Rebecca's Sunday Report

Things I loved about today's outing?



a rush like the wind

 1.  Flexibility.  The plan was to take the boys to the British War Museum.  However, we just couldn't get there.  Our bus couldn't get to its terminus because of the (as we later learned) triathalon which was taking place in and through Hyde Park, which had left several roads closed.  So... we just dropped that plan, and instead hung out to watch part of the triathalon.  Why not?  Totally delicious to let the plans fall to the side, knowing that we can go on some other day.  It was quite fun to stumble across the triathalon  ... little stretches of nothing, followed by bursts of activity as the cyclists rounded the track again.  I particularly loved watching the cyclists emerge through the Wellington Arch, the sound of the helicopter (which was following the cylists) from above.  When the cyclists passed by, they were so close and so fast that you could feel a gust of wind that reminded me of the feeling you get in the Tube station as a train approaches.  This shot is blurry, but it captures what it 'felt' like to be standing so close!

2. The sky. It just kept changing. There were huge dark clouds on the horizon. Still, the sun kept trying to push through. It wasn't always successful.  We wandered our way through 3 or 4 small showers, and 2 major deluges, the kinds that send everyone scrambling into the shops and cafes, as water streams off the roofs, and leaves small lakes in the gutters.  Still.... I am always struck by the beauty of dark clouds mixed with the blues and greys of the skies.... i have a whole new appreciation for all those Flemish paintings that used to seem, to me, to be nothing but dreary overcast skies!  :-)



clouds on the horizon





The sun trying to push through

   

  3. I love the Quadriga (a chariot drawn by 4 horses) at the Wellington Arch. I don't have a great set of reasons... i mean, there are lots of beautiful statues out there. Maybe it really still something about the sky? :-)  Maybe also something about seeing the cyclists pass through the arch beneath it....

4.  Trees.  Seriously.  I love them.  Or maybe it is just tree bark that attracts me so much?   I really adore the trunks on one particular kind of tree.  I have no idea WHAT kind of tree it is, but it seems the model for traditional camoflage paint.

 


Its' bark is better than its' bite!

  4.   I loved hanging out in The Duke of Wellington Pub with my little family of men, while the rain fell outside.   A nice end to the day!

Duncan's Report on Sunday in London

Today on our travels, we saw a bunch of strange things. When we were by the Marble Arch, we saw a statue that looks a lot like a gummie-bear family. It is called the Jelly Baby Family. Check it out. We also saw a wierd statue of a horse's head sticking out of the ground.

Next, we walked by the Australia War Memorial. It is a long curved wall with words written all over it, and the words are made up of smaller words. If you click here, you can do a virtual tour of it!

When we were walking in the park, we saw they had set up a race track. We had no idea what was going on, but stayed to watch. It was a triathalon, and we watched the cyclists go by.

We also got a cool cataolgue from a store called "Argos", and it has a ton of stuff in it. My mom says it is a bit like the old Sears Christmas Catalogue. It has way more toys in it than they even have at "Toys R Us". I am loving looking at it.

Football and riots...

our tickets!

Yep.... Steve said it was 'quid pro quo':  he went to see musical theatre with me, so I would have to go with him to a soccer game.  OK.  Fair enough.  He got tickets for the whole family to see a pre-season 'friendly match' between Tottenham and Bilbao.  So off we headed to the Tottenham Stadium to see the game, with all three men dressed in tottenham shirts, so it would be clear which team we belonged to!

Of course, our affiliations would have been clear in any event.  If you look at the tickets, you will see they say "home supporters only"...you are required to state your affiliation at the time time you buy your ticket, and if you support the 'other' team during the game, one of the orange vested bouncers takes you out of the stadium. ... yikes!

I will admit that Steve got us a pretty good location:  11 rows back, and close to centre line.  The action was never far away!  Even if I am not really a soccer fan, I have to admit that it was a great location to watch things from!

ouch!  knees in pain!

 I have to also say that the seats were about as tight as any I have sat in.  I don't know if this is part of the effort to squeeze as many people into the stadium as possible (there were 28,000 people there), or just that Brits are smaller than we mighty Canadians!  You can see from our knees that the lack of seating room was a challenge!  The stands were full.  Lots of men out there with their small kids (not surprising, since as you can see from the ticket stubs above, kids could go for the low price of 5 pounds!)

