Picasa III

With the massive amounts of photo taking/processing going around here recently, I'm pretty excited about this new version of Google's Picasa software.  You can do photo cropping, tuning, and touchups, and can even have it find photos you have with faces in them, or sort by color. Between the color sorting and the collage feature, I was able to make this nice little piece of Yanks in the UK memorabilia:

If you want a simple but powerful photo processing tool I'd highly recommend it.

Photo Explosion

Well, it’s hard to even see what I’m typing with all of the dust and spiderwebs on this blog, but it’s high time for a post!  The yanks in the UK have been so busy with travel and work, that their UK life has remained sadly undocumented.  Thankfully even if we can’t manage much text I have plenty of photos cued up for viewing.  Here is the fastest summary of 3 months ever:

Budapest: Awesome city with lots of interesting soviet history and amazing thermal baths—3 day weekend there.

Normandy: My friend John and re-enacted the D-Day invasion arriving in Normandy by car ferry from Portsmouth. Gin and Tonics in the piano lounge possibly better conditions that actual Allied troops in WWII.

Camping with our favorite British family in Wales

Week in Novia Scotia, Canada with Lauren’s family in a house on the sea. Bears, moose, and foxes galore.

Burdette parents visit! Week showing Mom and Dad every corner of England in 7 days. 

Olympics Abroad

Now that the smoke from the fireworks has cleared, Oprah's filmed her ‘Welcome Home Olympians’ episode and Michael Phelps has donated that bonus, it's time to reflect on the good, the bad and the ugly of viewing the Games from another country.

It was an Olympics Opening Ceremony for the record books! The 2008 drummers and 3000 Confucian disciples were awe-inspring. Multiple times during the ceremonies I had to pinch myself, I couldn’t quite believe that what I was witnessing was real life. The footstep fireworks and the over-the-top performances felt more like a sci-fi flick than something that could occur in my lifetime. Because Nick is on the Olympics Team at Arup (unfortunately, not the team that actually goes and competes, although he does have a gold medal for working on the project for over 1000 hours), they watched the Opening Ceremonies at work, a nice way to spend the afternoon. There were plenty of jokes and general hysteria when President Bush was shown in the stands.

He saw the ceremonies for the second time later that evening, when we headed over to a friends for dinner. Gareth, who is a proud Welshman who has lived in Australia, his flatmate Tami, Naomi (both of whom are lovely English women), and Marwa, our friend from Syria, had dinner and watched the entire Opening Ceremonies on tape. It was great fun to see the reactions of people from all these countries to the ceremonies. At the end of the big show, the Brits all said, ‘Well, that’s it – we’re screwed. We’ll never be able to compete in 4 years!’ Someone said, ‘We won’t even bother to try!’

The Parade of Nations was a particular highlight. We got out a book of maps and an atlas and tried to find each country as they were announced (two comments on that – one, I know that sounds nerdy, but there was plenty of wine so it was quite entertaining! And two – all of that would have been irrelevant had my amazing brother been present, as his geo-political knowledge is frighteningly extensive).  Marwa would poke fun at most countries as they entered the Bird’s Nest, saying outrageously inappropriate things in a thick accent, like, ‘Look at those French! Look at the silly way they walk!’; ‘Oh, the Germans! I bet they are all drunk!’and ‘Look at the Egyptians, they are all on steroids, and they still won’t be any good!’ She was immensely proud when Syria’s tiny contingent of athletes entered, scrunched in between the giant Russian and American teams. When the American team came out, Gareth said, 'You guys are so uplifting! It's like, don't worry, the Americans are here, everything's going to be ok!'

After our charming evening, I thought, ‘wow, these games are going to be amazing! What an incredible cultural experience, we’re really appreciating the global nature of the games for the first time!’ But what I hadn’t grasped was that watching the games in another country is, in some ways, the equivalent of not watching the games at all. Instead of hearing Bob Costas comforting voice each night walking me through hours of coverage (sidenote – does anyone else think Bob Costas has the best job ever?), seeing the pull at our heartstrings back stories of atheletes, missing out on the statistics and stories and longer coverage that you can afford to do with a greater budget and larger viewing audience. All the BBC could offer me was an hour of highlights each evening at 7 pm, highlights that were British in nature. That meant I saw very little of Nastia Liukin’s gold-medal-winning routine but saw the one British contender for the uneven bars’ routine about 5 times; no volleyball, beach or indoor, no women’s basketball, soccer or softball, very few American moments at all – but I DID see hours of sailing and, worst of all, cycling at the velodrome. After the first few nights, I wanted to pull my hair out. After the first week, I had completely given up.

A couple of stories will, I hope, highlight just how truly different (and inferior) the coverage was. On the first Sunday, I saw that basketball was on, and that the US team was playing China. ‘Awesome!’ I thought, ‘This will be so cool to see America’s greatest players against the best that Team China has to offer, just seeing this group of guys playing together will be a treat.’ I truly felt like my father’s child as I cracked open a beer and sat Indian-style on the floor in front of the tv, ready for a great game. After 5 minutes, they cut forward to the end of the first half. Then, 5 minutes later, they cut forward to the last 5 minutes of the game! And that was that for my Olympic basketball viewing. What came on immediately after, you may wonder? Archery.

The next night, I watched the Olympics highlights, knowing that Michael Phelps had swam that day and that surely, at the very least, they would cover that. And they did – they showed the race in full. Then they cut back to the studio, and said, ‘That makes 2 medals now for Phelps – time to add another medal!’ They then panned over, where there stood a CARDBOARD Phelps! They then put a gold medal around his neck! How sad is that? They knew they’d never get to talk to him, never get to interview him, so they honoured him with a cardboard cut-out. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Somehow the BBC got Michael Johnson to do their track commentary, which was the one shining moment of the games. He is articulate and bright and brings the sport of track to life. When he was first in the studio, the first thing they asked him was, ‘Have you seen our own Michael Phelps over there?’ He replied, ‘Um, yeah, that’s kind of weird.’

Olympics Fever

Very soon I'm going to do a post on what it's like to watch the greatest international sporting event in another country. To whet the appetite of those of you who share my complete Olympics obsession, here's a string of links to interesting, often funny and sometimes poignant trivia from the history of the games. Most of these come from mental_floss, which has a great blog full of random trivia and brain teasers.

• The weirdest Olympics events of all times (singles synchronized swimming? Are you kidding?)
• In the same vein, 12 sports that were cut from the Olympics (rugby could make a come-back!)
• Strange paths to multiple medals - my favorite is the Yale/Harvard/Oxford grad who won gold in boxing AND bob-sledding!
• Cassius Clay throwing his gold medal into the Ohio River is one of '13 Medal-Worthy Olympic Performances'
• For those of you obsessed with the structures of the Olympics, like Arup's Bird's Nest, Water Cube, and Nick Burdette's Amazing Bridge of the 2012 Games, here's a story on how past Olympics venues are being used now.
  
• And if that's still not enough, here's 7 completely random Olympics stories that you've probably never heard before (seriously, how could you NOT get a perfect 10 in the gymnastics event of rope-climbing?)
  

