Long Weekend: Easter in London

Street performer in Trafalgar Square.  How does he do it?

Our trip to London wrapped up a busy few weeks of travel and hosting guests.  Kristine's parents were here for 10 days, we spent the following Saturday in Birmingham, Kristine picked up friends from Indy the next morning, drove them back to the airport for their return flight early in the morning on Good Friday, the girls and I drove down to pick her up a couple hours later, and we made our way to Swindon for another couple of days with the Oldfields.  Unlike last Easter's trip, we did this drive through Moreton-on-Marsh and Stowe-on-the-Wold during mid-morning instead of mid-day.  That meant, much to our shock, no roads turned into parking lots as we entered either town.  This drive also had three girls who have considerably more practice handling road trips.  Lots of engaged comments about the countryside we drove through, imaginative games played together, and singing along to "Here comes science" from They Might be Giants.  What a difference a year makes.

Like our trip to Swindon last Thanksgiving, this one involved a cheesecake.  Unlike Thanksgiving, Kristine made the cheesecake after we arrived.  This version was also majorly upgraded.  It had mangos on the top.

The flurry of activity with visitors before this trip left us all ready for some down time.  The girls and I took advantage of the local swimming pool.  Charis is starting to do some basic front crawl.  I lost count of how many new friends Clare made while she cheerfully played in the kiddie-pool.  The girls also spent quite a bit of time reading or playing games (jenga, old maid, DUPLO blocks).  Here's story that Charis and Clare worked on together.

Sunday morning we caravanned with John and Carol up to London for an Easter service with Alex and Hannah at St. Augustine's Church in Queen's Gate.  

Kristine described it as a sensory feast.  The building is Victorian era, but had a major facelift in the 1920's.  Lots of interesting architecture to enjoy visually.  The church uses an Anglo-catholic liturgy; more parochially known as "smells and bells."  The smells came from the burning incense, flung upwards at various points in the service using bells on chains.  I enjoyed the liturgical content - much was a brief return to elements of our ELCA sojourn in CT (including the small 4-part choir that led the sung portions of the service and did its own special number).  Elise enjoyed listening to the Latin elements.

Easter lunch enjoyed at Bumpkin, we made our way up to the Natural History Museum.  This was a good idea on paper (after all, can a building this impressive be anything but fun to explore?) that stretched our ability to cope.

Turns out we were some of a very, very many people who all decided to make a mid-afternoon visit to this well-known museum.  The throngs around this dinosaur skeleton give you a little idea.  We decided not to visit the main dinosaur exhibit because it had a 60 min wait.

We did brave the crowds to see this Redwood trunk.  The early rings are circa 600 AD. I was impressed.  The girls didn't understand what was so interesting about a piece of wood.

Our visit to the museum was redeemed by finding the investigation center in the basement.  All three girls enjoyed the interactive elements here - drawers of specimens on the walls to pull out and look at under microscopes, guided investigation centers (Charis got to build her own bird, and was then told how well it would survive based with the habitat and predators she'd picked for it).

I learned from one of staff members that the museum is the first point of call for investigations when live or dead animals are confiscated at the border, and also when dead animals wash up on beaches.  The border confiscations deal mostly with illegal imports like crocodile skins being brought in to make leather goods.  Sometimes it's clear what the item is.  Other times it's not.  The museum staff get to do the investigations to try and identify it.  Same applies for dead animals washed up on the beaches.  The staff get called in to figure out cause of death.  In both cases they get to keep the specimens.  Many of them were in the investigation center.  The shark's mouth (not captured on film) that all three girls enjoyed handling was a border confiscation.  This whale skeleton was a forensic investigation on the beach.

We left the investigation center when it closed at 5, made our way briefly past this mechanical scorpion, and then headed out to our flat.   

The flat was a good find off AirBnB.  It had two bedrooms with a couch / bed in the living room (which Kristine and I got).  It was only a 10 min walk to the Earl's Court tube station, and also had a couple small grocery stores in the area.  Kristine and I were still full from our Easter lunch, but we picked up a small dinner for the girls and cold cereal for breakfast.  The space to spread out and relax was welcome after a long day.

