  I'm guessing she has a different costume for that performance.

We ducked into a little Italian restaurant where we were greeted with a delicious plate of warm garlic, cheese and tomato bread as we sat down at a table.   

Ellie tried cannelloni for the first time and loved it.  Place a plate of any type of stuffed pasta in front of that girl and she is in heaven.  Leah enjoyed a plate of spaghetti bolognese, one of her favorites.  And Eric and I shared a pizza, as well as several bites of the girls’ dishes. 

After filling our bellies, we headed back outside into the now dark streets of London.   

We wandered from street to street, each one different from the one before.  You’re on a dark quiet street one moment with only the light of a few well-spaced streetlights to see by, and the next you are walking down a street in Chinatown with bright, colorful balls of light hanging overhead and people everywhere.  

  

We walked through Leicester Square, passing an M&M store with four floors.  Call me naïve, but I was not aware that M&Ms had their own gigantic four floor stores.  And they are popular.  We went it just to see it and the store was packed with people.  For the rest of our visit, we noticed people everywhere carrying the distinctly yellow bags full of M&M merchandize. 

We ended our night in Piccadilly Circus, a  junction where four major roads meet coming from odd directions and huge neon signs flash overhead.  

People, cars and double-decker buses whizzed by in all directions beneath the six enormous video screens that adorn the buildings on the north side of the junction.  Street performs put on shows as tourist stopped to watch.   We were all tired from a long day on our feet so we headed back down into the Underground for the ride to the hotel.  We needed rest for tomorrow would be another day in London.

Reflections on February in England

I feel like there isn’t much to say about our first February in England.  It was a quiet month for us, not much traveling except for our very fun trip to London.  I'll share the rest of that trip with you next week.  These pictures are from our last day in London when we visited Kew Gardens which holds the largest collection of living plants in the world.   

There are trees in Kew Gardens that were planted back in the mid 1700s and are still alive today.  Walking by these old trees, it was fun to image the people and styles of dress they've seen pass by over the course of 250+ years.  

It may seem like a funny time of the year to visit a garden, but I was in dire need of whatever kind of warm, tropical fix I could find and glasshouses full of lush, vibrantly green trees and plants were just what the doctor ordered.  It's still winter outside,

 but inside, it's warm, colorful and beautiful!

 

There happened to be an orchid show going on, so on top of the vast array of plants that are normally in the glasshouses, there were also beautiful, exotic, colorful orchids all over the place. 

February in England was cold, but it doesn’t feel right whining about that when so many of our friends and family are back in the states freezing their butts off because I assure you, it never got anywhere near 0ºF here in England.  The one thing I will say about the weather in February is that while what Mother Nature is actually throwing at us in terms of precipitation, sunshine and clouds feels like it changes from minute to minute here, the actual temperature is very steady.  Looking at the forecast each day is quite frankly boring because you know it will say the high will be 45ºF, or 46º, or 44º.  Very little variation.  Yes, I know most of you are probably thinking “I’ll take it,” but it really is boring.  At least when it’s a high of 5ºF one day and a high of 30º the next you have something to get excited about and look forward to.  

  

Valentine’s Day – no Valentine’s exchanges at school in England.  In fact, I heard no mention whatsoever of Valentine’s Day activities in school.  It is celebrated in England though.  For the couple of weeks prior to February 14, upon entering the grocery store you were greeted not only with a huge display of Valentine cards, candy and flowers, but also with the most horrendous, cheesy, 80s love songs belting out of speakers on top of the display.  In no way, shape or form did that awful music entice me to buy a Valentine for someone.  It made me laugh though.  

I’ve reached that point in the school year where making lunches and getting the kids to do their homework each day is getting old.  Seems like this happens around this time every year, and since school goes into July here, I feel like we have a looooong time until we reach the end and get a much needed break for a couple of months.  But Eric and I continue to really enjoy hearing about what the girls are doing in school here.  Leah’s been learning about penguins and got to do a penguin huddle in school the other day.  She’s started division in math.  And she studies French once a week.  They both do actually.  A French teacher visits their school one day a week and gives each class a lesson.  I love it!

