London – Final Day

For our final day in London, we decided to take in a couple of galleries.  The two we chose were the Tate Modern and the Victoria and Albert Museum.  They couldn’t have been more different!

We set off to the tube station and made our way to Southwark (the “w” isn’t pronounced).  We’re feeling pretty confident underground now and have learned how to read the route map.  However, Eve told us of the best app for navigating called citymapper.  It does all the work deciding the best route and by which means of transportation.  It gives you the time the next vehicle will arrive, how long the ride will be, what the stops are along the way, and then if walking is necessary, it maps out your directions.  It’s really amazing!

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St. Paul’s Cathedral

The Tate Modern is a huge building, and getting bigger, along the Thames directly across from St. Paul’s Cathedral.  The Tate is a rather ugly building, all industrial-looking, but it is bright and airy inside.

20160323_054930 (576x1024)The Alexander Calder exhibit is subtitled Performing Sculpture.  Calder is widely celebrated as the originator of the “mobile,” not the phone, but the thing that hangs from the ceiling.  It amazed me that he was one of the first artists to think about art in motion.  This was in the 1930s.   He overturned many assumptions about sculpture.  His early work involved wire sculptures and he made lots of portraits.  These I liked very much because they hang and so the light and shadows behind them project various images on the wall behind.  Calder also was enamored by the circus and so for years he created all kinds of acrobats and circus performers from mostly wire and then he figures out how to attach motors to make the figures move.  I was disappointed with these objects because the motors no longer work so the objects did not move.  That’s technology for you.

Calder’s mobiles are very interesting, some more than others.  Unfortunately, there was no photography permitted in the gallery.  I walked around all these very large mobiles hanging down wanting to blow air or flap my program so I could get them to move.  I was surreptitiously successful on one or two occasions.

After the Tate, we went back underground and travelled to the Victoria and Albert Museum.  This is a classic British museum and bills itself as the world’s leading museum of art and design.  It’s brochure states, “the V&A enriches people’s lives by promoting the practice of design and increasing knowledge, understanding, and enjoyment of the designed world.”  It is a very impressive museum! Just the building itself knocks your socks off.

The Victoria and Albert Museum’s collections span two thousand years of art in virtually every medium, from many parts of the world, and visitors to the Museum encounter a treasure house of amazing and beautiful objects.  You would need several visits just to get through all the exhibits.

One of the reasons Christine wanted to go to the V&A is so she could eat in its café.  Now, I know that sounds crazy, but I’ll tell you that it was the swankiest café I’ve ever eaten in.  And the food was really excellent.

Since we only had a couple of hours, we trotted through several areas.  The tapestries were awesome.

Here are some other pictures of things we saw.  I thought my brother Grant would be interested in the scenery exhibit showing model sets.

I loved this image over one of the doors entering the museum.

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Better it is to get wisdom than gold

I could spend a lot of time in the V&A Gallery.  It was wonderful.  But other things beckoned so we made our way back to our Airbnb room and spruced up before meeting Eve for a tour of her school, the American School in London.  We then met up with one of her colleagues, Chris, and went to a lovely Thai restaurant, the Banana Leaf.  Yummy food!  We then walked back to the school to see a student performance of the Heidi Chronicles.  Some of it was a real walk down memory lane for Christine and me.  The students did a phenomenal job and we enjoyed the production very much.

And that brings to an end of our time in London.  We packed up Wednesday night and arranged for a taxi to Victoria Station to pick us up at 6:00 a.m. in the morning.  We are catching the Gatwick Express train for our flight to Barcelona Thursday morning.

What a fun time we had in London!

 

London – Day 4

Today, Tuesday, we woke up to sunshine and blue skies, a perfect day to visit the Royal Botanical Gardens, known as Kew Gardens.  You’ve probably figured out from some of our other posts that Christine and I are garden nuts.  We very much enjoy nature in all its glory and often ensure that our travels include various types of gardens.  So off to Kew for the day.

We got to experience more mass transit opportunities getting to Kew.  From the St. John’s Wood station we took the Jubilee line (that’sthe tube or underground) several stops northbound to West Hampstead.  Then the  new experience was taking the overground, as opposed to the underground, out to Kew Gardens station. The overground is the same type of train as the underground, but, you guessed it, it stays above ground. I liked that because we could see more as we passed through smaller towns.  One of the things I love about the UK is all the different town and village names, places like Kensal Rise, Swiss Cottage, Shepherd’s Bush and Harrow-on-the-Hill.  So quaint.  At any rate, we got off the overground at Kew Gardens station and walked a short distance to Kew Gardens, the Victoria Gate.

