Well, we’re seeing the beginnings of Spring here in the capitol of the former British Empire. This week, I’ve felt something in the air, the plants on our window sill look less dead and some flowers are starting to sprout up and ponder the concept of blooming through the gray. With the temperature being a little more mild (it’s never exactly arctic here), we decided to load our bikes up onto the Overground and meet up with our friends Nic and Clint, who live in Richmond, a cute area in the Southeast of London and have a little bike ride around Richmond Park. It’s apparently one of the former playgrounds of the Royal Family although it’s been open to the public since it was walled off and made into a park. It has a wonderful wild feel to it, even being home to a shitload of deer. It’s apparently three times the size of Central Park. Impressive. Let’s take a look:

Those would be the deer. Check out the antelers on some of them. As we were getting near this group, a number of them went off and formed their own splinter herd, which is where the rest of them are looking. They are remarkably peaceful considering that, even on a gloomy kind of February day, people were playing in the field around them and assholes like me were walking up to click pictures.

This is a lake in the middle of the park. Hard to believe this is middle of a city of oodles of people. I think it’s less than 10 miles to Charing Cross as the crow flies. It’s a nice piece of green space in a very large city.

This would be the Thames River from the Richmond Bridge. We began and ended our little bike afternoon there, with a nice detour for tea at Nic and Clints place down there. We’re looking forward to more outings as winter receeds and springs rears its ugly head.

As always, I’m happy to provide an image dump of this entry. It’s not a lot, but I aims to please! 🙂

Last week, I made a work trip to Milan. Once I was done with the work part, I stuck around and Carolyn flew down and we had a Valentines weekend together in Italy. Allow me share with you our weekend. If you’d like to see all the photos we’ve taken, here’s a document dump. And if you’d like to see a larger version of any photos below, just click on the photo.

We decided to see about some pretty areas around Milan and settled on Lake Como. It’s a pretty Y-shaped glacial lake nestled up against the Alps. In the summer, it’s a very popular tourist destination and place for the rich and famous to buy villas and show off their wealth. In the winter, it isn’t dead, but it’s not quite the hot spot it is when the weather is warm. To get there requires a train trip, so I’d be remiss not to show you the train shed in the massive, monumental train station. It’s an obvious product of fascist bravado, but it kind of works:

Como is the main town, but you can take a boat up the lake and check out the cute villages that dot the coast line. Check out how nice the lake and surrounding area is:

Note the beautiful alps in the background. Not too shabby.

We took a tour of Torno, one of the cuter villages along the lake. It’s got wonderful winding streets and curves in various directions, affording wonderful spots to sit and soak in the scenario. This is the local church:

We headed back to Como on another boat and wandered the town, eventually having some tasty pizza with a view overlooking the lake and mountains. Then we took a funicular (which is a train that is pulled up a mountain by a bigass cable) to Brunate, a town overlooking Como, where we froze our asses off but got to see this:

(definitely click on this one to see a bigger picture. Nice panorama!)

We had a hotel room in Milan, so we needed to say good bye to Como at some point. Now, this being Valentines Day, you’d think a nice meal was in the cards. While we’d had a lovely meal the night before, I’d also come down with a nasty cold and, by Saturday night, I was a wreck. So we improvised:

A Valentine’s meal fit for a sick man and his wonderful wife.

Our second day, we decided to do some sightseeing in Milan before we had to jet back to London for work. Now, the biggest monument is the Duomo. Take a look and you’ll understand why:

It’s a gigantic, wonderful Gothic church with amazing ornamental work all over the facade. You’re able to climb up to the roof and check out the views as well as the art work up close.

It really is an amazing church. In all my travels to Italy, I’d not yet been to Milan, but I’d been waiting for a long time to see this church in person. It was worth it.

Nearby, through an ornate 19th century version of a mall (man, they were far more attractive places back then) we came upon La Scala, which is one the pre-emminent hotspots for opera, particularly the late Romantic opera of folks like Verdi and Puccini. Now, we came up signs showing we’d missed a concert in the hall by about 30 minutes and pondered trying to just poke our heads in when a nice surprise happened. Two men were replacing the posters outside the opera house for the next show. These are some pretty high quality poster style ads and they were just throwing them out when they replaced them. The got to the one near us and handed it to us instead of throwing it out. A nice memento of our time there!