Trip Catchup Take 1

As we've finally settled down enough to have some time to be home and post about our travels, it's time to get this blog up-to-date! I'm shocked to see that we have trips as far back as April that remain un-posted, so we'll have to try to knock a bunch out in a row. Get ready for lots and lots of sporadically labeled pictures.

Backlog Trip #1: York, UK (pictures here)

In what was probably our longest Peugeot road trip to date, we drove up to York in the north east of England for a 2 days and a night with our friend from Syria. York is known for its cathedral, the York Minster which was the first building to rise higher than the Great Pyramid, the highest structure in the world for 3500 years or so. York was really charming (though rainy while we were there) and you can definitely understand why everyone here would say it is the number 1 or 2 nicest English town. On the way back, we made a long detour to check out the longest bridge in England (5^th in the world?), the Humber Bridge, which was pretty amazing.

Backlog Trip #2: Northern Italy (pictures here)

Most of our British friends here are appalled by the number of sites and destinations that we cram into our trips, but I think our long weekend in Italy will stand as the high watermark of our insanity for some time. What began as a long weekend in Venice turned into what seemed like a competition to ride every mile of railway track in Northern Italy, as our travel map bellow suggests.

The trip began with a bit of recklessness from the start: over a 3 day UK holiday weekend I saw it was much cheaper to fly into Rimini south of Venice and out from Milan that direct to Venice, so I booked it. Upon further research, it turns out these locations are 4+ hours from Venice, but no matter, we had 3 nights and 3 days to do it all. We landed in Rimini, which is a tiny airport and the one taxi waiting left pretty quickly. After a 20 minute wait for the bus, I remembered the airport wasn’t THAT far from our hotel on google maps, and vaguely remembered we needed to walk to the beach then north. Off we went with all of our things in the backpack, and 4 hours later were still heading north, looking for any vehicle that looked even a little like a cab to collapse into. We did finally find our hotel (on foot), and got up early the next morning to spend a few hours on the beach before catching the train to Venice.

In Venice our travel challenges continued when our hostel was full and we needed to find a place to sleep for 2 nights of a very busy May weekend. Thankfully, a bookstore nearby had a sign out front advertising a B&B (beds and books). The owner showed us 8 beds he had set up in his storage room amidst hundreds and hundreds of Italian books and magazines. We smiled and said it was great.

After the challenges of getting there, Venice was well-worth our hardships and we loved it. The water everywhere, tiny winding streets on which you have to suck in let people pass, the food, and the architecture were all amazing. There really is nowhere like Venice. We had a great time taking boat trips out to two of the other islands in the Venetian Lagoon, Murano and Burano. Murano was the glass-making capital of Europe for centuries, and Burono is a fishing village with beautiful brightly-painted houses.

Our last and most extreme travel ‘hiccup’ occurred at the airport in Milan. The woman at the ticket counter kindly showed me that our return tickets had been purchased for a date 3 weeks in the future. DISASTER. At the Ryanair help desk, the attendant couldn’t even say out loud the price of 2 tickets for the flight leaving in 1 hour for Birmingham, she had to type the number into a calculator and slide it to me discreetly. Well, I guess the good news was we could stay in Italy to wait 3 weeks for the price of those tickets.

After a few dark and desperate hours, the airport internet café came through huge and we found a flight back to Birmingham from Pisa late the next day. Back on the train we went, making the 5 hour trip to Pisa and arriving late that night. We emailed our respective employers to tell them work the next day wasn’t going to work so well, and decided to make the most of the beautiful day and enjoy our impromptu visit to Pisa.

Checking our tickets 100 times and arriving at the airport 3 hours before our flight, we managed to board a plane out of Italy and breathed a sigh of relief when we touched down in England that night. It was truly an amazing/insane Italian adventure! I think our British friends are right, we are crazy.

John - Good-on-yer, mate!

Last weekend we saw off our good friend John, Nick's closest work colleague here, who moved to AUSTRALIA last week. He's transferring to the Brisbane office for - well, for as long as he wants to stay, really. We had his going-away party last weekend, then helped him finish packing and sent him off. We're excited/proud/tiny bit jealous of this adventure that he's on.

There were around 20 people at the party, with 8 nations represented - I love that about Nick's workplace, so different from mine where I'm the only 'diversity' going. There were people from Malaysia, China, Portugal, America (hmm, who could they be?), Spain, Poland, Syria, Wales, England, etc. We were at a Mexican restaurant, and I was sitting next to our Polish friend Lucazs, who like many others had ordered fajitas. His food had arrived and mine hadn't, and I said, 'Go ahead and eat, it's fine!' He said 'I don't know how! I do not understand this food, what do you do with it?' I was amazed that he'd never had fajitas, or any Mexican food for that matter before! After he'd managed to roll one up (asking about what the salsa and guacamole were), he said 'This is a very difficult meal. I do not understand why people would want to work so hard for their food.'

Another of Nick's friends, Mike, had just got back from a wedding in California and was regaling everyone with tales of this exotic land that is America. Nick and I listened, amused, as he enthused about burgers (I will never eat a burger here again! I am ruined for life, he said), and shared how confused he was by driving. That was surprising to hear, because most people find the driving in America so easy. The combination of straight roads, lanes that are actually wide enough for a car, and automatic transmissions makes for smooth sailing compared to British standards. However, Mike was confused by two things - crosswalks and stop signs.

For crosswalks, he felt that we didn't do quite enough for them. He said 'A line painted across the road could mean anything!' He couldn't understand how we could get by without thick lines of vertical paint and flashing lights to mark them.

On stop signs, he said 'Stop really means stop - it really does!' As though he had come to a stunning revelation. Happily for Mike, who is quite polished and speaks with a posh accent, not knowing this led to his favorite American encounter. As he attempted to roll through a stop sign, a guy shouted at him in a southern accent 'A**hole!' Mike responded, 'I'm ever so sorry, did I do something wrong?' To which he received--er...a commonly used automobiling hand gesture. We might have found the exchange normal or annoying, but he was so excited to have encountered a real, live, Angry American, like when the black bear at the zoo roars.

You can imagine how proud Nick and I were hearing this story! We showed those Brits who rules the roads.

Office Life in Britain

I’ve been spending a whole lot of time at the office recently, so while we catch up on organizing travel pictures I might as well tell a bit about work life.

To start, we’ve been embroiled in a fierce inter-office competition called the Arup Cup for some time now, with teams (like bridges, highways, IT) competing in ridiculous competitions over lunch to assert office dominance and presumably build morale. The British are known for inventing games (croquet, rugby, soccer, billiards, cricket, cheese-rolling, etc.) and then loosing to the rest of the world in those games. No, no, that’s a bit harsh, and I have to compliment them on the incredible array of sports they’ve developed. The nearest comparison I can make is that Brits of all ages seem to be as inventive as US college students in dreaming up new games and competitions.