 

Ellie just finished reading The Hobbit.  That one took her longer to read than the rest.  Most of the books she brings home from school she breezes through in a couple of days.  I think The Hobbit took her a whole week.  We can’t keep enough books around for that girl.  She’s wrapping up studying the Maya at school this week with a trip to Cadbury world.  Our little sugar queen gets to take a trip to a chocolate factory.  I bet she is in heaven right now.   

Ellie started playing the flute this month.  Once a week a music teacher visits the school and gives music lessons to those who want to play an instrument.  After trying to play a few different instruments a couple weeks back, Ellie announced she had decided to play the saxophone.  Yikes!  How would we get a saxophone home from England?  We’ve already accumulated enough stuff in our few short months here that I’m worried about getting it all home and thinking about what we can leave behind.  And I don't think she realizes how heavy that big, bulky case is to lug around.  Well, I do because I use to play the sax and dreaded each day that I had to drag that case onto and off of the school bus.  That’s a heavy instrument for our pint sized Ellie.  After talking to her music teacher, we realized she had only picked it because it was the easiest instrument to get some sound out of on the first try.  We intervened and persuaded her to try the flute instead and now she’s glad she picked that sweet sounding petite little instrument.  She’s only had it for one day but already she’s gotten pretty good at producing some decent sound from it.  If she wants, she can try the sax when we get back home and we don’t have to worry about lugging it onto a plane. 

Eric continues to work hard during the week at Rolls-Royce.  He is busy, busy, busy and I know he enjoys coming home each evening to the very low stress life we have.  Not having a house to work on is a vacation in itself.  We’ll be back there someday and weekends will once again be spent working on the never ending list of projects, so for now, he seems to be relaxing and enjoying this little intermission from our normal lives.

 

The past few years February has whizzed by for me because I was working and March 1 was a major reporting deadline for many of our clients.  I worked more hours in February than any other month and really didn’t mind because, despite being the shortest month of the year, February can feel like a long month to get through when it’s cold and snowy outside and having a lot of work to concentrate on always made the month fly by heading towards spring.   

This year was quite different.  February was slow and felt very long, but maybe that’s how it should be.  Maybe we need a month like February where nothing much is happening to let our bodies rejuvenate before the flood of spring and summer activities begin.  So I did my best to relax and enjoy it, taking care of the normal day to day household and kid related chores, I started reading Ken Follett’s 1,014 page long World Without End which I had brought with to England to help me get through the winter, I spent time making plans and reservations for our next couple of trips, and I got outside for a walk whenever I could despite the damp, dreary conditions.   

This quiet time is about to change for us.  As the weather gets nicer, we will be doing a lot of traveling, welcoming family to our new abode here in England, and wrapping up the end of the school year which always seems to be a crazy busy time.  I feel rested, relaxed and ready for the craziness to begin.  Thank you quiet February!

London Calling

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the things I love about living in England is that there is a plethora of neat places to visit that are only two hours away.  We can pretty much take off driving in any direction and end up at a castle, beautiful estate home, national park, the ocean, gardens, ancient ruins AND we can drive two hours south and be in one of the great cities in the world – London!

On a bridge over the Thames with Big Ben in the background.

Last week was midterm break for the girls.  No school for the week.  Thank goodness because I think the entire town needed a break after the scarlet fever epidemic that swept through the week before.  We spent the first half of the week relaxing at home and taking a break from the busy school schedule.  But we couldn’t stay home for the entire week.  We are only living in Europe for two years after all and we feel the need to take advantage of every opportunity we have to do some traveling and see as much of this beautiful continent as we can.  This time, we decided to keep our feet on English ground and headed to London for a few days. 

I love London!  You know those cheesy t-shirts you see with this slogan on it?  I’m going to get one because I really do love London.  It’s a huge, bustling, beautiful mixture of old and new.   

The old with the new being constructed behind it.