As was a desk to read at in the morning.

Or beds in which to sleep in late.

Monday morning we did another obligatory "parents trying to give their children educational exposure in London" activity.  This one as a double-decker bus tour.  It was also a good idea on paper that yielded less-then-stellar results.  The whole idea behind personalized audio tour is that you sit quietly and listen to the voice tell you about the places you're driving past.  The whole idea behind personalized children's audio is that children do the same thing because their guide is also a child.  9yo - no problem.  6yo - okay, but not if the audio only works half the time.  4yo - no grasp of the "sit quietly and listen" part of the deal.  Cue parents taking turns with 4yo on lap while other parent listens to audio (as long as it works).  Notes to self:  Flexibility to get on and off the bus at your leisure means others can also get on and off the bus.  Double decker on a pleasant spring day means nobody else wants to ride on the first level either.  Be prepared to throw elbows, monitor who's getting off, and quickly make your way to the upper level at a stop before the new folks can get on so that you can grab a recently vacated seat.

We got off the bus at the Tower Bridge.  Which meant we lost our upper level seats.  See notes to self.

Charis recognized Big Ben from the bus before it came up on audio

To be fair, the tour was a good way to get quick visibility to many of the well-known sites in London.  Grumpy selfies of father and 4yo notwithstanding.  The girls were noncommittal about the tour when we finished, but told several people about it afterwards.  Elise and Charis had studied enough in school to be excited about seeing some of the buildings on the tour.

I had promised Charis that if she came on the bus tour (instead of going up the London Eye), I would let her chase pigeons at Trafalgar Square.  I told her there would be lots of pigeons.  I might even have said there would be so many that she wouldn't be able to find the ground.  Alas, it was not to be.  There were very few pigeons at Trafalgar Square.  I learned later from a friend in Melbourne that there did indeed used to be many pigeons at Trafalgar Square (in other words, memories of my last trip there from the mid-90s were not entirely incorrect).  About 10 years ago the number of pigeons, combined with all their droppings, got so high that the city of London decided to phase them out.  They started by asking tourists not to feed the pigeons.  Then they hired a hawk to come fly around the square daily.  The result is that the last 10 years has seen a drastically reduced number of pigeons at Trafalgar Square.  More importantly, the result is that there were none for Charis and Clare to chase.  Overall they were good sports about it. They graciously allowed themselves enjoy a couple of street performers before we grabbed lunch and entered St. James Park to meet Alex and Hannah for a picnic.

Yoda's ability to float gave him my "top performer" rating

The girls preferred this fellow's ability to balance the chair on his head

St. James Park did have a few pigeons.  It also had fences at the side of some sidewalks to protect flower beds from pedestrians.  The clever pigeons had figured out that people can't chase them if they're on the flower bed side of the fence.  As a result, a pigeon on the path who suddenly got chased by someone (say a Collins daughter) would simply flap its wings a couple of times to hop from the path over the fence.  No panicked flight into the sky.  No opportunities for repeat chases when panicked flight ended and the pigeon landed back on the ground.  Just a fence.  The girls were not impressed.  Fortunately the spot where we ate our picnic had more open green space with pigeons on the nearby grass.  They were easier to chase and did not have a fence to hide behind.

Lunch complete, we made the short walk through St. James Park to Buckingham Palace.  We were there during the mid afternoon, so didn't get a chance to see the changing of the guard.  The girls did find the guards to be interesting enough that they crammed against the fence for a better look (for some reason - maybe the bank holiday - there were no guards outside the fence).

At Buckingham Palace (no, we couldn't get a photo with Clare looking at the camera)

They also enjoyed climbing on the statues in front of the palace.  We were not the only family taking pictures of children on statues.  Must be the thing to do when you visit Buckingham Palace with children.

Our last stop of the day was at Fulham Palace.  The palace is the historical home of the Anglican bishops of London.  There is some archaeological work going on to restore some of the older areas of the palace grounds.  We didn't get to see that due to the bank holiday.  We did, however, get to enjoy a welcome change of scenery from crowds and concrete to open space and green.  Elise has been spending lots of time on her hands recently - a result of the weekly gymnastics club at school.  We weren't in the palace grounds for long before the cartwheels started.