I’ll give you a flavour for their inventiveness with two of the recent Campus Cup activities: the Pancake Race and Wellie Wanging. The origins of Pancake Day in Britain seem similar to Mardi Gras in French-speaking countries and it is a celebration that precedes Lent. Since Lent is a period of fasting and eating simply, rich ingredients like butter and sugar would all be used up by making tons of thin pancakes then eating them. That’s all pretty straight-forward, but the office adopted this into a bizarre race where teams need to flip a pancake on a skillet while ducking under or jumping over poles, and finally running through a gauntlet of co-workers armed with whiffle balls. My bridges team was pleased to be crowned winner for this event, as you can see from the proud photo:

The competition continued in another great British test of manhood: Wellie Wanging. A bit of preference: a “Wellie” is a type of completely waterproof boot worn by the Duke of Wellington which most Brits are obsessed with. I certainly understand how important waterproof clothing must be to them here, but the Wellie seems to enjoy an almost cult following. Anyway, in an effort to look for new ways to use their boots, the game of Wellie Wanging was invented where you pretty much just see who can hurl a Wellie the farthest. Here’s a great one of me mid-launch:

So yeah, all in all a pretty serious place to work. It’s not just games though--the other week I had to go down to the London office for a long, boring, and ostensibly important meeting. They gave us an hour break for lunch, so I pulled out my trusty A-Z street map and found I was 5 minutes walk from the British Library. That sounded like a nice destination, so I went there and over my lunch hour saw i) an original Guttenberg Bible, ii) the Magna Carta, iii) the first map of America, iv) Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook, and got a sandwich in the café. It was the most culturally scintillating lunch ever, and you can’t do that many places…I mean antiquities and good roast beef!?

Walking Heroes

My Mom and her sister, Aunt Mary Beth, are my heroes. They are both cancer survivors in remission, praise God. About a year ago, last June, they read that if you walked for 30 minutes over the course of the day, you reduce your risk of cancer recurrence. Most people would hear that, sigh, and add it to the bottom of their list of things to accomplish for the day. Not Mom and Aunt Mary Beth. They heard it as a challenge to rise to. Unfortunately, Mary Beth lives in Oklahoma (note – that is NOT the unfortunate bit!) and Mom lives nearly 800 miles away in Ohio, so it would be impossible for them to walk together and hold each other accountable….

Until they had the idea to virtually walk towards each other. Each month, they decided, they would track their miles walked, getting closer and closer to the other, until they met in the middle around St. Louis! Nick made a map for them that he updated each month with the miles walked by each, and the total percentage complete. Here’s their October map, 4 months in:

You’ll notice there are symbols in Springfield, Ohio and Tulsa, Oklahoma to represent our intrepid walkers on the next map, from December. Mom’s is Schuler’s Donuts, the absolute best donuts in the world, and Mary Beth’s is the sign for….er…some historic movie theater that I don’t know. There’s also symbols next to their names: Mom has cowboy boots for her country dancing and Mary Beth has eye glasses for her love of reading.


Finally, finally, finally, after 10 months of solid, hard-core walking, they reached each other! And actually met up in real life, with a long weekend in St. Louis in May (see fireworks below).

The picture below is from a different trip, but it sums up the celebrating that occurred! I am so proud of you both!

Easter ‘08: 6 Days, 3 Countries (Part II, finaly)

The Great French Roadtrip: Conquering the Coast

We picked up our sweet French rental car in Perpignan after a solid 4 hour bus trip from Barcelona up the coast. The French highway system is really good (though you stop to pay a toll every 10 minutes) and our car cruised like a dream. Since all speeds were in some meaningless km/h unit I didn’t pay them much attention, and was more interested in trying to figure out how the windshield wipers knew to come on automatically as soon as it started to rain. Those French do make some pretty cool cars.

Our first stop, to celebrate my 26th birthday was the valley town of Millau, home to one of the top 5 most amazing bridges in the world! We beheld the Millau Viaduct as the sun was getting low on my birthday, and what a present it was. We made it to the bridge gift shop 15 minutes before closing, and pretty much cleaned them out. If anyone wants to borrow a fascinating 30 minute video on the viaduct, you just let me know.

The four of us spent the night in Millau, which is a wonderfully quaint French town on its own, and overshadowing it with the highest vehicular bridge in the world only improved it. The next morning we followed an elderly French couple to what seemed to be the only church in town open for Easter mass. It was interesting to take part in the service in French, and afterwards we had lattes, bought a lunch of baguettes and cheese, and generally tried to blend in with the locals.

Next, we travelled 2000 years into the past to see probably the best example of Roman bridge-building in the world: the Pont Du Gard (2 bridges in 2 days…who planned this trip!!). This 3 level stone aqueduct was part of a water system that carried water from springs in the French Alps to the town of Nimes 70 miles away. The bridge looks stunning in the sunlight and you can wander all over the site: up the hills on either side, over the pedestrian level, or along the River Gard which it crosses.

Happy and contented with pictures of bridges dancing through our heads we headed back to Nimes where we had a hostel for the night. We quickly learned that not much had changed on the streets of the city since Roman times, and it is the most challenging/frustrating driving experience of my life! New York’s northing, you should try driving in Nimes. Anyway, after 2 hours of winding through the narrowest, oldest streets of France we found our hostel and managed to crash our car out front. That night we managed a walk to see Nimes’ main claim to fame: the well-preserved Roman amphitheatre.

The next morning, ready to leave Nimes forever, we set off on an unbelievable road trip of discovery (note how much stuff is going to happen before I write about going to sleep again). So, we set off fairly early and headed down through Marseille, France’s second city and a tricky one to get through. We drove along the coast and saw the famous Château d'If prison out in the harbour, where the Count of Monte Cristo was held in the book, the Count of Monte Cristo, which was about a count, who lived in a place called Monte Cristo.

Right, taking a tunnel (?) out of the city we headed down the coast and down a HUGE cliff to the beautiful fishing town of Cassis. We had some coffee and walked around the harbour some, then got lunch overlooking the sailboats bobbing in the crystal blue sea. I read that one of the best drives in France was along the cliff tops east of Cassis, so we wound our way up what can only be described as an incredibly dangerous road. The wind was insane that day, so the cliff top drive was closed for safety, which was extremely disappointing to our car’s driver but deeply comforting to its 3 passengers. Instead we found a road to the top of a cliff and got out to be nearly blown over by the unbelievable coastal winds. There’s a great video on our picture link at the end of all this that shows how crazy the wind was that day.

Finding our way back to the main road, we continued along the coast through Toulon and down to another of the top drives in France along the D559 north of Le Lavandou. The coast there undulates up onto huge cliffs then down to protected beach coves and the road and coastal villages follow right along. We kept stopping to snap pictures out to sea or try to get out onto a beach…it was a great drive. After an afternoon of driving and stopping, we decided to visit St-Tropez to ogle at how the other half lives. We walked around checking out the high-end designer shops, beautiful people, and enormous yachts with names like “don’t touch”, “all mine”, and “I’m so rich it hurts”. We bought a postcard.

Back on the road, we got stuck in a 40 minute line to pay for a toll, which seemed to show that building a fast road to make people stop every 10 minutes and pay a toll results in a very slow, expensive road. Finally well after sunset we made it to our goal for the evening: the posh principality of Monaco. Having just walked the streets of St-Tropez we were used to looking glamorous, and I know I certainly cut a dashing figure in my grey fleece, jeans, and sneakers. I popped my collar for that extra boost of panache.