We finished our time in Milan before an excrutiatingly inefficient trip back to the airport by walking along a district southwest of the Duomo that is centered along a nice canal. It’s not Venice, but it’s pretty.

We found a lovely place for a nice lunch there. I managed to get paparedelle with wild boar sauce. Always a favourite of mine! Alas, it meant it was time to head out. A short time, but fun for the whole family (except for Chewy who was stuck in London! 🙂 ).

Well, among the positives of living in the capital city (and a big ass metropolis), is the opportunity to take a in a lot of culture. The oodles of free museums aside, we’ve also soaked in some high-class music as well. A few weeks ago, we went to the Barbican to see some choral/orchestral music. Earlier in 2008, we went saw Partenope, an opera by Handel performed by the English National Opera at the London Coliseum. The music was excellent and the performers were great as well. However, while the opera takes place in Roman Naples, this production changed the setting to 1920s Paris and Partenope is supposedly living in some sort of Surrealistic flat and hanging out with artists. It didn’t quite work.

Regardless, a good time was had by all and we decided to go again but see a performance with a more classic performance. The ENO was performing The Magic Flute by Mozart and we managed to snag some seats. Behold a British opera house:

Now, the ENO does all of their performances in English. They still have the words shown above the stage since, regardless of what you might think, classical singers are not known for pronouncing anything well. I was a little worried about a German opera in English, but this one has speaking parts instead of recitative to move the plot forward. And, having British singers speaking German would haven’t worked either, so overall it was good. Unlike Partenope, The Magic Flute was a more classic staging. The singers were excellent, the plot harebrained, the setting was lovely. We had a blast.

During intermission, we tend to have a drink and the nose-bleed section in the Coliseum has a nice bar area which leads to a glass atrium that has a nice view of the area. Observe:

And here are some happy opera fans:

Twas a wonderful day out. The day began with pre-opera drinks at a great pub near the opera house. Then there was opera and we finished the day out having a good curry near the Tower of London. Fun for all. Now we’ve seen a baroque opera, then a classical opera so I guess we should prolly go for a Romantic opera. Pucini? Verdi? Wagner? We shall see. We’d also like to check out the Royal Opera, but that will be more difficult since the tickets are in the range of £200-800 and the cheap seats (they seem to have handful for quite a bit less than £200) are hard to come by. We’ll just have to keep an eye out.

So the city is still recovering from the snow storm yesterday.  Most train and bus routes were running today but side streets and sidewalks have become solid ice rinks as nobody here shovels.  All the walkers yesterday have packed the snow down nicely into ice packs.  I thought I would share a few photos from my snow day.

Looking out our window on Sunday night as the snow began.

Matt outside our front door on Monday morning beginning the journey to work.

Coworkers waiting for the building to open Monday morning.

More coworkers on the way to lunch.

A lovely snowman =).

Well, my two mile commuting walk wasn’t the fastest trip even and I got a good workout, but I made it. There were quite a few people on foot since only about half the tube was running (unless you live off the Northern or Victoria Lines, good luck), no buses, most of the commuter rail is shut. My boss took 2.5 hours to get into the City when it usually takes less than an hour. The streets are very quiet, even though a few insane souls are using their cars. The less major roads are sheets of packed snow/ice and the major roads are heavy, dirty slush. It was cool to witness. In the meantime, here are some images of my walk today. Those of you in the US might just yawn, but this is the most snow London has seen in 18 years. 🙂

This is right outside my house. People were out playing in the snow, making snowmen, clearing cars off with their arms. Very festive and happy.

A London pub covered in white. The Scolt Head is a nice place. Good beer, friendly folks and a fireplace.

Regents Canal — This is a canal that traverses North London. No narrow boats on this stretch, I wish I had seen some narrow boats to snap.

Bunhill Fields – The old City cemetary that was the place for dissenters (people who were not Church of England goers), until the dead were buried further out for health reasons. It’s right near my office and was shut due to the weather. It looked pretty and untouched through the fence.

Snow brings out the fun in everyone! Nothing to brighten your day like a happy Mini under a foot of snow.
Anyway, those of you in England – enjoy your lovely wintry day!

We went to bed last night with snow falling and about 1/2 inch of snow on the ground. That was cool. What we woke up to was even cooler. It seemed unusually quiet outside and when I opened my windows, what did I find? There is maybe 4 inches of snow!!! Even more amazing is that the city is basically shut. Hell, a huge chunk of the entire country of England is shut! Trains coming into the city are not running. All buses are suspended and the tube (yes, the London “Underground”) has severe delays or complete closures. This is absolutely amazing.

