Westminster Abbey cloister

This is taken from inside the cloister, looking out at the south tower of the Parliament building--opposite end from the tower with Big Bend.

Victoria & Albert museum

Jali Sandstone screen, carved and incised pink sandstone, 19th century. This screen is about 2 ft.by 2 ft. and is carved out of sandstone.

Albert Memorial

This and the following 2 are of the monument Queen Victoria had built when her husband Albert died. Boy, do these people know how to build a monument!!

Albert Memorial

The Albert Memorial was commissioned by Queen Victoria in memory of her beloved husband, Prince Albert, who died of typhoid at the tender age of 42 in 1861. The memorial stands 176 feet tall and took 10 years to complete. Victoria continued to mourn Albert, dressing only in black, until her death in 1901.

Albert Memorial

Buckhill Lodge

Buckhill Lodge at the Hyde Park entrance to Kensington Gardens. It was built in 1852.

Fountains in Kensington Park

View from Wellington Arch

OOPS! I should have sent this one first!

Wellington Arch

Wellington was the guy that stopped Napolean at Waterloo (I know you all know that but I had to say it anyway) and this is the monument built in his honor. (They actually moved it in 1882 because it didn't line up the way they wanted). There's an observation deck around the top of it, and the other picture is taken from it. This is at one end of Hyde Park, close to Buckingham Palace.

Rare moment: alone on a tube-train car

We Get Wicked

John, Gerri & I went to the Apollo Victoria Theatre to see the London production of Wicked, which tells the story most people never heard- what happened in The Wizard of Oz from the Wicked Witch's perspective. It's based upon the book by Gregory McGuire. You can read more about the play and the story here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_(musical)

The music and costumes were clever and there were some tear-provoking scenes. We had great seats (10 rows back from the stage in the middle of the theater). We even had ice cream during the intermission. It was a lovely evening.

John Revisits the V&A

These are pictures in the Victoria & Albert museum--HUGE!! building--you can find out probably more than you want to know about it on Wikipedia, but suffice it to say it has over 4.5 million objects, and it covers 12.5 acres!! The first picture is a glass chandelier--unfortunately it wasn't lit. The second one is a shot looking down into one of the rooms, taken more to show the size of the spaces here than for a specific item.

Home in London

These are shots near our apartment. The one of the house fronts shows our place--the door just to the left of the lamp post is ours. The other picture is looking out our front window. These row houses are everywhere in London and probably most cities here. Since the separating walls between houses are brick, you can't hear noise from house to house through the wall (at least we haven't), but since ours has been divided into upstairs/downstairs apts, we hear the folks below us pretty often.

Elephants on Parade in London

Two of the elephants in the Elephant Parade. These are right outside Apsley House.

Elephant Parade is a conservation campaign that shines a multi-coloured spotlight on the urgent crisis faced by the endangered Asian elephant. Presented by www.elephantfamily.org, the event sees over 250 brightly painted life-size elephants located over central London this summer.

Each decorated by a different artist or celebrity, the elephants brighten and beautify the city, enhancing every park, street corner and building they grace. Running from May to July 2010, this is London’s biggest outdoor art event on record. With an estimated audience of 25 million, they aim to raise £2 million for the Asian elephant and benefit 20 UK conservation charities.

Walter Keeler Teapot, Birmingham Museum

A thrown and altered, salt-glazed teapot by Walter Keeler one of the most inventive functional potters working in Britain. On display in the Birmingham Museum.

Birmingham and the Staffordshire Hoard

Description
Hilt Fitting Press quality photo Finds number NLM 449 Photo by Daniel Buxton, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

The Staffordshire Hoard is a recently-discovered cache of gold military objects found in a farmer's field by a treasure-hunter with a metal detector. My Dad would have loved to see this! There are over 1500 items in the hoard, mostly gold, some with intricate garnet cloisonné designs. Most haven't been cleaned of all the dirt on them yet because money had to be raised to pay the farmer and treasure-hunter (3.7 million pounds) before the museum could clean and conserve them. John & I saw a National Geographic special about it and decided to make a visit. Well worth the trip to Birmingham!

Good Things After a Day of Sightseeing

Don't you love the new fuzzy slippers?

