July 22: On To Dover

This marks the spot in my trip where I re-join the original plan.  The Cantabile tour in Paris was over last night (sigh!) and I would have been taking a train to Calais this morning followed by a ferry to Dover.  Today instead I took a train from London to Dover and now I'm back to the plan.   I had always thought it would be cool to take a ferry across the Channel and that's still on my bucket list, but I will still have the chance to explore Dover.  My original idea when I planned the trip was to use my full day to go on a hike where I could see the famous White Cliffs.  Since then, while I was still in Kingston I happened to notice a little program on our cable called "Secrets of Great British Castles" and they had an episode about Dover Castle.  I hadn't realised Dover had a castle!  So I recorded and watched it and it was fascinating and I knew I'd have to explore the castle on my day there, and hopefully see a bit of the cliffs as well.

So I got on a train to Dover this afternoon, looking forward to two quiet hours with a good book and some pretty scenery going by.  And I got a screaming child sitting right across the aisle.  I complained about a screaming child on the plane on the way over, but,he really didn't make noise all that long.  This one *screamed* almost constantly for an hour and a half until he and his mother finally got off the train.  At least I wasn't trying to sleep this time, but it was really something.  He didn't seem to be sick, just a very exuberant little guy who wanted to run full speed around the train and did NOT like being stopped.  I'm not sure I've ever seen a mom looking quite as tired as this one did.

I was happy to get off the train at the end and head for my B&B.  There's a long street near the train station in Dover with a whole lot of pretty guest houses and B&Bs and I discovered other ones as I explored the town.  Dover is a fairly small town but it has huge numbers of people going through it on the way to and from the Channel ferries, so I guess it makes sense that a lot of them stop for the night.  They may want to break up their trip, or like me they may want to stop and see what's there.  Anyway, the street with my B&B is really pretty:

And here's my B&B, complete with beautiful garden:

 No photos of the inside, but it's just as nice as the outside and the owner seems very friendly.

Once I got settled in my room I went out for a walk.  I visited the information center but didn't really learn anything new.  But I enjoyed seeing the downtown area and just wandered around exploring for quite a while.  Some of it was just like any other town, full of modern stores, but some sections were just adorable, with gardens and pretty old homes and churches. 

And always the castle looming over it all.  Any time you turn in the right direction in this town, you see it.

After seeing the size of the castle complex and how high it is above the town I'm understanding more of what I heard on the TV show about Dover Castle's key position for defending England!  I would normally be determined to climb up there on my own steam, but maybe I'll see if there's a bus and save my energy for exploring when I'm there....

July 21: Science Museum

It's still hot today, but not as brutal.  I decided to go to the Science Museum.  The web says it's air-conditioned but not to hope for really cool conditions.  That turned out to be accurate; it was a little warm and stuffy, but bearable.  And the contents were extremely interesting.  Much of it was hard to photograph, so I've only got a few pictures, but I saw quite a lot. 

First I went to a special exhibit about Leonardo da Vinci.  Many people think of him as an artist and forget that he was also a brilliant inventor and visionary.  He left many sketches of ideas that couldn't be implemented with the technology of his time but were extremely interesting. They were detailed, but some also left quite a bit to the imagination.  This exhibit displayed reproductions many of these sketches plus 20th century wooden models of how the ideas might have been realised.  I didn't get any photos of these, but they were fascinating.  The models included a "flying machine" (kind of like a helicoptor), ideas about how to build walls around a castle to maximize its resistance to attack, and a primitive sort of diving suit to allow people to repair the hulls of ships underwater without having to haul the ship out of the water.  The exhibit also included a lot of really interesting information about Leonardo's life and what was going on in the world while he was creating all of these ideas.

After that, I went searching for Babbage's Difference Engine.  This is a famous and important historical relic of the early days of my profession (Computer Science).  And it just happens that there was a documentary on TV about Babbage shortly before our trip, so David and I were eager to see it.  David went to the Science museum on his one full day in London -- while I was applying for my return visa -- and today I went to see it for myself.

I say that I "went searching" for the engine because it really was a search.  This museum was beautiful and full of fascinating objects, but it wasn't terribly easy to find things!  On the plus side, there were many museum employees who were very kind about giving directions for finding specific objects.  The trouble is that it can be hard to describe exactly where something is in an enormous museum and I had to ask several times.  It got frustrating, but the search was worth it.

