Trip to UK - Brighton and Lake District
We had an excellent four week trip to the UK, mostly sunshine and only a couple of days of actual rain. Every time I brought the foul weather gear on our daily outings, the sun would shine extra brilliantly. On those days when I forgot the rainproof trousers and anoraks, it would just be cold and perhaps spit on us occasionally.
We spent two weeks in Queens Road Peckham ('Saath London'), courtesy of my brother and his wife, Karen, who went to the States to visit North Michigan and Sedona, Arizona. They have a comfortable flat in a gritty, mostly Nigerian, neighbourhood (I should emphasize that it's really not the Nigerian's that make it gritty, just a bit more unfamiliar).
We took advantage of the kitchen to cook delicious British food from nearby Sainsbury's or Victoria Station's "Mark's and Sparks". The first night, we each had something different: boys had mac and cheese as usual. Carmen had a prepared meal of salmon and mashed potatoes, and I had one of the prepared Indian curry meals. I cannot emphasize enough, and I want to put it down here lest I forget, that you can REALLY taste the flavours in British food, the curries are outstanding, and you can't beat Mark's and Spencer's Simply Food for quality and selection. The latter I hadn't seen before and are a new invention to the UK; they are everywhere now and are basically small stores, a little bigger than a 7-11 store which stock low and high end snacks, beverages and prepared meals. You would have thought that Tesco's Fresh and Easy stores in the US would be trying to do something like this, but they are more like Trader Jo's with a British edge and pharmaceuticals. Anyway, I digress, but British food from the supermarket is really excellent now. P.S. everything that you can buy in the US for dollars, can be bought for the equivalent by changing the $ for a pound sign. That means everything is about 1.7 times more expensive!
From Queen's Road Peckham, we took day trips around London. Now I've been to London before but always took the underground. Sometimes I would try to go one stop and have to change trains twice. Only then would I realize that I could have walked a couple of hundred meters instead. So this time we walked and took the bus everywhere. On our first day we bought our 7 day London travelcards (25 pounds each for zones 1 and 2), and got off at Westminster, saw Big Ben, Houses of Parliament and walked for hours around the city. The second day, we walked from Victoria to Trafalgar Square, St. James's Park, Tate Britain and then took the ferry to Tate Modern. The third day, we walked from London Bridge through the Borough Market, across Tower Bridge, around Tower of London and back on the trains. The kids loved the British rail trains, which are now all privatized and consequently able to charge monopoly prices on their respective sections. The next day, we walked across Hyde Park from Kensington Gardens, stopping at the excellent playgrounds and the Lady Dianna Memorial Fountain which is an unconventional and beautiful fountain. After trekking across the park diagonally from South-East to North-West we met Dad, Indu and Marcus at a Chinese Restaurant called Royal China which was good as any in San Francisco and luckily just as noisy to drown out the kids constant screaming.
I forget the exact chronology of the rest of our time in London, but we went to Greenwich Village twice, we liked it so much; we saw the Maritime Museum and the Observatory on the hill. It's easy to see why it's marked as a World Heritage Site and consequently would like to visit a few more if it's representative of how they all are. Greenwich Park is a huge undulating green park with a steep hill upon which sits the observatory. The interesting part for me was that I had read a book called Longitude, lent by my Rocket Scientist friend George, and this had many of the telescopes and clocks mentioned in that book. The story goes that sailors always knew how far South or North they were because the angle of the Polar star or Southern Cross represents the same in terms of latitude. But none knew how to gauge how far East or West they were and so all too frequently got lost or ended up wrecked. If sailors were to have a reliable time piece they could solve this issue, but the clocks of the day used pendulums which were unreliable at sea for obvious reasons. A challenge was made and a reward offered to the one able to solve this problem, who turned out to be a John Harrison. Simultaneously, a solution was also found using celestial means (location of stars). Seems like all the clocks that John invented are still there, as well as numerous early telescopes.
More to come and pictures to follow soon.