We opted for an introductory hour-long walking tour with a guide.  I’m glad we did that because Chris, our guide, gave us a good overview of the history of the gardens.  It was fascinating to learn how it all started in the 18th century. Two royal estates, the Richmond estate of King George II, and the Kew estate of his son, the Prince of Wales, Frederick, were merged. Frederick never became king due to premature death.  His wife, the Dowager Princess Augusta, started the garden at Kew in 1759.  Her son, King George III then inherited the estate and continued his mother’s desire for a huge garden.  King George III was often referred to as Farmer George, because of his love of gardening and what he did to develop Kew. After George III, the gardens declined because George IV spent all the money on a lavish lifestyle.  After this, in 1840, the crown gave the gardens to the people and the Royal Botanical Garden started its purpose, that being scientific and the collection of plants from all over the world.  Today, Kew has the largest collection of plants in the world.  They also have over seven million species catalogued in their herbarium (a library of pressed plants). They are experts in plant taxonomy and people come from all over the world to study. And they are now undertaking the Millennium Seed Project whereby they are amassing a collection of seeds from around the world.  I was very impressed by all this.  Kew is a fantastic resource, and awesomely beautiful.

Palm House
Palm House

One of the iconic Kew buildings in the Palm House.  When constructed, it was an engineering masterpiece.  It is full of tropical plants and in the basement there is even a marine exhibit with some really interesting fish and marine ecosystems showcasing the importance of plants.  Like did you know that half of the world’s oxygen comes from algae?

Kew is over 300 acres in size and has many different sections showcasing various trees, shrubs and plants.

If I had been a good horticulturalist, I would have written down all the names of the plants that were our favorites.  But, I didn’t, so here are just some lovely plants.

We were really struck by all the fabulous trees.  Some of them, which Kew refers to as the “old lions,” have been there for hundreds of years.  We saw one pine that Princess Augusta had in a pot that got planted after her death and now is a huge tree.  There was an ancient Japanese Pagoda tree that was really unique.  I fell in love with a maple called the Paper Bark maple because its bark was a beautiful orange color.  In 1987 there was a hurricane in the UK and over 1,000 trees were damaged or killed, a sad story.  However, one good thing that came out of it was that a huge old oak trees got lifted up out of the ground and it came down a little crooked.  Before the storm, the tree had been really sick and wasn’t doing well.  After the storm, it started to flourish and the botanists learned that  the injection of oxygen in the soil during the storm lifting the tree up is what gave it new life.  Now, injecting air into soil around sick trees is a common practice by arborists.  So now, I’m fascinated by all things trees.

One of the buildings in the garden is Kew Palace, which is where King George III lived in the summer.  It’s a beautiful house along the Thames, but there was noting palatial about it.  It was just very stately.

Orangery cafe
Orangery cafe

We had lunch in a lovely café that used to be the Orangery, yes, where the royals grew orange trees.  However, they had to stop that practice because the moisture and humidity needed by the orange trees kept rotting the structure.  But now it is a lovely café.

There was just too much to see at Kew for one day’s visit.  We ended the time there by taking a little trolley ride around the park so we could at least see an overview.  I could go on about our visit, but since I’m tardy getting this posted (no internet this morning), I’ll end for now and just say, the Royal Botanical Garden is not to be missed.

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Museum No. 1 seen from balcony of Palm House

 

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London – Day 3

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Going down underground

Since we have successfully navigated some bus routes the past couple of days, today we decided to take on the London underground – the tube.  We decided to go to the Royal Academy of Arts (RA for short) to see an exhibit titled Painting the Modern Garden:  Monet to Matisse.  The best way to get to the RA is via the tube, so we studied the map and planned our strategy.  Then off to the St. John’s Wood tube station and down underground we went.  The stairs down are quite something – steep!  Christine was taking her time and hanging on to the railing.  I was a little quicker down the stairs.  Our train was just pulling in to the platform so I yelled to Christine to hurry.  I was on the train and the doors began to close, and Christine was still on the platform.  We looked at each other through the glass with panic in our eyes.  Fortunately, someone hit the open button and the doors opened and Christine was in the train.  Phew, that was a close call!