To add to the confusion, they actually have two difference engines, which I hadn't realised at first.  There's a very long, complicated history to all this, which you can find here if you're interested.  In brief, here is a model created by Babbage in the 1850s.  It's just a section of a complete Difference Engine:

You can't tell from the picture, but this above model is only about two feet high.

Babbage wasn't able to complete an entire Difference Engine in his lifetime. In the late 20-th century, however, the Science Museum decided to build a Difference Engine to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Babbage's birth (in 1991).  It is complete and actually works:

This successful version is a little taller than me.

Seeing those two objects is kind of like being a pilot or an aeronautics engineer and seeing the Wright Brothers airplane!

Nearby I stumbled upon another artifact related to Computing:

This is a mechanical Jacquard loom, used to weave cloth with complicated patterns in it.  The threads and fabric are near the bottom of the picture.  What you see on top is a series of cards with holes punched into them.  These cards encoded specific patterns for the machine to follow while weaving.  These cards were the inspiration for the punched cards used in the earlier days of Computing.  I am old enough to have used punched cards as an undergraduate.

Besides these Computing artifacts, I saw many other interesting things.  There was a big exhibit about the history of communication, including the development of the telegraph and telephone and transatlantic cables.  Other exhibits included transportation, agriculture, and space exploration.  Most of these things didn't lend themselves to photography, but were quite interesting in person.  I wandered happily for most of the day and learned a lot.

And on my way back to my hotel at the end of the day, I happened to stumble upon another science-related thing near Paddington Station.  It was just a small plaque on the wall of a building near a hospital:

Pretty cool!  Especially interesting to me because just two days ago in Kensington Palace, I learned that William III died of complications from a broken collarbone.  One of the visitors was expressing surprise that someone could die from a broken bone and one of the "explainers" said a bad fracture can lead to infections, which could be quite lethal without antibiotics.

July 20: Who You Gonna Call?

The weather in London has been pretty hot and humid and the walking I've been doing in the last couple of days has really wiped me out.  The forecast correctly predicted that it would be even hotter today and I was having a hard time facing more sightseeing in this weather.  Very few things in London are air conditioned, including my hotel.  It does cool down at night so I've been able to sleep, but it can get bad in the afternoon, especially when the sun is bright as it has been lately.

So today when the morning started out just as hot and miserable as promised I just couldn't face another day on my feet in the sun (or in a stuffy hot building).  I decided I needed a down day.   So I stayed in my room and read my novel until it got too unpleasant here and then I took a tube to the London Westfield, a big fancy new mall fairly near my hotel.  Because malls are always air conditioned, right?  Well, sort of.

I was a little shocked when I got there to see that the entrances were huge open spaces, with the muggy London air going right in.  They did seem to have some kind of A/C inside because it was a little better than outside, but still not the cool I had been hoping for.  And most of the roof was a skylight, so it was like a huge greenhouse.  I'm sure that's a wonderful thing most of the year in a city that tends to be chilly and grey, but it's not the thing for summer.  And they must do something to protect the entrances in the winter or every one will freeze.  It was bearable in there, but not super comfortable.  The shops were mostly very fancy and I didn't really want to buy anything.  So maybe not as good an idea as I had thought.

I got some very good pizza for lunch and then passed a movie theatre.  That sounded good.  Movie theaters are usually kept nice and cool in Canada, so I hoped it would be the same here.  And it was!  And Ghostbusters was playing soon after I checked and I'd been wanting to see that movie.  I had a gloriously cool couple of hours watching a very, very funny movie and came back out feeling like a new woman and able to face the rest of the heat wave.  By the time I got back to the hotel the worst of the heat for the day was over. Whew!

Seems a bit silly to have spent an afternoon in London watching a movie I could have seen at home, but the weather was really awful.  And even on vacation sometimes you need a rest.  Plus this was by far the glitsy-est movie theatre I've ever seen, which made it kind of fun.  They had **17** screens and a huge, fancy lobby with every kind of junk food known to man available to buy. 

I highly recommend Ghostbusters for adults or teens.  Some of the ghosts are too scary for children.  I liked the original movie very much.  I remember going to see it with David when we were first married -- that certainly dates us!  I thought this new version did a good job of keeping the main idea of the original while changing up enough to make it fun for the old-timers to see.  The gender swap was a lot of fun, of course -- a group of woman fighting the ghosts with supporting male characters this time.  The actors were all great and I particularly enjoyed seeing Chris Hemsworth doing comedy instead of being a superhero.  Melissa McCarthy is wonderful too, as usual, as were the rest of the ghostbusting team.  As expected, there were some great cameos too, which I won't spoil.