Duncan's says his favourite part of the game was participating in "the wave" that ran around and around the stadium when there was a few minutes of downtime in the game.  There was one particular crash that took two players out:  one walking, the other on a stretcher.

We got to sing a bunch of songs (a necessary part of the game... audience participation and all that!)  One of the most interesting was the song "Stand Up if You Hate Arsenal".  Strange song to sing when Arsenal wasn't even there.  I guess some rivalries run pretty deep!  :-)



the final score



In the game itself,  Bilbao scored first.  It would be an understatement to say the Bilbao fans were in rapture.  We ended the first half at 1-0 for the Spanish.  Happily (at least for the home fans), Tottenham managed two goals right after half time:  the goals were within 5 minutes of eachother, and both happened when I had my head turned and was whispering something to one child or the other.  Ah well... such is my lot in life.   But even if I missed seeing the event, I was able to join in with the rest of the crowd in a rousing chorus of the song "look who is not singing now", sung to the Bilbao supporters (off in the Bilbao section).  I must say, the Bilbao supporters put on a great show, and were way noisier than their relatively small numbers in the corner of the stadium would have suggested they could be! 

On the way home, the queue at the train station was impossibly long, so we decided to walk from the stadium back to the Seven Sister`s tube station.  The evening was nice, so it seemed a pleasant diversion to walk rather than queue up.  The walk down the Tottenham high  street started off fine, but seemed a bit wierd near the end.  Traffic was not moving at all, and finally people started turning their cars around:  there seemed to be a block on the road up ahead.  Indeed, there were people crowding around a police station, and there were police all over... it looked like maybe a vigil or a protest.  It was hard to say, but the mood seemed a bit off, so we just kept going til we got to the tube station.   

In any event, it turned out that there were riots and fires later on that night in Tottenham... protests over the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan.  We had been walking past the first part of the march on the police station.  I didn`t hear about riots until tonight.... people are talking about the parallels to the last riots like this back in the 1980s...  Here is a bit more footage...   All I can say is, you could certainly feel something was in the air.  Glad we were home before it started....

Alex's report on Sunday in London

The plan for today was to visit the British War Museum. The bus was supposed to take us to Victoria station, but for some reason, they kicked us off close to the Marble Arch.
We walked from there through Hyde Park. We stopped at Speaker's Corner, where there were a lot of people talking about stuff. Apparently, every Sunday, anyone who wants to can stand on a soapbox, and talk to the crowds. We stopped to listen to one guy going on about Iraq and the CIA and stuff like that. People from the audience were yelling back, or heckling, or asking questions. He held his own. Beside him, there was a bit of a shouting match between three old guys: a Muslim guy, a Hindu guy and a Christian guy. Not too much of a match, actually. The muslim and hindu guys were pretty calm and polite, but the christian guy was mostlyshaking his fist and shouting that all of us were rebellious and needed to change. Pretty wild.

Then it started to rain a little, and we headed off across the park. The rain stopped again, but as we crossed to the other side of the park (by the Serpentine Lake), we could see why the bus didn't take us all the way to Victoria Station: the roads were closed for a triathalon. It was in the middle of the cycling part. There were a couple of front runners, all trying to get the front spot, then a huge pack of riders in the middle, and then one guy way behind. There were motorcycles riding along side recording the race, and a helicopter above doing the same thing. You could tell when the riders were going to pass us again bywatching where the helicopter was.

We headed off past Buckingham Palace, but then it turned into a huge downpour, so we headed for a pub instead. On Sundays they always have a "Sunday Roast", so I skipped the Steak and Ale pie, and tried that instead. It was my first time to try Yorkshire Pudding. It tastes more like bread than like pudding. That's all for now!

A Little Night's Music (and fish and chips)...


Steve's first night back from Kansas, and I arranged for a family outing (dinner and musical theatre!)   Yes... I believe in suffering for him!



washed oyster, anyone?

We arranged to meet up somewhere downtown after work.  The boys and I headed off a bit early to get a few other action items complete.  One of them was the question of Duncan's new oyster card:  did it still work?  Well... of course we knew that it HAD worked, but we also knew that the washer/drier worked pretty well, and that Duncan's Oyster card had still been in his pants pocket when the load of laundry went in for the 4.5 hour complete wash/dry cycle.  What you can't really see in the photo is the lovely 'permanent wave' that the dry/spin cycle left in the plastic part of Duncan's card.  So... first order of business was to see if the electronic/magnetic parts of the card still worked.  We hopped on a bus, and he scanned in his card.  Yippee!   Still works!... it has a certain 'character', but continues to function, so who cares!