The Victoria line is the only line which is almost entirely underground, hence the “Good Service”. They have zero idea what to do with snow. No plows, no shovels. Nothing. It just doesn’t snow enough here to be worth it. The bad news? I can walk to work. So I guess, I’ll at least try to go in. Bummer. But it’ll be a pretty walk! 🙂

My office is in the picture! (photo credit: Jason Hawkes)

A friend of mine pointed me to a couple of articles on boston.com that contain a series of really great photos of arial shots taken at night of London. Generally, the skyline of London, when you move away from Westminster Abbey, isn’t though of as being that spectacular. At least compared to a city like Chicago, with it’s wonderful skyline. It’s always been about exploring the winding streets and soaking in the history. However, these shots show a great persepctive on a city that’s quick complex and beatiful in it’s own way. I ‘borrowed’ the picture from above because that’s one of my stomping grounds. Shoreditch and Old Street is where my office is. You can even see our main office in the lower-right hand corner (at least the northern wall of the building). The actual picture is number 12 in the second set of photos. I’d also like to point you to this photo (picture number 17 in this set of photos). That’s the home ground for Arsenal, who play about a 15 minute walk from my flat. Anyway, the photos are gorgeous and they give a nice view on the town I live in at the moment. Enjoy!

Les Musiciens du Lovres led by Marc Mikowski takes the stage at the Barbican

Two Sundays ago, we had a chance to partake of some culture in London. Our friend, Tobiaaas, is a big fan of classical music and one of his favourite tenors, Richard Croft, was singing as part of a performance at the Barbican. The Barbican was one of the large planned developments of the 1970s to replace aging and destroyed sections of the City of London. It’s a very stark multi-function complex of apartment towers, art gallery, performance spaces and movie theatres. It’s a pretty polarizing piece of architecture. Personally, I kind of like it, but I can see why it might piss some people off. The interior is lofty and welcoming. You can just go in during the day and wander, which is nice.

A happy Carolyn and a Matt making some sort of face (trying to be silly)

While I’d been there to see a film (The Simpsons movie, complete with an academic-like explanation provided when you went into the theatre), I’d never seen a performance in the hall. It’s a lovely space, modern, but comfortable and the acoustics are excellent. The orchestra and choir we saw focuses primarily on early and Baroque music, but they have recently been expanding into more comtemporary music. However, this night was about the earlier stuff. We saw pieces by Purcel, Handel and Haydn, to celebrate a varity of anniversaries in their honor. The theme was St Cecilia, the patron saint of music as all three pieces were about her in some form. The performance was excellent and we definitely got our money’s worth as it lasted almost 4 hours. We went home afterwards tired but content.

mmmm…Guinness

While I was in the midst of my massive change in life (that being living in another country, among other pretty big things), my parents were (and still are) in the middle of a new phase of life. For the first time since the 1970s (or, in my dad’s case, kind of ever), they left the East Coast life and gradually made their way west. First, they made a stop off in Michigan to spend a year living in Michigan, but have made their new roots in a beautiful place in Arizona. Soon, my dad will be retired and it truly begins. But they’ve been a busy couple. And, at the end of the summer, Carolyn and I had the pleasure of their company in London. I always enjoy visitors because, while the tourist stuff is fun, living in a city allows me to find some of the more interesting places to visit. So, they got to see an honest to goodness London neighbourhood, eat at some lesser known, but tasty places and take some day trips of their own choosing. We then decided a weekend trip somewhere new to all of us would be fun and we picked Dublin, having never been to Ireland. Allow me to provide a little writeup below. Selected pictures will come tomorrow.

Now, Ireland is a beautiful country and Dublin is a wonderful city. I feel like it would be a terrific place to live. As a tourist destination, it’s perfect to take in for a day. And that’s how we did it. We used it as a homebase with a lovely hotel right in the center and then took a couple of excellent day trips.  We arrived at night and the natural thing to do was to find a pub. We did well at one right around the corner and, naturally, had ourselves some Guinness. A quick comment on Guinness. In the days before the US had their own little selection of microbrews and beers of some quality, Guinness was what there was to drink if you didn’t want cheap, shitty American lager. So, even if it is just another mass-produced product, it holds a place in my heart, beer lover that I am. So, to be drinking it in it’s “hometown” was a nice little moment. And the pub we first got it in was a lovely one. Busy and full of young professionals in the front, but a nice quiet place for us to chat and enjoy ourselves in the back.