The forecast says tomorrow's weather will be a little better.  Let's hope they've got that right.

July 19: Kensington Palace

In yesterday's post I forgot to mention that when I went to the Tower of London I bought a "Historic Royal Palaces" membership, which gives me free admission to four places I had wanted to see anyway and a few other perqs as well.  The Tower was the first place and today I saw the second place: Kensington Palace.  David and I saw it from the outside when we walked in Kensington Gardens and today I went in and took the tour.  I thought it might be a half-day outing and I'd do something else later, but like most things on this trip it was both slower to get to and more interesting to see than I anticipated, which means it took up more time than I expected.  No problem; it was a fun day!

Here is one of the formal gates into Kensington Palace.  It's famous as the place where crowds left millions of flowers after Princess Diana died.

They had the exhibits in the palace set up in a very interesting way: there were four "routes" laid out through the public part of the Palace.  Each had a specific subject or theme.  You followed arrows to stay on your current "route".  You could go through them in your own order, and as many times as you wanted.

Each route had some "explainers" who would give short talks at intervals and were available to chat at other times.  They were excellent -- very informative and good at, well, explaining.

The first route I explored was about Queen Victoria.  It concentrated on her as a young woman, rather than the "Widow of Windsor" in black that we so often see pictures of.  The latter was part of her life, of course, but I read a biography of her a long time ago and knew there was more to her than the stereotype and was happy to see an exhibit which emphasized that.  The first room was the room in which Queen Victoria had her accession council.  She was just barely18 and had been kept isolated by her mother for her whole life and had just a couple of hours to prepare herself after hearing the news when a roomful of men descended on the palace for her to take her oaths as the new monarch.  She apparently behaved with great poise and won them all over.  Here is a picture of her as a young queen:

The second route I followed was about royal fashions, particularly displaying clothes worn by the current Queen, Princess Margaret, and Princess Diana.  I don't pay much attention to fashion, but I enjoyed seeing some of the beautiful dresses worn by these women and reading about what royal women have to think about when the dress for public appearances.  Here is one of my favorites:

I can't remember now which of those ladies wore it or the dresses behind it, but it was beautiful.

The third route was about William and Mary, who were very important in the life of Kensington Palace.  These two were the only joint monarchs in British history.  Mary was the actual heir to the throne, but William, the Elector of Hanover, was her cousin and actually fourth in line in his own right.  Mary inherited the throne under difficult circumstances (the "Glorious Revolution") and as a condition of leaving her home in Hanover to come rule in England she insisted that she and William be named joint monarchs.  He was William III and she was Mary II.  Here's their monogram over the front door of Kensington Palace:

When they came to England they found the weather unpleasant and the pollution of London bothered William's allergies.  They needed a country retreat.  They found a house "out in the country" and bought it and made it over into a palace and that's how Kensington Palace came to be.  They retreated there as often as possible.  Here is a statue of William in front of the palace:

Besides rebuilding the house, they created gorgeous gardens around it.  Kensington Palace still has beautiful gardens, although they have been changed quite a bit since those times.

The fourth route was about George II and Queen Caroline.  It was a series of rooms decorated to look like the rooms people would have to pass through on social occasions to get to the king and queen (if they were of high enough status to get that far!).  There would be games to play:

 and women in the latest dresses:

(How did they get through the doors???)

And, of course, musicians to keep everyone entertained:

In addition to all this, I joined a tour of the wonderful gardens around the palace.  This was led by another pair of excellent volunteers.  They concentrated on the history of the gardens and explained to us how William and Mary designed the original gardens to be similar to the kind of gardens they left behind when the came to England, and how later monarchs changed them.  They were very informative and entertaining.  One of the features is a "sunken garden", meant to be looked at from the outside, not walked in.

 
There's a sort of topiary tunnel nearby, with "windows" that let you look out at framed views of the sunken garden:

The gates to the sunken garden are still kept locked, but if you're on one of these special garden tours you get to go in!  There's currently a pair of moorhens nesting in there.  The guides mentioned that they had a nest hidden in the bushes and nobody wanted to get too close for fear of spooking them, but they thought there were 6 eggs in it and that they must be close to hatching.  When we went in, we saw the two of them on a little "island" in the middle of the pond.  The female was staying pretty still and the male was bringing her food. 