We made the usual rounds through the city and checked out the casino Monte Carlo (they wouldn’t let us on the actual floor), the Grand Prix circuit, and the harbour. Monaco is an amazing jumble of buildings and you can tell they really tried to cram as much as possible into their tiny country. The hillside starts with a road, then houses, then a bridge carrying a road over those houses, then houses built above that, with a road coming through a tunnel, with houses on top of that. It’s not somewhere you’d live if you wanted a backyard. Anyway, we got dinner at a nice restaurant with a picture of the prince smiling away at us and pictures of his mom, princess Grace, everywhere.

At 11 or so we decided it really was probably time to head back to Nice where we were staying for the night, and arrived at our hotel just before 1. What a day!

The next morning we took Eric and Dez to the airport to catch their flight to Paris (turns out France is actually really, really big and Paris is not just next door) where they would spend a few days before coming to Birmingham. Lauren and I spent a few hours on the beach that morning, and then did a quick cliff-top drive before flying out ourselves. Not bad for 6 days!

Whew…TRIP PHOTOS

Oh that’s right we have a blog…

Task: keep friends and family up to speed on our UK livin’ with regular blog posts
Performance: complete multi-level failure with no blog activity for 49 days
Attitude: Sheepish and generally contrite
Excuses: Extensive. (i) Suspension of regular life for non-stop glut of travel, work, illness, and deprivation of sleep (ii) 4 weeks of solid visitors (iii) flooding of apartment floorspace cutting off home internet connection for 3+ weeks.
Action Plan: (i) beg reader’s forgiveness, (ii) storm landlord’s house demanding basic human rights, (iii) write shorter posts more regularly

We're about 5 trips behind now but we'll start to work on catching up!

Easter ‘08: 6 Days, 3 Countries (Part 1)

Whoo-hoo visitors! After a 6-month visitor hiatus we were excited to welcome our Pitt friends Dez and Eric to Birmingham for the first time just recently. Not wanting our guests to come to the greatest city in Europe first and thus make the rest of their trip a sad anticlimax, we decided to do Birmingham last after an Easter holiday trip to more mundane destinations, like Barcelona and the south of France. The UK gets Good Friday and Easter Monday off, so with an extra 2 days your average euro-worker can put together a pretty sweet holiday: we flew down to Spain on Thursday to meet our brave countrymen.
We met Eric and Dez on a busy side street in Barcelona outside our apartment for the next 2 nights. After some happy hellos and stories about Spanish language difficulties (they tried to find out what they were ordering for breakfast only to have the waitress start clucking and flapping her arms like a chicken laying an egg!), we set off to catch the late afternoon sun in the Park Guell: a surreal (Antoni) Gaudi-designed park on a hill overlooking the city.

From our experiences there, Barcelona seems to be about two things: food and architecture. I’m sure they’re great at lots of other things too, but we didn’t get much past those two. The city’s most famous son is the early 20th century architect Gaudi, who helped to invent the Art Nouveau style and designed many totally unique buildings around the city. You really got a sense for his style at Park Guell, which he designed for a wealthy count who wanted to sell houses in the park to Barcelona’s rich and famous. The project was a commercial flop, but the park looks amazing and it a great place to be at sunset.

Architecture is way easier to show than describe, so now might be a good time to check out our Barcelona pictures so you see what I mean!

Our first night in the city we discovered that our nice 3rd floor apartment was on the most happening street corner in Barcelona, and people don’t seem to need sleep in Spain. Poor Eric fared the worst, and it took a lot of coffee in this nice local café to get us going the next morning. Once we got going, though, we didn’t stop. We started with a metro trip to Barcelona’s most famous attraction, Gaudi’s partially completed (under construction for almost 100 yrs!) Sagrada Familia cathedral. This fairy-tale building is seen as his masterwork and Gaudi died while working on it (hit by a Barcelona tram car – killed by the city he loved). After touring this amazing cathedral, we went up to a hospital designed by another architect with the goal of giving patients an environment that makes them happy and thus aids recovery. It was a really nice hospital, with a big open “campus” with lots of orange tree. I think if you have to get seriously injured on vacation, Barcelona is the city to do it in.

We spent the afternoon wandering in the dense maze of streets and alleys in the old town, and found a great tapas place from our guidebook with huge casks of house wine by the door as you entered. Lauren was a pro on the Spanish front, though even she had a bit of trouble reading menus since many things were in Catalan, the regional language of Catalonia.

The same scene played out whenever we entered any restaurant: someone would smile and approach then say something completely incomprehensible but probably very friendly to us, and wherever Lauren was in the group we would push her to the front while making awkward stuttering noises to the host. Lauren would start chatting away, asking about the kids, the weather, who they were supporting in the next football match, etc, and the rest of us were left to meekly follow in lemming mode. For all we knew Lauren had this super power of telepathy with an alien race, and it came in very, very handy. It was like magic: they would say something, and then she would understand it and say something back, which they understood. I think Lauren rather liked it.

After some more aimless wandering we had a comical experience trying to find a cable car up onto the mountain west of the city, called Montjuic. We got off at the foot of the mountain and saw a cable-car symbol on our maps right at the corner we were standing on. Looking up, there was no way a cable-car could leave from there. There was one further up, but the buildings blocked its terminus from view. We walked around the block, around another block, checked our 3 different maps, scratched our heads, and after 40 minutes were getting desperate. Finally, feeling pretty dejected and incompetent, we headed back down into the metro to give up, only to see the SAME symbol in the metro as on our maps! Well, like archeologists piecing together a hieroglyphic puzzle, we followed the arrows towards this mysterious symbol, which turned out to be an UNDERGROUND incline up the mountain. Haha, we just laughed and laughed…and cried a little.

The mountain top was beautiful and mostly covered in parks and Olympic Stadiums. This is where the 1992 Olympics were held, and for 1 month the mountain was renamed Olympus, and the mayor had to wear a toga like Zeus (this is a lie). We walked along catching some great views of the city, then passed the impressive Olympic complex, and on to the National Art Gallery and its steps and fountains. At dusk there was a huge fountain show (like, really, really huge) with lights and music, which was created for the 1920’s world fair. It was a great end to our sightseeing day and we headed home exhausted. We rallied for a great meal at a tapas bar then crashed and slept very well our second night.

After just 2 short days in Barcelona it was time to move along: our stylish French rental car and the open road were calling. Saturday morning, we headed to the Eurolines (“the Greyhound of Europe”) bus terminal to catch our chariot across the boarder. Though much more scenic, the ride reminded me of my Greyhound trips across PA with unhappy drivers and lots of seemly unnecessary stops, but after 3 hours we crossed the boarder into France and got off in the warm coastal town of Perpignan. The French countryside beckoned…

Our Peugeot Time-Machine

Last month we traveled 2000 years back in time simply by driving 80 miles north. Sound too good to be true? Well, let me tell you about a little civilization I like to call the Romans.