One of my favorite things
These are my new cookie discovery. Pretty good. You have to love the British - they call their cookies "digestive biscuits" -- like they're health food!

The Homunculi

These little freaky guys were on display in the Human Biology section on the Natural History Museum. They represent parts of the body controlled by the Motor and Somatosensory cortex in the brain.

Van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear

In the Cortauld Gallery, Somerset House, London.
http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/gallery/index.shtml

A Walk Through Russel Square

Russell Square is a beautiful little park! Lots of big trees, flowers and squirrels.

The British Library (Again!)

One of my very favorite places here. I'm hoping to get a job here with room and board provided so I can just live at the British Museum and never have to leave.

Portrait of Two Boys

This piece in the Victoria &Albert Museum made me think about what Homer Simpson said about art, "Wow, your paintings have brush strokes. And your statues have wieners!"

Portrait of Nita Maria Schonfeld Resch. Conrad Dressler, 1898.

Nita Resch was the wife of the sculptor. I love this because of the colors. Dressler added red coloring to the clay to create the contrast.It's quite striking. In the V&A Museum.

Peasant Woman Nursing a Baby, Aime-Jules Dalou, 1873.

This terra-cotta sculpture in the Victoria & Albert Museum is one of my favorite things today.

Tube ride to the V&A

We rode the tube to the Victoria & Albert Museum. It was so fast and convenient. Why don't we have these?

John's Chair

OK, here's a reason I love this man: he is totally unafraid of what other people think! His main gripe about our flat is that there are no comfortable chairs. It's furnished with modern Ikea leather sofas that convert to twin-sized beds. Uncomfortable for lounging. So we're walking down the street and pass a used furniture store where we wandered in and bought this great (and light-weight!) chair for 30 pounds. John carried it home through the streets of London (OK, so it was only 5 blocks).

I'm adding this to my memories of him carrying a Coleman cooler through the streets of Santa Fe (asking some people seated at an outdoor cafe, "Is this an all-you can-eat buffet?") and driving an overloaded pick-up truck of odds and ends 15 miles down Lamar Blvd. With a rocking chair strapped to the top of the heap. I think I've already mentioned the large wooden table strapped upside down to a camping trailer. He always makes me laugh.

Our Flat

Here's John standing by the entrance to our flat in West Ealing, London. We're about 7 or 8 blocks from the Northfields tube station and about 6 blocks from Lammas Park.

Lammas Park is a sweet little neighborhood park which derives its name from 'lammas' land – land on which manor tenants could graze cattle after a harvest in medieval times. It has a walking path, several children's playscapes and tennis courts.

The British Museum

Our day of arrival was gray, cold and gloomy, but today was a glorious
day! Blue skies, cool and totally heavenly. John & I took the tube to
the British Museum where we spent 3 hours looking at "stuff."

The British Museum chronicles the development of Western civilization.
The British flag flew over a quarter of the world in the 19th century
and this museum has much of the "booty" the triumphant conquerors
brought home with them. You can follow the rise and fall of Egypt,
Greece & Assyria here, watch the development of The Enlightenment and
learn something about virtually any civilization that ever existed on
Earth. I love this place! If they would give me a tiny bedroom there
I'd live happily ever after.

This is my favorite thing today.

Our U.K. Trip

When John and I were first married, he talked about spending his retirement traveling for months on end around the country in a fifth-wheeler RV. Sort of like our own gypsy caravan - footloose, carefree. Then we decided to pull a camper-trailer to his niece in Las Vegas. After a worrisome trip across Texas (with a wooden table strapped to the top, a la Jed Clampitt), we arrived in Albuquerque. We dropped the table off with a friend and continued across New Mexico & Arizona to Las Vegas, where we joyfully off-loaded the camper and vowed never to haul ANYTHING again, ever.

Then we began to think about the fact that neither of us had ever really lived anywhere but Texas (John says that year in Vietnam didn't count). We spent several years considering different parts of the country, then different countries. In the meantime, I was lucky enough to get the job of my dreams - teaching statistics at Texas State University. It will be a while before I'm ready to retire so we've decided to live in another country - England - for a couple of months this summer.

Keep up with us through this blog!