Then we realised that they weren't alone; when the female moved a bit we saw that the food was actually for the tiny babies she was sheltering.  I was so excited to be one of the first people to see those new little birds!

It was a lot of walking on a warm day, but lots of fun seeing many beautiful things.

The other time I was in London, Kensington Palace had been covered with scaffolding, with major renovations going on.  There is another wing of Kensington Palce that you can't see very well because there's a tall brick wall around it.  It contains apartments for many members of the royal family, including Prince William and his growing family.  When Prince Charles and Princess Diana were married they lived in there, but things were much different; the wall wasn't there and they didn't have much privacy except when they were inside.  Now they have some outdoor space they can use without being on display and I'm sure they're happy about that. 

July 18: Tower of London

The words "Tower of London" naturally make us picture a tower.  But it's really like a walled town.  People lived there and coins were minted there and all sorts of things happened there -- including chopping off of a few heads, but so much more.  I was there five years ago for a short afternoon and didn't get to see nearly all of it, so I wanted to come back.  I did that today and I STILL don't think I've seen all of it, but after devoting a lot of the day I've certainly seen a lot more.

Here are some photos just to give the idea of how big and varied the place is:

People still live in the Tower.  There are roped off areas that obviously have small apartments in them.  I'm guessing they're for the guards.
(Do you see the clothesline in the first one?)

They also had reconstructions of what some of the interiors might have looked like centuries ago:

They had some actors in costume popping up and acting out scenes and getting the crowd involved.  I think it was mainly aimed at the school groups there, but it was kind of fun.   I unexpectedly ended up fairly close to the end of one of the scenes:

The Tower also used to contain the royal collection of exotic animals, brought as gifts by foreign dignitaries.  People used to be allowed to come in and see them, occasionally with unfortunate results.  There are now statues to commemorate this old practice.  I had to look closely to see that the statues were made out of what looked like barbed wire fencing, I suppose to symbolize captivity:

And then, finally, a reference to the previously mentioned chopping-off of heads.  There were actually fairly few executions inside the Tower.  Most of them happened outside the walls, on "Tower Hill", where the tube stop is now.  But some high-profile people were executed inside the tower, including three queens: Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, and Jane Grey.  The exact spots of these executions isn't known, but this sculpture was put in one possible place to commemorate those deaths:

Many famous people executed in or near the tower were buried under the floor of the chapel there, which is still a practicing church.  Their individual graves were never marked, but there's a list inside the chapel.  It includes two saints, Thomas More and John Fisher, so it's an official pilgrimage site.

Finally, the big event: the Crown Jewels.  We weren't allowed to take pictures of them, but here's the building they are in:

They are quite beautiful: many crowns, scepters, orbs, and other ceremonial things, all covered with gold and silver and many, many jewels.  There's also a lot of information about them and where they came from and how they were made and what they're used for.  Plus a video about the details of a coronation ceremony, since many of these things only get taken out of the vault for coronations.

There was also information about the Cullinan Diamond, which was found in South Africa in the early 20th century and is the "largest clear cut diamond in the world".  It was divided into several polished gems.  The largest one of those is in the Sovereign's Sceptre and the second-largest in the Imperial State Crown.  They were quite something to see.

The last thing I had time for was a big exhibit of armor, much of which had belonged to kings.  This one was used by Henry VIII in his younger days:

That was almost all that I'd been hoping to see.  The only thing I missed was an exhibit about the Royal Mint, which for five hundred years was inside the Tower.  I guess I'll have to leave that for another visit....

July 17: These Boots Were Made....

Today started with a tube ride to Westminster to go to church.  I missed the chance to sing in Notre Dame today with my choir, so going to Westminster Abbey instead seemed like the right thing to do.  I got there a bit early, so I walked around the park near the Abbey and looked at the statues of famous, inspiring people:

Then I went over and joined the people who were starting to line up to attend the Sunday service at the Abbey:


If you have to stand in line, that's a really pretty place to stand.  I was surprised there weren't more people there; I had thought that getting there 45 minutes early might not have been enough, but I was near the front of the line.  Ushers came out periodically and let us know that there was no tourist access to the building on Sundays and that we'd be going in just for the service.  That was fine by me.  I did the tour the other time I was in London.  I was sad this morning not to be singing with my friends as the visiting choir in Notre Dame and it seemed comforting to be in a different big cathedral.  I could still enjoy some great church music even if I wasn't helping to make it.