The Romans were around a long time ago: 2000 years they say, and what’s more, they didn’t just stick to Rome. They made it over here to Britannia and in AD 74 founded a legionary fortress called Deva at the site of the modern city of Chester. Being cultured, historical types we decided to take a day trip up to Chester to see “the finest walled city in England” (pictures).

Chester has come a long way since the Romans left and most of the present walls are medieval or Victorian ones built on top of the original fortress. The walls and gates surrounding the old city were a popular place for Victorian gentry to go “promenading,” and in the spirit of the promenade we made sure to look as refined as possible as we walked the scenic 2 mile circuit ourselves. It was a great way to see the city and neat to think of how long the walls had protected the city.

Besides the walls, Chester is just generally known as a very quaint and charming English town, with lots of old Tudor framed houses and a special section of 2-story shops called “the Roes”. They are quite unique and looked like a typical row of 700-year-old shops at street level but had steps up between every other shop, leading to a covered walkway along the tops of the shops running along more shops on the second level. I could see its charm and surly they were ground-breaking in the 1700s, but they reminded me a lot of a 2-story American mall. I’m sure the villagers of Chester would have me tarred and feathered for saying that.

It was a great day out, and happily our car/time machine performed well on this, its longest journey to date!

…stay tuned for a major travelogue post this weekend, including American visitors (yeah!!), tiny principalities, tapas, and dangerous mountain pass drives!

What I'm Loving

This doesn't fall under the usual 'travelogue' type posts we normally do, but there's so much good stuff that I've been enjoying lately that's worth sharing! Here's what I'm loving at the moment:

Books
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - I'm a few years behind on the bandwagon of this book, but I LOVED it! The main character, a 9-year old boy named Oskar Schell, is precocious and precious and heartbreaking. It is so symbolic, playful and creative. If I ever write a book, I would want it to be similar to this

Plot Against America - I didn't love this book quite as much, but it's still really good (alternative history of America during WWII), and the main character is also a 9 year old boy, which seems like an unusual coincidence! Has anyone else read these books?

700 Penguins - My first coffee table book, this collection of 700 Penguin paperback covers combines my interest in design and my obsession with books.

Movies
The Thin Man - My family has been after me for years to see this movie, and now I know why! It's incredibly enjoyable, and the marriage portrayed between William Powell and Myrna Loy was groundbreaking. There's a whole 'Thin Man' series, I can't wait to see the others.

Arsenic and Old Lace - Hilariously entertaining Frank Capra classic, starring the inimitable Cary Grant, it's another Horstmanian favorite.

Michael Clayton - I've heard mixed reviews of this movie, but we really, really liked it - I think the intelligent dialogue was my favorite part.

TV
Flight of the Conchords - Now that Arrested Development is off the air, this is hands-down my favourite comedy. Brett and Jemaine are hilarious - if you havent seen it, you need to!

Brothers and Sisters - I absolutely love this show. It reminds my family a lot of ourselves, and it is so refreshing to finally see an amazing family drama again. For me, it's in the same vein as Party of Five and Life Goes On.

Music
Alexi Murdoch - I know nothing about this guy, but Andrew (my sister's boyfriend) gave us some of his music and I listen to it over and over - low-key/folky/soulful.

Those are the heavy-hitters at the moment. I would love to hear YOUR recommendations!

Belgium by Land: Part Duo

Brussels is a huge and sprawling city, and a bit intimidating to get around. Saturday morning we decided instead to visit somewhere more charming and manageable, and made the very popular day trip to the lace-making town of Brugge. We got coffee in a brutalist concrete train station, managed to get train tickets by pointing and showing numbers of fingers and toes, and were off through some beautiful countryside to Brugge (1 hour west near the coast).

Brugge is a picture perfect almost Disneyland-clean city with an interesting history. In the Middle Ages the city was a huge producer of lace and shared control of the “global” cloth trade with its great rival Ghent. The small river leading to Brugge slowly dried up, however, isolating the city and killing off its trade dominance. This pretty much froze the city in time, making it one of the most beautifully preserved medieval cities in Europe. It was ‘discovered’ again 200 years ago when wealthy Belgians started building beautiful homes matching the ancient architecture and it’s been a premiere tourist destination for recent centuries. Apparently it does get really busy and touristy in summer, but on a (freezing!) February Saturday we had plenty of room to wander. This was good, because stopping too long would let the hypothermia set in.

We took the town in with a long walk and our usual game of trying to figure out where Nick has led us astray. We visited an interesting religious community from the thirteenth century south of the city called a Begijnhof, which had a rough circle of whitewashed houses around central green. These Beguine communities were common all over Europe, and were built to encourage widows and unmarried women to live in communities and help the poor, etc. The original residents were not nuns, (they did not take a vow and were free to return to secular life) but with the decline of the Beguine communities in the last century many are now occupied by Benedictine nuns.

Proud of our cultural/religious education, we spent the rest of the day looking at grand architecture and eating amazing fries and chocolate-covered Belgian waffles. The fries were a double bonus, since they delayed frostbite and were really tasty.

A nap on the train back into Brussels got us ready for our much-anticipated Belgian Beer crawl around the Grand-Place – “one of the most uniformly beautiful enclosed city squares in Europe” as the tour book says. The square is mostly made up of ornate guildhouses which are now really cool restaurants and pubs. We tried 4 or 5 different places, trying to sample some of the highlighted beers from our guidebook. There were tons of bitter, fruity, creamy, and alcoholy beers, many with millennium-long pedigrees. The glasses were really unique too, with one notable beer, Kwak, served in a totally impractical round-bottomed hourglass so you couldn’t set it down. It came with a wooden stand to hang it from when you wanted to set it down.

Other highlights were Leffe, Chimay, and Lambic which is made with one of the oldest beer manufacturing methods on earth, using wild yeast and aged 2-3 years in a cask. Draft Lambic is extremely rare, and we went to the one place in Brussels that had it, which was an experience in itself. We walked down this long, shady ally very much off the beaten tourist track into a small beer hall with long wooden tables and benches filling the room. You just took a bench seat where you could find it among the patrons and they brought you a big ceramic pitcher of Lambic along with some mason jars. It was great, and it was fun just people watching and drinking our (kind of cider-tasting) draft Lambic.

The next morning we rose and checked out, leaving approximately 6 hours to explore all of Brussels. We started with a walk back through the Grand-Palace in daylight and read a bit about it in our trusty Lonely Planet guide. Town Hall was pretty impressive, but the guildhouses that boarder most of the square encapsulate the Baroque ideals of exuberance and complexity. The square was rebuilt after 1695 French artillery fire leveled Brussels, and city guilds used their money and power to have their headquarters rebuilt and control the style of architecture (early urban planning). The law they created said that “non-conforming facades are to be demolished at the expense of the offender,” so I guess people were pretty careful with development. Industrialization rendered guilds obsolete soon after they dumped all this money into their houses and with all industry/commerce taking place in newer parts of the city the Grand-Palace quickly became something of a museum, preserved it in its height for modern tourists like us to visit and enjoy.