The following morning, we set out to see what Dublin was all about. It’s obviously full of rich history, but much of it had been destoryed over the centuries. So we found a wonderful way to relive it on a walking tour. Carolyn introduced me to these. They tend to be quirky walks through historic parts of cities with people who really know their stuff. Ours was an engaging grad student of history and she knew the history of the city and Ireland in general very well. In the course of our walk, we went right up through modern Ireland and saw things like the location where Bloody Sunday took place as well as the ornate former City Hall. Twas a good step back in time.

Lunch was, of course, in a pub. We found a classy old pub with good hearty food. Now, I know it’s a stereotype, but the Irish seem to like their potatoes. Maybe at home, the do nothing but eat, ummm, tofu, but no matter where we ate, every dish came with potatoes. In fact, I had one or two dishes where it specified potatoes and came with not only those potatoes but some mashed potatoes just to make sure you didn’t miss any potatoes. Potatoes.

But I digress. After an excellent lunch, we made the obligatory pilgrimage to the Guinness brewery. My thoughts on it would best be left to another post, but I went in expecting a pretty corporate tourist attraction and I wasn’t disppointed. But the glimpses of an old brewery and the birthplace of Guinness (and a pint with a 360 degree view of Dublin was nice).

After a good Italian (really) dinner, we had booked a car to drive out to the nearby areas of Dublin. We had a bit of trouble with manual transmission and the car rental place. About 20 miles after picking up the car, it kind of died. The transmission just stopped working. On a hill. At a blind turn. Well, we called the rental place, they came and picked up the shit car and provided us with a second car. My mom did fine for the next leg of our trip, which took us to the Wicklow Mountains. This is a splendid range of mountains south of Dublin and it is dotted with wonderful mountain views and some cute villages Glendalough. It’s a former place for hard core monks to live out their whole vision of austerity for god. But the location is stunning and is full of wonderul walks along a lake as well as some impressive medieval architecture that housed the monks churches. This includes an amazing bell tower that just seems perfectly constructed. Well worth the visit.

Now, amid all this beauty, I would like to come back to driving. Being the child of someone, parents tend to be a little freaked out by their kids driving. Now imagine yourself a parent and your child has just taken the steering wheel of a car on the ‘wrong’ side of the road. And, this is the first time your child has ever driven on that side of the road. Well, that was my driving experience in Dublin. My mom was, umm, ok about it. After a few initial freak outs. Actually, what made it all better was that I was proving more adept at using the manual transmission cars in Ireland as our second car started having issues and we kind of needed to get back to Dublin and I was the only one who could find the sweet spot on the clutch that didn’t cause a horrible burning smell. 🙂

Anyway, we had one more day in Dublin and were debating whether or not to dump the shitty rental car or just drive it into the ground. We smartly chose the latter one (no more talk of the car, it got us to the airport and around the area of north of Dublin without a problem. Obviously due to my excellent driving!). This allowed us to go north and see some evidence of life in the neolithic era in Ireland. That would be Knowth and Newgrange.

Apparently, 3000 years ago, the folks living in the British Isles (among other places), practiced a particular rite of burials. The created earthen mounds where the dead would be placed for a period of time. These burial mounds (well, the entrance to the chambers) tended to face towards the east and were perfectly situated to have the sun enter the chamber directly on the winter solstice (now celebrated as Christmas — cooincidence? Hmmm). Well, there are two particularly big ones about 30 miles north of Dublin. So we piled in the car and made the trip up to take in these two impressive sites.

Now, these are not just big piles of dirt. They were elaborated constructed of massive stones, some of which came from hundreds of miles away and have managed to survive 3000 years. Not only that, but they have found other purposes over the years. The medieval folks around Knowth liked the artificial hill it created because then they could live atop them and, if people came from around the countryside to committ unspeakable acts and destory their lives, they built escape tunnels into the mounds. In Newgrange, the entrance to the burial chamber was discovered and left open for years, which allowed Victorian tourists to go in and leave their mark in the form of graffiti. So in the middle of this 3000 year old place of death, you look to your left and there’s “John Smith, 1865” carved into the rock.