Happily on top of the double decker, we prepared to settle in for a long bus ride to a key-cutting shop i had located on-line.  We currently only have one set of keys (having forgotten the other set in Paris). While family togetherness is of course lovely, it is good to have the liberty to send people off in different directions without having to leave a sentinel in the house to let everyone back in!  So... prepared for a long bus stop, we looked to the left, and saw a keycutting shop right beside us.  So... off we hopped again!   Minutes later, we each had our own housekey. 

 That having been such exhausting work, the boys convinced me that we should stop at the small sandwich and juice shop next door that had a sign outside advertizing "smoothies".  It being a brutally hot day, I asceeded to their demands.  In we went.  The owner/manager told us that their smoothies were exceptional:  all natural, just fruits and ice and no artificial colours, sugars or additives (not such a great sales pitch for me, since those are items from my favourite food groups, but that is another story).  We had simply to choose.  They various combinations on the list had descriptions under of the health benefits you could get from each choice. He did say that the #1 was a big seller, but that maybe it wasn't for Duncan.  Since that particular brew was for male 'vitality', saying it was the all-natural equivalent of Viagra, I agreed.... Duncan ended up choosing something a little less 'vital'.  :-)   While we were waiting for him to make the smoothies, he suggested we try sitting in their garden.  Garden?  Yep.... a door on the left led to a little enclosed garden seating area.  Perhaps seating for 12, but shaded by a huge umbrella, and the walls covered with flowering vines, and even one paliated apple tree loaded down with fruit.   Sweet!   I shoulda taken a photo, but didn't remember until we headed back outside, so all you get is a photo of Duncan out front... it looks banal, and complete fails to disclose the lovely treasure inside.  I think we will go back another day for lunch!

Tasks done, we headed to Charing Cross, to take a wander through Trafalgar Square on our way to meet up with Steve.  We stopped long enough for Duncan to hop up by one of the lion's (too hot to touch because of the burning sun, but he still managed to get is hand on its butt!)  The fountains were running, and people had their socks and shoes off to paddle in them.  Every gust of breeze tossed spray high in the air and the direction of the throngs of sweaty folk happily turning their faces into the cool mist.  Lovely!

And then we headed off to watch one of the buskers up at the top of the square.  My kids could, I think, spend the full day in the square watching the buskers.  This time, we saw an amazing contortionist guy, a great entertainer, with an incredibly flexible and strong physique, who eventually managed to get his whole body into a little box.  Street theatre!   There is just nothing like it!   So worth the money in the hat!

After that, we wandered over to covent garden, and found the pub (Crown and Anchor) we had arranged to meet Steve at.  We discovered, at to my dismay, that they served only drinks and no food.  However, to my delight, they did not exclude kids from being in the space, and had an upstairs level that was gloriously air conditioned.  They boys nursed their pop while waiting (though they are still in shock at the 'no free refills' thing here) for Steve to join us. 

My first Steak and Kidney Pie...

Duncan with fried sausages?!

When he arrived, we wandered the streets looking for food.  We finally choice to eat on the street at (the world famous, so they say) "The Rock and Sole Plaice", a fish and chips restaurant and takeaway established in 1871."  This did not please Duncan, who does not like Fish!  Still.... the chips were a hit, and they did have a few other options.  Duncan  went for a sausage fried in butter, and I took my first shot at steak and kidney pie.  ...  (I think i will go for the fish next time). 

And then, it was off to see "Betty Blue Eyes"  ... a musical about a pig.  You can see the trailer for it here. Basically, a musical version of the play "A Private Function".  it is very 1947 England, during the time of austerity and rations and the royal wedding.... people conspiring to keep (and eat) an 'illegal pig' at a private dinner party.... it has singing, dancing, stinky pig poo jokes, etc.... everything you could want in a musical. We all came home singing "Nobody Calls Me Nobody" from the play.  You can see Sarah Lancaster (who we saw) singing it here!  There is one part where the 84 year old mother (who plays a great comic part) overhears the two main characters planning how to kill the pig, and thinks they are talking about her.  At the place where she refused to die... "Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin", Alex laughed so hard that he swallowed the icecube he was sucking on, and I was worried I would have to heimlich him.  That is always the sign of a good show!  :-)  And thus ended the day...