We parted ways with Alex and Hannah, enjoyed a brief ride back to Earl's Court on the Tube, and made an uneventful drive back home to Melbourne.

Long Weekend: York (of smells and LEGO sculptures)

We saw the York Minster Cathedral several times on this trip, but didn't make it inside.

We're approaching the end of our planned secondment.  We've been fortunate to get most of the major locations we wanted to visit, as well as a couple that weren't on our radar.  I'm squirreling vacation days away now for a couple more big trips plus relocation time.  Kristine and the girls have gotten into a routine of meeting with friends from school or church during breaks.  This preserves everyone's sanity during a week-long half-term break (case in point, the precursor to this blog post's trip included local excursions to Calke Abbey and Rosliston Forestry Center).

Despite my stinginess about vacation time, we decided to do a long weekend trip during the February break.  Since coming over here, many people have told us we need to visit Yorkshire.  I originally wanted to do a countryside excursion like our Wales and Cumbria trips.  However, consensus from willing advisors was that we should go to York proper.  After some discussion, an added condition from Kristine to visit Durham Cathedral (more on that later), and a lovely flat found through ownersdirect, off we went.

We made the 100 mile drive from Melbourne on Friday morning.  It was on the M1, past Nottingham, and uneventful with no traffic jams.  Yes - I used all those terms in the same sentence.

Our flat was right around the corner from Botham Gate - one of the gates for the York wall.  Elise lost no time finding a window in which to curl up.  Like the pictures of the girls running, this is becoming a standard one for our trips.  Usually the picture involves Elise and a book.  This time, much to Kristine's delight, it involved Elise knitting.

  

The York Minster Cathedral was about as far on the other side of Botham Gate as our flat.  We made it as far as the outside.   I have it on good authority that the Minster is truly impressive.  However, this trip had Durham on the mind.

Our main agenda item Friday afternoon was visiting York's Chocolate Story.  It's a little museum / shop / tour that has only been open for 3 or 4 years.  I wouldn't have known to look for it, except one of my colleagues said "You're going to York?  You've got to visit the Chocolate Story."  He was right.  He didn't tell me about the pigeons outside the building.  Charis and Clare, remembering our trip to Germany, took advantage of the time before the tour started to chase every pigeon in the area.  Sorry, pigeons.

People told us about York's significance as the former capital of England, later the center of Viking power in England, and for architectural features like the Minster and the Wall.  I had not realized it's importance in the chocolate industry.  Yes, I have eaten countless York peppermint patties from grocery stores in the US and the UK.  No, I never made the connection.  It turns out there was a network of Quaker families who all got into the chocolate business during the mid-1800s (Frye in Bristol, Cadbury in Birmingham, Rowntree and Terry in York).  The Quaker prohibition against taking oaths prevented careers in government, law, or medicine (I didn't know this).  The prohibition against armed conflict prevented careers in the military (I did know this).  Given limited career options, these families were all in the grocery / confectionary business.  At the time, chocolate was a popular hot drink for the upper classes.  Frye's innovation was figuring out how to make solid chocolate.  These families shared ideas that developed solid chocolate further, and distributed it through their grocery stores.  Presto - chocolate became available in previously unimaginable form and scale.  

The tour was a well-done mix of guide, audio-visual, and tactile (mostly tasting) information about the role of chocolate in government control (Aztec rulers publicly consumed large quantities of their chocolate drink during important festivals), political espionage (the Spanish court tried to keep the recipe a secret after Cortez brought it back with him from Mexico, but it spread through Europe after a member of court sold it to the Italians), urban renewal (Rowntree and others invested heavily in improving living conditions in the slums of York on behalf of their workers), medical employment (specific tasks in the chocolate factories gave lots of work to the company dentists), and women in business (jobs in the factory gave young mothers rare opportunities to get out of the house and socialize in the evenings; the wives in the founding families helped their husbands run the factories and in some cases bucked stereotypes by running the factory themselves).  I also enjoyed hearing about the role of mistakes in the development of modern chocolate.  For example, Nestle evidently left the machine that stirred his melted chocolate turned on for a weekend.  He came back and found the consistency to be much more to his liking after the three days of mixing (previously everyone mixed for just a few hours).  Which got us the smooth texture in today's milk chocolate.