The large paving stones along the bottoms of the mounds had a variety of patterns carved into them that are believe to signify various parts of nature. And the fact that the burial chamber was situated facing east to see the sun rise fit into the naturalist beliefs of the time. In Newgrange, they have a raffle for 20 people to witness the winter solstice in the burial chamber. For those unlucky people who can’t do that, they simulate it while you stand in the chamber. It’s quite powerful.

Among the interesting things about Knowth and Newgrange is the fact that, while people tend visit both, they were excavated and studied by different people. The archeologist at Knowth has done less interpretation and left things unknown when he had no concrete evidence for it. At Newgrange, they attempted to recreate what it might have looked like 3000 years ago. So, while they both found these gleaming white stones that came from very far away, at Knowth, they are left as possibly paving stones, while in Newgrange, they create something of a protective/decorative wall around the mound. There’s a lot unknown about these things and it’s nice to see a variety of opinions about them.

Anyway, after some more exploring of the countryside, we had to make our way back to the airport to return to London. My parents had a few more fun days in town and then they returned to their life in Arizona. It was a pleasure to have them visit and share Ireland with them.

Shortly, I’ll post what I’ve described above in picture form.

Since Matt has been quite delinquent with regular postings I have decided to jump in once again =) in order to wish everyone a Happy Chinese New Year.

Last Thursday, Matt and I joined a group of about 30 of his coworkers and their assorted friends and families, for a lovely meal in celebration of the Year of the Ox.  Unfortunately, we ourselves don’t have any photographic evidence of the night (although several minutes of entertainment was had by all as one friend took video footage of all party goers via his digital camera and the lazy susan in the middle of the tables.)  If I get access to the video I will post it here soon.

Our dinner location was China Delight in the City.  We had two large banquet tables and enjoyed a variety of delicious meals shared amongst ourselves.  My favorites were the sweet and sour prawns and sea bass.  Matt enjoyed the fish stew and cantonese roast duck.  The best dressed attendee was Echo’s daughter who wore a lovely pink silk outfit and impressed us all with her excellent table manners, considering she is just one year old.  Here’s wishing everyone happiness in the Year of the Ox.

A smaller mound near the neolithic mound tombs of Knowth in Ireland.

I’m still catching up and I’ll put up something tomorrow that’s a little more timely, but I’ve many photos from Ireland which Carolyn and I visited with my parents during their visit in September. So, without further ado, here is a photo dump of Ireland.

Since I began my practice of photo dumps, there’s a bit of a gap. This is just me filling the gap between Frankfurt and the latest entries about the Lake District. Well, you might recall our mini-honeymoon to Ludlow. Now, if you’ve got some time, you can browse the almost 200 pictures we took of this lovely town on the Welsh border. Here is the photo dump for Ludlow. It’s a lovely town and hopefully these photos capture a little slice of it.

On an unrelated note, I’ve noticed that the blog has hit 200+ posts this week and over 500 comments. That means I’ve technically posted something every 3.5 days. I’m a machine! 😛

In an attempt to write about something that didn’t occur 6 months ago, I thought I’d just give a quick rehash of what we did a week ago. We went to Paris. There, now you know how we celebrated our first Christmas as a married couple. 🙂

But seriously folks. We had a blast in Paris. In a nutshell, we rented an apartment, shopped like Parisians, went to midnight mass at Notre Dame, ate Chinese food on Christmas eve (nothing was open), made a homecooked meal with a Christmas duck and saw a whole lot of Paris.

Soon enough, I’ll give a full account. But for now, here’s a photo dump of all our Paris photos. Enjoy!

As promised, here is a sampling of the many pictures we took while in the Lake District. If you want more, we’ve got them right here.

This is Grassmoor House, the B and B we stayed at in Keswick. Note the slate exterior. Using it on the buildings was quite common and provided a cool look.

A mountain cloaked in heather. This was prime season for heather in bloom. Beautiful!

Two bad asses near the top of Skiddaw. Look at the view behind us.

We took the hard path down. It was a blast, but you sometimes needed to slow yourself down lest you go barrelling headfirst on a path of sharp slate.

This was our view from a pub we stopped at and had a few pints and played some games.

Matt amongst the boulders. This was in a mountain pass south of Keswick with a one lane road in and out of it. And cars were going in both directions. Crazy. From there we drove amongst a number of cute old villages that now cater to the tourists with pubs and ice cream.

There’re a few more photos I might post with commentary. I feel like I’m missing pieces of the trip in this selection. 🙂