Friday: First time to the Tate Modern...across the Millenium Bridge...

After Friday's lovely 3 hour bus tour, we decided to stay downtown a bit longer.   We stopped at Subway (ie. fastfood sandwiches) to get our energy back up, then plunged back into the bowels of the tube line, over to Mansion House, our closest stop to the Millenium Bridge.  The final destination was the Tate Modern, but of course, one needs to think about the journey, and not only the destination, ... and we wanted to journey together over the Millenium Bridge (which was destroyed in Harry Potter book 6, of course!). 

 We wandered across the bridge, and over to the Tate Modern.   The Tate Modern, which is located in the old Bankside Power Station, houses modern art (ie. 1900 to the present).  It is named for Henry Tate, one of the great (?!) sugar barons.  Sugar, we learned on the bus tour, is one of the only products that is still delivered to London via the Thames!

I have a working theory of museum life for the kids this year, a new practice that completely reverses my usual practice.  The new theory is that we never spend more than 45 minutes in a museum on one day (this is as opposed to my own personal preference of being inside from the moment the doors open til the moment they kick me out the door).  Hopefully, the shorter visits will help them work up strength!  :-)   So... with that theory in mind, we only stayed only long enough on this visit to take in  4 works of art:

Bridget Riley

Warhol, Self-Portrait

First, a self-portait by Andy Warhol (of Campbell's Soup can fame). Since both kids were required to do soup can art a la warhol in their elementary school classes, it seemed only right to find Andy and raise our hat to him. 

Second, we spent a bit of time by a piece of Op Art by Bridget Riley. It is basically a bunch of black and white wavy lines, and seems to ripple and move the longer you look at it.

Third, we played an interactive game and quiz about a Jackson Pollack piece called "Summertime".  There were a series of questions, and you got to try to do a computerized version of trying to get paint onto canvas.... fun!  I got to compete against Duncan and Alex.  Their painting skills (in the computerized version) kicked butt on mine!

Finally, we took in a seriously cool installation piece, called "Brutalism: StereoReality Environment" by Jose Carlos Martinez.  it is in the shape of Peru's headquarters.  There are little 'ticker tape' things at the top that prints out and spits out pieces of paper out at 1 minute intervals, with different things written on them, assorted fragments of text on various brutal regimes. They cluster in higher and higher pools of paper on the floor as you watch.

There you go....and then it was back to the tube station and back home.  We will see 4 more things on our next visit....

Friday adventures: Bus Tour



Big Ben



The London Eye - cloudy sky...

Friday's  adventure was the Golden Bus Line Panorama Tour:  a three hour trip around London on an open-top double decker bus, with a live guide commenting on the sights of London.  The firstpart of the  adventure was, of course, simply finding the place that the bus tour started.  It said "Victoria Station".  That is rather less specific than you might imagine (since there is the Victoria Tube Station, Victoria Train Station and Victoria Coach Station).  After walking what appeared to be an 8 block radius, we arrived (stocked up with beverages and treats), and staked out seats on the top deck. 

Under Tower Bridge





I loved the tour.  The boys tolerated it (which is about as good as a mother can expect).  Of course, I came prepared:  both boys had their DS games, and, when they got bored with the sights, played as we drove.  You can see them here in the front two corners (duncan with my coat covering his head so as to reduce the glare on his DS.  So.... everyone was happy.  I watched and took photos and notes, the boys got a break from me making them walk all over town.   :-)  Things I loved?  Just driving past the incredible array of buildings.  



Selfridge's Department Store



Henry Havelock (& Duncan)



New things I learned?  One was that Selfridge's, one of the oldest/largest department stores in London, was responsible for coining the phrase "The customer is always right".   Vocabulary builder moment?  Havelock.  One of the statues in Trafalgar Square is Henry Havelock. The word "Havellock" is the piece of fabric that hangs down the back of the french foreign legionnaire's hat!



 Other pieces of trivia? Only 7000 people live in the square mile that is the "City of London", but 300,000 commute in and out of it every day. yikes!  I guess that on Friday, we were 'three' of those!