We hurried on through the Cathedral, the main park in Brussels, and finally took a tram car ride to the EU quarter where all of the governmental buildings for the European Union are located. This center of bureaucracy was about as boring as it sounds, and none of the buildings or architecture were particularly stunning. Writing the EU Quarter off as a rookie tourist mistake we crossed the city to the much-more-interesting Victor Horta Museum, which was his former house and workspace. Horta practily invented the Art Nouveau style of architecture which rejected imitative styles of his time (neoclassical) in favor of an innovative style characterized by curving sinuous lines. Horta experimented with steel and glass, and said “never use a straight line when a curve will do”. His house was really interesting and a great last stop on our Brussels blitz.

Nice work to anyone who’s read all the way down to here: pictures for a reward!

Belgium by Land: Eurostar Stars

For Valentines Day this year we thought wrap the experiences (not simultaneously) of Belgian beer and high-speed train travel into one glorious weekend trip. Friday after work we made the 1.5 hour train trip down to London to catch a Eurostar train out of the new St. Pancras International Station. St. Pancras used to be a major hub of British rail travel and was the largest enclosed space in the world when it opened in the 1860’s, but time and neglect really left it in a bad state. When the all-new (Arup) high-speed line from the English coast to Central London was proposed, St. Pancras became the new terminus of Eurostar and 800 million pounds ($1.6 bn) was spent to totally renovate and modernize it.

Friday night it was fun taking to to walk around the new station and check things out before we left: the “world’s longest Champagne bar”, high-end shops, and of course, impressive roof arches. After we had our fill of modernized Victorian engineering we boarded our train. A comfortable 2 hour trip later we were on the streets of Brussels!

As Cool As We'll Ever Be

Nick and I are terribly, embarrassingly behind on blog posts! The fact that we still haven’t written about Brussels is just shameful, and now we are multiple countries and two amazing visitors behind! We will be working over-time during the month of April to catch up!

We had the great privilege of being two of the adult leaders on B1’s (our church here) First Kids’ Weekend Away. B1 is rather small, and there are only 6 ‘kids’ between the ages of 10 and 16 (hopefully none of them will find this blog, as I’m sure they would be insulted to be called kids instead of super-cool teens!), and we took these kids and one or two friends of each away for the weekend to the Peak District. It was boisterous, exhausting and all-together memorable.

The weekend was organized and directed by Colin, who used to be in the army and has also worked for an outdoor adventure camp, so as you can imagine he had planned an action-packed weekend. From the minute we got in Friday evening until we left Sunday after lunch, there were events and activities happening, on top of cooking all of the meals (no packed lunches for these kids!). Friday night we just ate soup and did some ice breakers, including the ‘cup game’ where you each person has a plastic cup and you pass it around the circle to an intricate rhythm. My family will be delighted to hear I have finally found other people to play the cup game with, because once I learned it in high school I would do it for hours, to everyone’s general annoyance. Apparently I’m not the only one to have fallen under the spell of the cup game – one of the youngest girls was such a fan she carried a cup around with her and beat on it ALL weekend, to the slight annoyance but wary tolerance of the rest of the kids.

Saturday was much more intense – even though the kids didn’t go to bed until 11:30 (3 hours later than the normal bedtime of the youngest kids!), we had a 6:30 am wake-up call, a hot breakfast, and then it was off to the first of two of the weekend’s extreme activities: caving! The pictures at the beginning and end of the post show us before and after the adventure. Everyone loved caving, because it was whatever you made it. We crawled through the narrowest cave entrance possibly known to man, and then were allowed to explore the nooks and crannies to our heart’s content before meeting up at various points for a buddy check. The older boys could be as extreme as they wanted to be, while the girls were able to take their time more. After crawling on his stomach through water Nick doesn’t think he would do it again, because he’s a bit claustrophobic and it was surprisingly difficult and intense for a group of young caving novices!

We were just beginning, though – the afternoon included a low ropes course – which again the kids LOVED – and an orienteering walk through freezing rain in muddy fields. The course was so muddy that one of the boys stepped into mud up to his waste, and lost a shoe! He had to walk a mile in socks just to get back since the mud devoured his footwear.

After those adventures, it was time a for a big dinner, after which some of us girls went on a night walk while the boys stayed back to help Nick build the campfire. The nightwalk was incredible – I’ve done nightwalks before through woods, but this was through wide open fields under a really low cloud covering, so that you literally couldn’t see the person walking in front of you. It felt spooky. At one point, Colin lost the path and left us standing in a field while he went in search of the way. At first the girls screamed a lot and were really scared. Then they realized that by turning on and off their ‘torches’ (brit-speak for flashlight), it looked like a ‘disco’ (brit speak for school dance), and so they threw a disco, dancing and singing in the field. Once Colin finally found the way, we winded our way back to the camp site where a huge, warm campfire greeted us.

The campfire was one of the weekend’s highlights, because we had imported the ingredients for that great American treat: Smores! Smores are a completely foreign concept here, since they don’t have Hershey’s and they don’t have anything that even remotely resembles graham crackers. They were a huge hit, especially with the older guys. People kept saying ‘These – what are they called again? – are amazing!’ And ‘I love shmores!’ They couldn’t believe that people have these all the time in the States. Nick and I were so excited to share an American classic with people who were so appreciative! You’d think that would be enough for Saturday night, but we still had more games to play! We did games and icebreakers until midnight, at which point we finally convinced them it was probably best to get some sleep.

At Sunday’s 6:30 am wake-up call, a lot of the pep had gone – they were dragging. The day’s big activity, abseiling, cured that! Abseiling is essentially rappelling, and Nick was thrilled and the kids were scared that we were rappelling off of a 60 ft tall bridge. They gave us the option of going with someone else or alone, and most people tried it with their friend first and then by themselves on their second go (everyone got in three tries because they were so well-behaved and coordinated – the instructors said they were the best group they had worked with – we felt proud!), with the exception of the two youngest girls. They both wanted to go with me before they went alone. The one, who all weekend had seemed confident and outgoing, turned out to be terrified. She cried and cried as we stood at the top of the bridge, with all the kids trying to talk her into going. The instructor finally convinced her to go, and the entire way down with me she was shaking and crying and saying ‘Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.’ Over and over. When we reached the bottom I thought ‘well, she completely regrets that!’ And she said ‘Let’s go again!’ For the majority of the kids, both caving and abseiling were completely new, and it was amazing to get to share those adventures with them.

Truthfully, though, the highlight of the weekend was their complete love of and fascination with all things American. I think it’s a combination of their age and the fact that most of the pop culture that they like is imported from the states, but they just can’t get enough of it! They were asking us questions all weekend, the older boys grilling Nick and the girls quizzing me. The girls were hilarious – they asked ‘What’s the mall like?’ And ‘What’s a skate park like?’ And asking what words we had for different things and how we pronounce them. They also asked ‘What words do you use for amazing?’ I said ‘awesome’, and one of the boys said ‘Americans say radical a lot’ – I tried to tell them otherwise but they weren’t having it.