I enjoyed the informational part of the tour.  The girls put up with it peacefully.  They got more interested when the guide explained that real chocolate must be experienced with all 5 senses.  Interest became excitement when he said he was going to demonstrate, and that we would all participate.  He brought a platter around and let us each take a piece (only one, unfortunately).  Here's what he meant.

Touch - hold the chocolate on the back of your hand and savor the cool feeling.

Sight - look at the chocolate while it's on the back of your hand.  Enjoy the sight, instead of just snarfing it down as soon as you get it.

Smell - despite limited ability to smell, which is legendary in our family, I was detecting aromas by this point in the tour.

Sound - crack the chocolate.  It's not good if you don't hear a nice "Snap!"

Taste - goes without saying.  Unless one pointed out that unlike American chocolate (ahem, Hershey), it actually has taste.

The last activity on the tour was an interactive five stations that walked you through the chocolate making process.  You physically moved something (a wheel for whisking cacao bean husks, levers to mix milk and sugar or pour chocolate into the mold to set).  The friendly computer at each station chastised you if you did too much or too little, and congratulated you on being a bona fide chocolate maker if you did it just right.  5 stations, 5 volunteers staffed by 3 Collins girls.

For the final bit, everyone got a large blob of liquid chocolate poured onto a lolly (popsicle, for the Americans) stick on a tray, which they then got to decorate.  Decoration complete, the lolly went into the fridge to harden.  While we waited, we got to sample some of the high end chocolate they were making, look at displays about the chocolate industry around the world and watch a few chocolate adverts through the years (including watching some pretty clever commercials).  I might not have mentioned we got to sample the high end chocolate.  In unlimited quantities.

Some people in our family found this display amusing.  Others didn't.

Tour complete, we walked back to the flat, grabbed dinner, and savored our lollies.  4 of us savored our lollies, anyway.  For some inexplicable reason, a certain father had declined a spot at the lolly-making line because he thought he might need to help one or two daughters with theirs.  He thought wrongly, as said daughters very capably decorated their lollies with very limited oversight.  Sad father was reduced to begging and cajoling bites of chocolate lollies from the rest of his family.  Some daughters were sympathetic and gracious.  One daughter was not.  One mommy was even less so.

The Chocolate Story was engaging for everyone in the family.  It was interactive, the numbers in the tour group were kept small, and best of it all it had to do with chocolate. Perhaps it's unfortunate that we made it our first stop.  In hindsight, that was a tough one to top.  Here are the things we tried that just couldn't measure up.

We went to the Jorvik museum of Viking heritage in York.  I gather from folks I've talked with that it's kind of an obligatory thing to do.  I'm used to museums being in large open spaces - especially where archaeology is involved.  Not so with Jorvik.  The museum and dig are in a building not far from the middle of the city.  Of particular interest, it extends several stories down into the ground.  Very creative.  Unfortunately, the Saturday that we visited was the first day of the school half term break in York.  The place was packed.  Many of the displays had informative content about Vikings in York.  They were static displays, where you had to stand and read a plaque next to a case on the wall.  It would have taxed the attention of the girls under best of circumstances.  The crowds made it definitely not the best of circumstances.

The part of Jorvik that we all enjoyed (and to be fair, this is what people tended to mention most regularly when suggesting we visit) was a ride through a reconstructed Viking village.  <<INSERT GEEKY COMMENTS FROM EX-CONTROLS ENGINEER>> The ride was pretty cool.  Individualized audio commentary in multiple languages and with the guide being either an adult or a child.  The motion control for the cart on the track was fun to watch.  <<END GEEKY COMMENTS FROM EX-CONTROLS ENGINEER>>

There are times it's good to have a deficient sense of smell - like going past this are of the village that everyone else swore had powerful odors.

Or this outhouse, where our friendly guide greeted his grandfather.

Exhausted girls in tow, we made our way from Jorvik to the York Castle Museum.  This staged conflict between Vikings (I think in power) and Angles (I think resisting their authority) distracted them enough to raise their spirits a bit.