Royal Arcade
Arcade

We rode the train to Green Park and walked down Piccadilly Street.  We wandered a bit in the area of the RA and walked through an arcade, which is sort of an enclosed lane through a block that has shops along each side.  The two arcades we strolled through were really beautiful.  The shops were all very posh with extremely expensive merchandise.  But the arcade was really glamorous.

The RA is right on Piccadilly and you enter into a grand courtyard.

The garden exhibit was really popular so there was a large crowd.  Eve very kindly loaned us her Friends of the RA card so we were able to bypass the lines and go right in.  Because there were so many people, it was somewhat difficult to get close to many of the paintings, but what a treat to see so many Monet paintings in person.  What an interesting fellow Monet was, and he designed all his gardens himself.  He was really a professional horticulturist as well as a painter.  I got introduced to a painter I didn’t know, Santiago Rusinol, a Spaniard.  I fell in love with one of his paintings, Glorieta VII, Aranjuez.  I want to read up on Rusinol’s work because I was quite struck by what I saw.

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Green Park

After the RA, we decided to stroll through Green Park to Victoria Circle and Buckingham Palace.  The park was lovely with beautiful trees and lots of daffodils.  We learned about the prolific trees around London that I thought were Sycamores.  The bark and little round nuts really did look like Sycamores.  But the trees are called London Plane trees.  In residential neighborhoods the city cuts all the smaller branches off to prevent the tree from producing the nuts since the residents don’t want the nuts falling on their cars, their heads, or in their gardens.  So these big beautiful trees get severely pruned and wind up looking nearly dead, like the ones along this street.

The gate from Green Park to Victoria Circle was beautiful and the monument to Queen Victoria was awesome.  Buckingham Palace is big, but I actually didn’t think it was so spectacular.

We then spied Big Ben off in the distance and decided to head to Parliament Square.  We walked along St. James Park, the Birdcage Walk.  This is another beautiful park with lots of trees and flowers and ponds.  The closer you get to the Thames and Parliament, the more crowded it gets so it is difficult to walk around.  But we gawked at Big Ben and the Parliament.  Big Ben is actually only the bell in the tower.  The tower name is the Elizabeth Tower and it was built in 1859.

We looked around for a place to have a bit to eat and Christine noticed a sign outside the Supreme Court building advertising a café.  So we went into the Supreme Court.  We even had to go through security.  But we were glad to go in because we learned a lot.  The UK Supreme Court was established only in 2005.  Prior to that, the court was a Privy Council of Parliament.  There are 12 justices (only one woman) and they get assigned to various cases that the court chooses to hear.  Five or seven justices will hear a case, all civil matters related to interpretation of law.  Anyone can sit in the courtroom, which is designed to facilitate discussion between the lawyers and the justices.  The hearings are televised, kind of like on our C-span.  The justices don’t wear robes, but they have fancy robes for ceremonial occasions.  We had our lunch in the café and toured a small exhibit afterwards.  Glad we stopped in, because I learned a lot.

In Parliament Square we saw a statue of Churchill, and I was very surprised to see a statue of Abraham Lincoln.

We wandered along the Thames for a bit.  Of course, the London Eye looms over the whole area.  It’s huge!

London Eye
London Eye

While making our way to the Embankment tube station, we passed by Whitehall garden and strolled around.  The building on the grounds is, I think, associated with the Ministry of Defense.

Whitehall gardens
Whitehall gardens

We managed to get ourselves on the tube together and even made a successful transfer.  We returned to our room for a nap and then met Eve and one of her colleagues, Terry, for dinner around the corner at Carluccio’s.  It was a pleasant place and we had a nice conversation.  We then went to Eve’s school, the American School in London (ASL), for a student writers workshop reading.  Several students read their work and all were very interesting, often deep, one rather disturbing, but all very mature and well-written.  We met several of Eve’s colleagues.  All commented on how much they like having Eve at ASL.

And that brings day 3 in London to an end.

 

 

 

 

London – Day 2

(To email subscribers of the blog – apparently the email version of the blog is not showing all the photos posted.  I create groupings of photos in what WordPress calls a gallery.  The photo galleries seem not to be included in the email version of the post.  Therefore, in order to see all the photos you’ll need to go to the browser version of the blog at https://www.adventuresctlb.com.  Sorry for this inconvenience.  I’ll try to figure out another way to post multiple photos.)