They then used this new-found knowledge to come up with a conversation, which they repeated over and over the same way kids do when they’re learning a foreign language. Imagine the following in a fake, wisconsiny type accent:

‘What are you doing today?’ ‘I’m going to the skate park and then I’m going to the mallll’ ‘Really? That’s awesome!’ ‘Yeah, I’m going to see a movie.’ ‘What’s it called?’ ‘To-may-toes and Pot-ay-toes.’ ‘Radical!’ ‘Yeah, and then I’m going to buy sneakers and galoshes.' ‘That’s awesome!’

They just couldn’t get enough Americana. I don’t think we’ve ever felt so cool or popular! You can see more pics from the weekend here.

Weekend Peugeot-ventures

The Era of British Roadtrips has begun. With hundreds of miles of UK highway stretching out from Birmingham in all directions and our new car sitting on the street just a key turn from ignition, it’s going to be hard to stay inside writing blog posts on weekends. Hundreds of towns, hedgerows, hamlets, cities, bridges, and castles are out there waiting for us, and we can’t disappoint.

We began our auto travels a few weekends back when our friend Anthony (or Mitri, as he's better known) from Pitt came to England for work and spent an extra weekend hanging out with us. Though people here are a bit down on it, we’ve wanted to visit nearby Nottingham since we arrived. Robin Hood, Sherwood Forest, the Sheriff; we figured Disney had pretty accurately shown what the place is like and expected to be greeted by friendly, lovable talking animals when we parked and heading into town.

The Robin Hood angle was pretty disappointing; no animals AND turns out there is no real record of him actually existing and most historians doubt he did, but Nottingham was still really cool. We visited the world's oldest pub, from 1189AD, called Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, so named because of the trip Richard "the Lion-hearted" took in the 3rd Crusade at this time. It is built on the front face of a cliff, with Nottingham castle built into the cliff above, and has multiple, winding rooms carved into the stone, so it has a sort of cave/pub feel. It was really impressive.

Maybe it's because Nottingham is not a big tourist destination, but we've never had so many people hear our accents and want to talk with us! First we spent 2 hours in a pub with these two local guys talking about England and the US, and a lot about the election (EVERYONE here wants to talk about the election). Their main observation about the US was that you can get a bag of chips so big you can dive in and just eat your way out. We didn’t mention how pathetically small we’ve always found their chip bags here.

In Ye Olde Trip we ended up talking to a group of 20 Welsh nationalists full of revolutionary fervor out for a bachelor party ('stag do' as they're called here) and through this learned a lot about Wales. These guys did NOT like England, and all spoke Welsh as their first language, which is pretty cool. We were joking about how it would have been smart to snap a picture with them to document the time we had a pint with the future leaders of the Glorious Welsh Revolution. One question we never managed to ask was why they came so far into England if they didn’t like the English?

Since Nottingham just occupied our Saturday, we rounded the weekend off with a Sunday trip to the Black Country Living Museum, which documents life in the first industrial settlement in the world, just west of Birmingham where industrial iron-making was invented. The area was called the black country because clouds of soot and smoke blackened the sky. They told us it was “black by day and glowed red by night.” Many think JR Tolkien based Mordor in the Lord of the Rings on this area. We had a great time seeing the old cottages and mines with some of our friends from here - the captions of the pictures really say it all! Check out pictures of our journey back in time.

Yanks in the UK Official Road Trip Tracker - measuring our farthest road trip to date:

My Wild 'n Crazy Friday Night

Nick's out for a 'guy's nights' with some of the boys he works with - they were going out for Man Burgers and a Man Movie (Rambo). I was very graciously invited, but happily declined. I've been ill this week, so it's kind of nice to have a quiet night in, and thought y'all might want to hear about it! I am drinking a glass of red wine, listening to music, and getting caught up with emails/letters/etc - all while I'm wearing the most comfortable bathrobe in the world.

That might sound weird, but seriously, I can't tell you how happy I am about this bathrobe (which I think they call 'dressing gowns' here?). I've been wanting a big, soft bathrobe to curl up in for YEARS, and this year for Christmas my mom got me a big, puffy, soft, pale blue robe that cames down to my ankles - thank you, Mom!

(I almost left that whole part out because I know that guys I work with will read it and make fun of me on Monday - but I thought it was worth some ridicule if I could share my contentment with you!)

One of the things I've caught up on tonight is my Shelfari shelf, which was a fun reminder of all the great books I've read this year. My top recommendation from the last year is Bone People - if you've read it, let me know, if you haven't please do! I've also recently finished The Testament of Gideon Mack and The Shadow of the Wind - are those popular in the States, or are they purely British phenomena?

Other than my crazy night in, we do have an exciting weekend planned. We're going to Chester tomorrow, which according to Lonely Planet is one of the most beautiful towns in England. It's a very adventurous day trip by British standards, a whole 2 hours north of here - I'm sure we'll have some amazing pictures to post soon!

And to give you a taste of posts to come in the near future, below is one of my favourite shots from our weekend in Belgium a couple weeks ago:

Defining the British

Lauren found a great article from the NY Times about Gordon Brown’s recent proposition to formulate a British “statement of values” defining what it means to be British.

“The proposal, part of a package of British-pride-bolstering measures announced by the Prime Minister’s government, raised a host of tricky questions. What does it mean to be British? How do you express it in a country that believes self-promotion to be embarrassing? And how do you deal with a defining trait of the people you are trying to define: their habit of making fun of worthy government proposals?”

Some of the suggestions were:

“Once Mighty Empire, Slightly Used”
“Dipso, Fatso, Bingo, Asbo, Tesco”
“At Least We’re Not French”
“We Apologize for the Inconvenience.”

The winner, favored by 20.9 percent of the readers, was “No Motto Please, We’re British.”

David Bishop, author of the winning motto said:
“The point I was making is, this idea of a statement of Britishness; I cannot think of anything less British than that.”

“Part of the trouble with the whole exercise is that Britain never really began as a country, but rather “just evolved endlessly through time,” said Vernon Bogdanor, a professor of government at Oxford. “In the past, Britain was something that just happened,” he said. “You didn’t have to think about it. No one’s ever sat down and thought about what it means to be British.”

It is funny to live in a country now that just “evolved endlessly through time” and it definitely helps explain why Brits are so bad at celebrating national holidays. I miss American history…we were so decisive: colonize, declare independence, set up successful democracy, and settle down to plan great 4th of July parades.

In a related and doubtless controversial note, the Times had an online contest to find a six word motto for the US with 1300+ entries including:

“Still Using Fahrenheit, Feet, and Gallons”
“Just like Canada, with Better Bacon”
“Hubris: it’s not just for Greeks!”
“We came. We saw. We conquered.”
“Supporting Free Trade since 1776 (sic)”
“Enlightment scientific rationality meets puritan morality”
…and many, more

Driving in our Autocar

After a month or so of driving in the UK I am actually starting to get use to the seemingly-insane roadways and want to write a post about my initial impressions before I’ve been “assimilated”:

The first thing that any American getting into our car would notice is that it’s small…some would say tiny. The driver seat is easy to adjust because I just pull the lever and ram it to the extreme back stop so I can get my knees on either side of the steering wheel and make a decent stab at controlling it.