The floor of the museum that dealt with toys was mostly static displays.  I tried to cheer the girls up by getting them to follow clues and footsteps to find a hidden bear.  Not so successfully.  Clare cheerfully plopped down next to this castle, which was in one of the few corners of the floor that had tactile exhibits (e.g., toys to play with rather than look at).

Kristine and Elise enjoyed the displays about attire for weddings, funerals, and maternity.

I thought the hearse was cool.

Charis on the other hand ...

All three girls started cheering up when they got to join a "Votes for Women" march.  The good-natured policeman threw them in handcuffs, then released them and offered to make them his deputies.

Kristine's excitement shot through the roof when she found out they had a real 19th century pharmacy, staffed by someone who talked about 19th century medicine.  Her excitement dropped when it became clear that the person was an actor who was committed to following his script and not interested in talking with visitors who were interested in 19th century medicine.

There are very few things in life that a paper and set of colored pencils will not make better.  Including being exhausted and having been dragged by your parents through a couple of museums that you mostly didn't find interesting.

We made one more stop in the museum.  Somehow the girls got themselves locked inside the jail cell.

Spirits revived by the coloring, experience of almost being arrested for suffragette views, and thrill of being locked in jail, we made our way home via a restaurant serving take-away roasts with Yorkshire pudding.  This revived spirits even further and fueled bodies with energy to make a walk around the York wall.  The wall is an impressive structure going back to Roman times.  It's not as imposing in places anymore because they've built up embankments around much of it.  Originally it would have been about twice as far from the top to the ground.  We walked about half of the wall before diminishing daylight sent us back to the flat.  We walked the rest after our trip to Durham.

Open space to run = happy girls

Turrets from which to re-enact battle scenes and shoot arrows - even better!

Sunday morning we made the short train ride north to Durham.  This was Kristine's condition of agreement for our trip to York.  She learned about Durham Cathedral when she was in Scotland as a college student, but wasn't able to see it in person.  It's been on her wish list of places to visit ever since.  The girls were happy to ride on the train.  This picture was before a woman walked past several empty rows in the carriage, looked down at them, and said "Excuse me, you're in my seat.  Please get up."  I can understand kicking someone out of your reserved seat when the carriage is full.  But asking two young children to get up when the carriage is clearly almost empty?  Really?  She doesn't get any cross-cultural allowances from me on that one.

It was a dreary, but not unpleasant day to talk the 3/4 mile from the train station to the cathedral.  Here are a couple views of the cathedral and castle from our walk.

We stopped at a city square part way to the cathedral.  Fortunately for the local pigeons, Charis and Clare decided to play on the benches.

Here's the cathedral from sort of up close.

And the knocker for people seeking sanctuary.  You had to be tall enough to reach the knocker to claim sanctuary in the cathedral.  Elise's desire for refuge after crimes against her father would not be accepted.

The inside of the cathedral (which prohibited photography) was everything Kristine hoped it would be.  She was moved to tears by its beauty.  The girls and I left her to enjoy it while we wandered elsewhere.  Fortunately for us, one of the signs pointed to something comparably wonderful and exciting.  A LEGO replica of the cathedral.

Not only a replica, but one designed to be built by visitors to the cathedral.  All you had to do was convince your accompanying adult to fork over the 1 GBP fee per brick.  And then convince said accompanying adult to let you put on a second brick.  The girls swindled themselves into an unstated number of bricks that completed the tower on the left.

It was enough to make me smile.  Almost.

It was enough to make them smile.

Our last big stop Monday morning was at the Train Museum.  Like Jorvik, it had been highly recommended as being great fun to visit.  Like Jorvik, visiting on the first week day of half-term break was less than ideal.  The trains were well presented and had lots of information available to read.  If you could make your way through the crowds to the plaques on the side.  We contented ourselves with seeing Thomas

And the inside of a 19th century mailroom car.

Sightseeing complete, we walked back into town to grab lunch.  We "just happened" to make our way past the chocolate museum again.  Impulse decision to check inside was rewarded with an open table, which we quickly grabbed so we could finish our trip with some nice chocolate fondue.