You can walk down busy Regent Street in Soho passing high end shops like Burberry with big, red double-decker buses whizzing past and then turn a corner onto a quiet, quant, cobblestone side street filled with bookstores, pastry shops and small restaurants, and a few moments later you are walking under hundreds of brightly colored lanterns hanging high above the street in Chinatown.  One minute you are walking along museum row passing huge building after huge building not sure which one to duck into because there are so many to choose from, and the next thing you know you're lost in Hyde Park wandering the trails through the trees and grassy lawn with no buildings in site.  And the people watching – oh my, the people watching.  More than once I had to tell the girls not to stare, that we would discuss it later.

So here we go – our first day in London!

After a two-hour drive Thursday morning, we started our visit in a coffee shop in the suburb of Ealing where we decided to stay for the three nights we would be visiting London.  Don't worry - we weren't shacking up at the coffee shop, but at a hotel down the street.  We had just ducked in here for a cappuccino and a sandwich before heading into the city.  We found some seats downstairs where the chairs are upholstered in coffee sacks.  Wish I could get one of those home with me to Indiana.  While London is a beautiful vibrant city, it is also a very expensive city to spend a night in.  That's why we decided to stay just outside the city in a wonderful neighborhood called Ealing.  Another great thing about London that I did not mention above is it’s public transportation system which is what makes staying outside the city and paying less for a hotel room a viable option.  From our hotel, it was a 10 minute walk to the Underground station (London’s subway system) where we could jump on a train and be dropped off a short time later deep underground in the heart of the city.  The girls loved riding the Underground.  They had been on a subway once before when they were both much younger, but they don’t remember it so this was another new, exciting first for them.  After the first trip, they were pros at jumping on and off the trains with the few seconds you have at each stop.  

The Underground actually starts aboveground when you are outside the city but goes down into the tunnels as you get closer to the center of London.

Our first stop in London – the British Museum, a treasure trove of world art and artifacts.  The building is gigantic.  What should we see first?   

We started off in the Egyptian hall wandering through huge remnants of statues of great Pharaohs. 

Walking through the vast halls you feel like you are in a scene from Indiana Jones.   

 
If Leah and Ellie stood next to the head below, they would barely reach his ears.  These guys are enormous.

Leah couldn’t wait to see a mummy and they have several at the British Museum – even cat mummies.  Seeing the mummies led to lots of questions about how people were turned into mummies.  I tried explaining that the people weren't actually turned into mummies but that it is how the Egyptians used to preserve and bury the dead.  My explanations were met with vacant stares.  You see, to a seven year old, a mummy isn't a person, it is a monster from a scary movie or cartoon.  With some of the people we would see on the streets of London and some of the exhibits we visited in the Museums, Eric and I got would get lots of questions over the next four days.

We saw the Rosetta Stone, one of the most famous pieces in the Museum, which is a decree written on a stone in Greek, demotic and hieroglyphics which allowed historians to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. 

The Lewis Chessman (photo above) – another one of the most famous artifacts in the Museum because it is one of only a few surviving complete medieval chess sets.  It is suspected that the set was made in Norway during the 12^th century.  The set was found in a sand dune on a beach on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, hence the name.  Why they were in a sand dune in Scotland no one knows.  Most of the pieces were carved from walrus ivory, and a few were made from whale teeth. 

We also visits the clock gallery which was filled with all manner of devices purported to keep time.  Some do this well, and others not so well.  Above is Congreve’s Rolling Ball Clock – a gorgeous piece of work but not so good at keeping time.  There is a little ball that rolls back and forth on a zigzagged track.  It takes the ball between 15 seconds to one minute to roll back and worth, hence the reason it doesn’t keep time so well.  But it’s pretty!  

Taking a break from all the walking.  The museum was busy - very busy.  We grabbed a seat where we could.

By the time we left the British Museum, it was dark and raining but the streets of London were still beautiful. 

We were hungry.  I had done my research.  There are thousands of restaurants in London and we wanted to make sure we chose a good one.  Before coming here, I had searched for things to do in London with kids and happened upon the top ten recommended restaurants to visit with children.  One of them was a Belgium restaurant called Belgo Central that was within walking distance of the British Museum.   

The Belgo Central on the left.