I’ve found that being small is especially striking at high speeds. When driving to work on the 'Motorway' surrounded by lots of other pod-like cars I get this strange feeling I'm on some highway of the future like in the Jetsons puttering along in my little space-pod. This is all made ever stranger since the highway cuts through some beautiful English countryside where you can see sheep grazing and 2000-year-old hedgerows separating each plot. Ancient bucolic calm is separated from a space-age Active Traffic Management superhighway by a thin fence of metal.

This other-worldly pod-commute is in stark contrast to driving in any urban environment in Britain. Navigating the 500 year-old roads of a city centre, I feel like some sort of rally-car driver fighting for my life among terminally-ill competitors with nothing to loose from a crash. If you’re going to die, they must think, might as well go pulling off some never-before-seen road manoeuvre. Everyone is peeling out, weaving in, and generally in a huge rush to move forward 1 space in the queue (ok, ok line!) at the next light. The roads of Birmingham are literally at capacity most of the time, and Americans could learn a thing or two about real road rage from the Brits.

I’m getting use to it all though, and through the worst of it you can still be warmed by the cheery accent of some BBC radio announcer talking about how it will be mostly overcast with ‘a bit of wet’ for the next 859 days in England.

A UK Superbowl

Televised sporting events sure make the harsh reality of time zones apparent. It never bothered us in the States, but exactly why does the Superbowl have to be on a Sunday night? Sunday afternoon or even any time at all on Saturday would be much better for those tenaciously clinging to their American Sports connections 7 time zones from Arizona.

Thanks to the most American of our British friends we made the most of the Superbowl here, sitting down in front of a flat-screen TV to a feast of dominos pizza, nacho dip, Budweiser brews and even Oreos imported from the Motherland itself. Other than the late hour (kickoff at 11:10pm) we had a wonderfully American Superbowl 42 viewing. Of course seeing adds for British car insurance instead of the classic Superbowl ones was a bit of a downer, but at least you don’t worry about missing anything when you get up to go to the bathroom.

It was also funny how the commentators had to sort of explain a little about how the game works whenever they weighed in on it, and apparently last year there was actually a 20 minute lesson on how American Football is played before the game. This year from the TV menu you could select either British or “American” announcers, as well as a segment to learn the rules of the game, for those just tuning in to this strange American pastime =).

The worst part of the experience was actually just how good a game it ended up being, and our initial plans to leave at the 1:00am half-time show had to be changed due to ferocity of contest. Unfortunately we called it quits at 2:30, just moments before the epic 4th quarter carried the Giants to victory. In retrospect this was a major error in judgement, and we kind of feel like bad Americans for not watching all of our national sport’s championship game. Oh well, I guess there is something to be said for semi-coherence in the workplace, and it will make for a more dramatic letter to the NFL asking to change the game time next year.

What a game! What a country .

Anniversary Zwei

To celebrate 2 amazing, international years of marriage last weekend we made our first trip to 'the continent' since August with a holiday in Berlin! We had heard the German capital has some great architecture, history, and is the happening-est city in Europe, so we packed the most European clothing we own and hopped on a plane to try and go blend in. We figured on the dance floor of an all night underground techno-rave no one would even suspect we aren't locals…

Ok, we actually decided to give the techno raves a miss but were able to enjoy the numerous other highlights of the city in stead. We got in late Friday night to find out that our hotel had given our room away the first night, BUT they put us up at this amazing 5 star place across the street with an espresso machine in the room, then we got to go back to our original hotel the next night where they apologized with a room (or rather, apartment) that was definitely larger than our flat in England! All in all we did very well with Berlin accommodations, and learned how nice it is to have hotels trying to 'make it up to you'.

Leaving the comfort of our posh room for the rainy streets on Saturday morning, our first stop was the Kaiser Wihelm Church also called the "hollow tooth". The original church was badly bombed during the war, but its bell tower has been preserved and a strange hexagonal modern church built around it. There we saw pictures of Berlin in 1945 which showed neat rows of rubble, with about 70% of the buildings in the city destroyed or seriously damaged. You got a sense too for the world of fantasy the government was living in reading official press reports about this “temporary inconvenience” and how the church would be rebuilt even more grandly as soon as the Germans win the war.

After a quick lunch at the American Embassy (Starbucks), we took the U-Bahn (underground) to the eastern side of the city where most of the historic buildings are located. We spent most of the afternoon in the Jewish Museum, which had some unusual symbolic architecture representing the broken shards of Jewish life in Germany and Europe in the 20th century. Many of the exhibits were very moving and well-done, and the volume of information was extensive, tracing the presence of the Jewish people in Germany since the Middle Ages.

The next stop on a real but pretty depressing tour of German history was the Checkpoint Charlie museum featuring the history of the division of Berlin by Soviet forces following WWII and the terrible realities of life in a divided city. The museum was filled with stories of people flying, swimming, tunnelling, and driving trucks through the Berlin Wall to get out of the East, many of whom did not survive. The wall really evolved, beginning as coils of barbed wire that were laid out on the street, dividing neighbourhoods, shops, and even homes. As more and more people fled the east though, the fortifications increased, and by the 1990s the Berlin wall was actually two 10ft solid concrete walls with a "kill zone" between them patrolled by guards and dogs. By the end of the exhibits you got a bit of the sense of how momentous the fall of the wall must have been. The pictures of thousands of people just tearing the wall apart when the border was opened were moving.

Saturday night was had dinner in a traditional German pub from the 1600's and were pleased to see that no one was speaking English—just us and the locals. I think other than our terrible German pronunciation, clothes, and the 6 or 7 attempts to take a picture of us with our food, we did a pretty good job seeming like locals too. For 3 hours after dinner we had the only dry weather of the weekend, and we got to walk along Unter den Linden Strasse to the Brandenburger Gate seeing the significant buildings remaining in former East Berlin.

Sunday our flight out wasn't until 10pm so we decided to see something a little more cheery from before the rather depressing 20th century. Just on the edge of Berlin we visited the impressively royal and pleasantly opulent Charlottenburgh Palace, summer home of the first Kind and Queen of Prussia. The palace was as lavish and over-the-top as you would expect, but also had some beautiful gardens and lots of windows, which gave it a nicer contemporary feel.

In a final blitz-tour of sites, we ate pretzels at a bakery, took the U-Bahn to Potsdamer Platz which was a square of rubble during the Cold War but is now the Times Square of Berlin and has some very impressive architecture. We then walked up by the Brandenburg Gate again, and waited in line for the Reichstag (Parliament Building) in the pouring rain. Just before trenchfoot set in, we made it into the warm and dry interior, only to learn that we then had to go back out onto the roof to experience the new Norman-Foster-designed dome (1995). Though a bit cold on rainy January days, the glass dome that crowns the ancient building is really impressive and offers some amazing views of the city.

The Reichstag was a great capstone to our Berlin experience, and after a quick dinner at this great serve-yourself Italian place we visited our first night (why risk a poor last meal?) we took the S-Bahn to the airport. By 1am we were back in bed a time zone away in Birmingham, having crammed quite a bit into an amazing anniversary weekend!

Yeah Pictures!!