We had a lovely day today, Sunday March 20th, with Eve.  Eve and Christine had arranged to meet up this morning to go to the pool.  Eve was anxious to show her mom this beautiful old building where the pool is located.  The Paddington Central Baths building was built in 1926 and was a very elaborate building featuring a double-height entrance hall.

Christine and I first walked around the corner to the neighborhood Starbucks and had coffee and our peanut butter rice cakes.  We then walked over to the bus stop near St. John’s Wood tube station.  We got on the 187 bus to Eve’s.

As I mentioned, one purchases an Oyster card, which is a plastic smartcard used to pay for the metro transport. You can “refill” the card at any tube station.  It is the only way to pay for bus and tube fare.  When you get on the bus you place your Oyster card on this yellow circle and it subtracts the fare from your card.  Pretty easy way to do bus fare!

Eve and Christine raced off to catch another bus to the pool.  I stayed at Eve’s apartment to work on yesterday’s blog post.  Here’s a photo of Christine at the place where the pool is in the beautiful entryway.received_10209291722026905[1]

On their return from the pool, we walked over to the Queen’s Park farmers market.  This is a pretty big, and very nice, weekly farmers market.  You can get all sorts of items including organic produce and meats, a myriad of international foods, cheeses, ciders, crafts and various other things.  The market runs all year round.  The market was crowded with lots of families and people doing their weekly shopping.

Eve’s favorite stall is the Pie Emporium where one can purchase all types of quiches and meat and vegetable pies.  Christine was in heaven because they had a steak and kidney pie.  She has a childhood remembrance of loving steak and kidney pie.  So that’s what she got.  I had a quiche Lorraine and Eve got a cheddar and onion pie.

20160320_114455After the market, we strolled over to Queen’s Park, a very nice park.  We sat and enjoyed watching the families walking in the park.  There were lots of daffodils in bloom.  The Queen’s Park high street (every neighborhood and town has what’s referred to as a high street where the main shopping area is – what I’d refer to as “the main drag” in American vernacular) was fun to walk through.  It was a bustling area, even on a Sunday.  All the shops were open and lots of people were milling about.

Pulling out my Oyster card
Pulling out my Oyster card

We got back to Eve’s apartment for a yummy lunch of our pies and a great salad that Eve prepared.  We then headed off towards Little Venice where we wanted to take a canal boat tour.  On the way, we stopped at a really nice nursery, Clifton Nurseries, where there was an amazing selection of plants, shrubs and trees for sale. Eve wanted to go to the Quince Café there for tea, but they were too crowded.  We did find the Waterside Café at Little Venice.  The café is housed in a moored longboat, which was really cool to go into.  We sat in the longboat sipping our tea and watching the goings on around Little Venice.

At 3:00 we boarded the London Waterbus boat for a trip to Camden Lock.  It was fun being on the canal and going past all the moored longboats.  We passed by where we walked yesterday.  In my post yesterday I had 3 photos of very large houses along the canal.  We learned today that those are foreign embassies.  Our tour was about 45 minutes long and we ended up at Camden Lock.

The Camden Lock area is this very crowded marketplace where there again are a myriad of international food stalls and all kinds of shops selling probably anything you could imagine.  Being Sunday, the crowds were out in full force.  The market is several blocks in area and it surely is a happening place.  Lots to see and do!

We also actually saw Camden Lock in action.  The canal lock takes boats up and down about 15 feet or so.  We watched a tour boat lower in the lock and had a great view from a bridge crossing over the canal.

We then caught a bus back to Eve’s apartment.  By late afternoon, Christine and I were starting to feel our jet lag and so we said goodbye to Eve for the day and bussed back to the St. John’s Wood high street.  We picked up a takeaway dinner from Pret Manger and returned to our room.  We had a tasty dinner.  We’re now just relaxing in our room.  I’m sure we won’t be awake too much longer.  So ends day 2 of our time in London.

The adventure begins!

After nearly two years of talking about and planning our trip to Malta, the trip finally began Friday, March 18, 2016.  Christine had wanted to return to Malta for more than just a brief visit.  During her recovery from her hamstrings injury a couple of years ago, she spent hours searching the internet for a nice place to stay.  Then when the Caruana property in Malta sold and all the many, many heirs received their portion of the proceeds, Christine decided to take the money and spend it on a trip to Malta.  So in November 2014, she paid a down payment on an apartment on the front in Sliema, just down the block from St. Julian’s Bay where she had lived as a child.  We decided to spend three months in Malta, plenty of time to learn about the history and culture of the islands and to walk as much of Malta as we can.  On the way, we wanted to stop in London to visit Eve, and then stop in Barcelona – just because.