It turned out that Westminster Abbey had a visiting choir today too.  I guess it's the time of year when cathedral choirs get a vacation.  The choir was a very good one, but it was a small chamber choir that was very different from the Cantabile Choir, which made it a little easier for me.  They sang parts of William Byrd's "Mass For Four Voices", which I happened to have sung with my madrigal group in high school and which I love very much.  It was wonderful to hear it sung by such a good choir and used for worship rather than just a concert piece.  And the organ was amazing.  It was a beautiful service and I enjoyed it very much.

After the service I grabbed a sandwich and took a walk.  When I was in London before I took a walk in that area that I enjoyed so much I wanted to do it again.  I highly recommend it if you're ever in London and looking for a walk to take: it's just a rectangle bounded by Westminster Bridge and Lambeth Bridge and the banks of the Thames.  One side leads you past Westminster and a really nice park and other side takes you past another park and Lambeth Palace (the residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury).  The walk was just as nice as I remembered.

You might have noticed that the sky in these pictures varies a lot, but they were all taken within about an hour of each other.  Great Britain is just like that; the weather keeps you guessing.  I often thought it was going to rain today, but I actually only felt about 2 drops of rain the whole day and got a lot of sun at other times.

I was enjoying walking, so I decided to walk over to visit the Queen, since Buckingham Palace isn't very far away from Westminster.  In the sermon at Westminster Abbey, the preacher reminded us of the importance of quieting down our minds and challenged us all to find a nice garden to sit in for 10 minutes and just do nothing.  He even suggested Saint James Park, which is right on the way to Buckingham Palace, so that's where I went.  It is quiet and beautiful, with wonderful flowers and a big artificial pond with lots of birds, including pelicans.  I sat quietly for my 10 minutes and just watched the water and the birds and the families out for picnics.



And then I sat and knitted for another little while, since I find that very meditative too.  I took a picture of my scarf-in-progress so that I will remember this beautiful afternoon when I wear it.

After all that sitting I was feeling relaxed and ready to walk again and I headed up the Mall to the palace.  If you've never been there before, the Mall is a big street leading up to Buckingham Palace and it's pronounced to rhyme with "pal", not "ball".  I learned that it's closed to traffic on Sundays, which made it particularly nice to walk down today.  It starts with Admiralty Arch, built by Edward VII in member of his mother, Victoria.

Car traffic goes through the left and right of the three big openings and pedestrians walk through the little openings.   But the middle opening has a gate across it and is only opened up for royalty.

On the way down the Mall I passed monuments to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (parents of the current Queen)

and Queen Mary (grandmother of the Queen).

 
I also passed St. James Palace, which is still the official residence of the monarch, even though no King or Queen has actually lived there for a long time.  I did see a documentary on the plane on the way over which mentioned that Prince Charles has an apartment in St. James Palace.

And finally, Buckingham Palace itself, with the huge statue in front including Queen Victoria and various other things I can't really identify.

The gates in front of the palace are quite impressive.

And here's as close as you can get to the palace (taken through the bars of the gates), with the iconic balcony in view.

Close to the gates I also noticed a bunch of music stands, probably for ceremonies such as the Changing of the Guard.  Now there's another gig my sister might like; do you suppose they need cellists?

Just as I was noticing that the flag on top of the palace was flying at half mast, I heard someone explaining it.  When the Queen is at home, they fly a special royal standard above the palace.  The fact that we saw the Union Jack instead meant that she was not at home.  (I guess they forgot to tell her I was coming!)  And the fact that the Union Jack was at half mast was a tribute to the victims of the terrorism in Nice.

I had already done a lot of walking, but I was enjoying it and looked on my map and realised I was within walking distance of my hotel.  Not a short walk, but do-able.  So I did it!  A lot of it took me through Hyde Park, which was nice although not as elegant as St. James Park or Kensington Gardens.  I've had a fitbit for a little over a year now and this is the first time I've ever hit 20,000 steps, which is about 10 miles.  My feet hurt afterwards, but I felt good.  I achieved my goal of creating a great day in London for myself instead of moping about not being in Paris :-)