Why is it recommended for children?  Well, they did have a good kids menu, and the restaurant is located deep underground where you feel like you are eating in a cave (this is not the place for claustrophobics), and the wait staff are all dressed in long Trappist monk robes.   But I suspect whomever made this top 10 list wasn’t just thinking of the children.   If you remember back to our trip to Belgium in October, Belgium + Trappist monks = GREAT beer!  Eric has been obsessed with Belgium beer ever since and the Belgo Central serves all types of frothy Belgium beer, including my new found favorites, the fruit beers.  I enjoyed two – a cherry beer and a peach beer.  Delicious!

Beer crates outside the entrance of Belgo Central.

Time to head back down into the tunnels of the Underground for the ride back to our hotel.  It was a short day in London.  We hadn't arrived in the city until the middle of the afternoon but we had three more days ahead of us to see the sights.  

  
It was a bit of a ride back to Ealing, maybe 30 minutes or so, but we didn’t mind.  It was nice to just sit and rest after spending the afternoon at the British Museum and filling our bellies with some hearty Belgium food and drink.  Now, time to rest because tomorrow is another day in London!

Alone at Waddesdon Manor

Our new house!  No, not really.  I wish.  Well, actually I don’t really wish.  I cannot image being comfortable in a house this grand.  But – it was awfully fun to walk around this magnificent Waddesdon Manor like we owned the place.   

You see, when you go and visit an estate like this in the dead of winter, when it’s cold outside and no flowers are blooming, when the inside of the house is actually closed for a few months for annual repairs and upkeep, you will virtually have the place to yourself.  And it is awesome!   

We could stand on the front doorstep like we were waiting for the butler to the open the door and let us in.   

Eric could take picture after picture after picture and not spend ten minutes waiting for the crowd to clear so he could get a clean shot of the ornate architecture.   

Even without any flowers blooming outside, the gardens were beautiful to stroll through.    

 At any given moment, we maybe could see one or two groups of people walking around the estate. 

We did get to see a little bit of the inside of the house.  The estate run cafe was open so we stopped in for some lunch.  It's located in what was formerly the kitchen for the huge house.  See that long black thing behind me that runs the length of the wall and is covered with copper pots?  That is the original stove.  There must have been some grand parties here back in the day.  A couple of the pots were big enough to bath children in. 

After lunch, we wandered through the woods following trails that will be lined with tulips and daffodils in another month or two and found the former estate stables. This is the only horse that is kept here now.

We continued to follow the trails through the forest and stumbled upon a woodland playground.    

Winter isn’t really the time when I think about the girls in a playground, 

but the setting was beautiful, 

the equipment fun, 

so we couldn’t resist letting the girls run around and play for awhile.  

Time to head home.  

It's a two hour drive back to our house, so one last look at this beautiful home before the walk back to the car.   

Waddesdon Manor is owned by the National Trust and we have a membership that gets us into all National Trust sites.  If we pass back this way in the spring or summer, we'll stop back to see the inside of the house and the outside gardens in all their blooming glory.  

Update on the scarlet fever post from Wednesday:  Neither of the girls have scarlet fever, at least not yet.  As I suspected, Leah simply had a rash.  She's a redhead.  Redheads are prone to rashes.  Their delicate, white skin shows even the slightest of irritations.  It is gone already and she's back in school.  Ellie came home with a sore throat and fever on Wednesday, just in time for Leah's trip to the doctor to verify what I already knew but needed to hear a doctor say so I could send her back to school.  The doctor checked Ellie over too.  No scarlet fever - just a simple virus.  Rest, lots of fluids and she'll be better in a few days.  Thank goodness they have next week off.  Of the eight staff members at their little school each day, only three were there this morning when I dropped Leah off.  All the rest are sick too.  Ellie's class had to combine with one of the younger classes because the two teachers and one assistant for her class are all sick and no substitute could be found.  Or maybe no substitute wanted to set foot in this germ infested school this week.  I can't blame them.  Of the two teachers that are still healthy and in school, in addition to teaching the two combined classrooms, one of them is also serving as interim head mistress (principal in US terms) for the school as the actual head mistress is also out sick.  And Leah's poor teacher who usually has two assistants because she has three different grades in her classroom has been left to fend for herself in a room full of 4 through 8 year olds.  That's a wide age range.  They watched three videos yesterday.  I don't blame her either.