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Our luggage

Of course, getting ready for a trip 3-1/2 months away from home is no easy undertaking.  We had lots to do to prepare for being gone.  Fortunately, I had the time to do a lot of the prep work because I’m retired, while Christine was very engrossed in her newest customer and getting them started using TQAudit.  She has been working round the clock and didn’t have much time to do much else.  But she managed to get things stabilized with her customer just in the knick of time.  Our friend JoAnn picked us up and drove us to the airport.  Here’s what the luggage looked like for a 3-1/2 month trip.  Yikes!  We were just under the weight limit with our checked bags.  I’m sure we’re taking way too much stuff.

We flew from Binghamton to Detroit.  We arrived at the Detroit airport and walked through our favorite tunnel.

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Tunnel between concourse A and B/C

We really like the Detroit airport.  The fountain is fun to watch because of its gymnastics in spitting shoots of water that they are segmented and just hang in air.  We had a pleasant surprise in that near the fountain was a fellow playing piano.  20160318_154948There was a nice little seating area nearby and so we sat for a long time listening to songs from the standard songbook.  It was soothing and helped everyone relax.

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Love the fountain!

20160318_173535Finally, we boarded our flight to London on Virgin Atlantic.  I was taking a picture of the plane and noticed near the nose the name of the plane.  I thought it was a nice name – Lady Love.

But it is certainly true that airlines are making seats smaller and closer together.Virgin Atlantic really packs you in.  We had no legroom at all and the seats were really uncomfortable.  God forbid the person in front of you reclines because that makes the little screen in their seat back practically hit you in the face – too close for you to see the movie you wanted to watch.  But we actually had a nice meal, a free drink, and all was okay.  Except for the turbulence.  It was a bumpy ride across the pond.

We arrived at Heathrow right on time – the busiest hour of the day.  That meant that about 5,000 arriving passengers hit immigration all at once.  It took over an hour to get through.  They had the ziggy zaggy lines set up so that you were kind of constantly moving, like at Disney, but you got nowhere fast.  But we got through immigration and then picked up our luggage.  There was no customs line surprisingly.  If you had something to declare, you picked up a phone and talked with an official.  Otherwise, you went right out the door.

We took the Heathrow Express train from the airport to Paddington Station.  It was easy finding the platform and only a 15 minute ride to Paddington.

20160319_051004We rolled our luggage through the station and found where to get a taxi – outside of platform 12.  You could follow a line on the floor in the station that directed you to the “taxi rank.”  There was no line and we got into one of those cute little black Brit taxis and off we went to find our Airbnb rental.  The apartment is located in the St. John’s Wood area, which is an upscale area.  We were told that we might likely see Sir Paul McCartney walking around.  Wouldn’t that be something!

This is our first Airbnb experience.  We rented a room in an apartment.  Josh is our host, and he is a lovely young man.  He’s a lawyer and also has a band and is a show promoter.  We have a very nice bedroom in his flat.

We couldn’t get into our room yet, so we went out for a walk around the neighborhood, which turned into quite a walk.  We wandered around for about two hours.  It is spring in London and the bulbs and flowering trees are in abundance.  Although it was very cool and quite overcast, we were happy to see all the wonderful colors.

20160319_083541We then walked around until we found Regents Canal in Regent’s Park.  Christine, the water baby, has to find water wherever we go.  So we walked along the canal for a bit.  We came upon moored longboats, or narrow boats.  These are actual residences and they are very interesting.  It is amazing to see all the plants the folks have, both on the boats and along the pathway.

And if you don’t want to live on a boat, but want to see the canal, you could live in one of these.

Here are some other sights around the area.

We went back to the room and had a nap.  Then we went to the St. John’s tube station to buy our Oyster cards, the thing that gets you onto the public transport vehicle, whether bus or tube.  Then we walked over to Eve’s apartment for a drink.  We then went round the corner to a fabulous Lebanese restaurant and stuffed ourselves with several mezzas (small plates of the most delicious food).  Eve then walked us over to the bus stop and we made our way back to Cochrane Close.

Seems like we covered an awful lot of ground, literally, in just 18 hours!