I began writing this shortly before we left Britain, but then life caught up, and in the chaos of returning to the US, it got set aside. As I write these words now, it has been nearly a month and a half since we landed in the US and a month since we returned to Albuquerque.  Life has been…  Very good, but very busy since the return.  But the memories of Britain and Europe are still strong, and part of our hearts still live there, I think.

So now I flip back through my notes and the feel and scents of Scotland return to me.  I will do my best to transcribe some of them, but there’s a great deal to say, so this may take more than one post and some time to get out.  (Not aided, I know, by my incurable verbosity.)  Think of it as a slow-motion discovery for each of you — you’ll never know when another bit of it will pop up.  But I’ll do my best to at least finish up Scotland before, oh, say, Christmas…

One of the final tour targets for the great Rati-Lane British Isles tours was Scotland. We’d been hoping to hit all of the major regions/countries of the British Isles (England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland), but we still missed Ireland.  Ah well — good reason to return at some point.  ;-)

We had to decide on something, and we had really needed a work-free vacation, so we packed our bags and headed North.  A lot happens in a week of intense vacationing, so there’s quite a bit to report.  We’ll start with:

Edinburgh

Day 1 (Fri): Travel

Bus to Manor House station, Piccadilly Line to King’s Cross, National Express train up through England, past the now-crumbling line of Hadrian’s wall, and into Scotland.  Caledonia: land of the lochs and mountains and the flamboyant and tough northern barbarians who threw back Rome’s might.

For Americans’ reference, while the British Isles are small in a global sense, the distances are still large in a practical sense, and Scotland is very big and very spacious indeed.  Really big.  I mean, it’s small when you put it down next to, say, Alaska or the Ukraine, but it’s big to travel across.  King’s Cross to Edinburgh is just about 400 miles (about 650 km) and took rouhly five hours.  That’s roughly the distance from Boston to Baltimore or Louisville to Atlanta or Santa Fe to Denver.

We pulled in to Edinburgh about 8:00 PM and plunked down the cash to taxi to our B&B.  (Refer back to trading money for stress when travelling.)  We caught a late supper at an upscale Thai place near B&B row, and then crashed.

Day 2 (Sat): Edinburgh

Up, not terribly early (vacation!  Score!) and off to explore the city.

Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland and seat of Kings.  It is built along (and spilling off of) a ridge of basalt spanning between two ancient volcanic outcrops, and the scene feels startlingly like something out of a Tolkien novel, or perhaps George R. R. Martin. At one end of the ridge, Edinburgh Castle dominates the skyline.  The “Golden Mile” spills down the ridge away from it, lined with gray Georgian stone buildings.  At the foot of the ridge lies the new Scottish Parliament building and Holyrood Palace, home of kings-in-exile and home-away-from-home for more modern monarchs.  Finally, the ridge lifts up again into Holyrood Park to end at Arthur’s Seat, the other stone mass, open and airy counterpoint to the brooding fortress of its sister pluton.

Our B&B was on, essentially, B&B row, which is pretty much right across from Holyrood park.  So the first thing was walking through the park on the way to town. It was lovely in an ornately-sculpted, eighteenth-century sort of way. Our path took us below Arthur’s Seat (which we resolved to climb… tomorrow) and into the base of the town.

View of Arthur's Seat in Holyrood Park, Edinburgh

Then into town, entering near Holyrood Palace and the Parliament building.  We’d seen a sufficiency of palaces at that point, so we glanced in bemusement at the Scot’s brand new, £400 million (!) parliament building.  I guess when you get your independent parliament back after almost 3 centuries of suppression, it’s a cause for architectural exuberance.  Parts of the (in)famous building are really neat (e.g., the native stone facing with samples graven with various quotes and poetry), but other bits were just odd.  It is something of an architectural marvel, in that postmodern chaos-of-architectural-motifs sort of way.  Given its self-consciously avant-garde design and its order-of-magnitude budget overrun, it is, unsurprisingly, a source of some contention among Edinburgh locals.

View of office windows in the Scottish Parliament building

Side wall and fence of the Scottish parliament building

Front face of the Scottish Parliament building

We chose not to tour the Parliament building, but did marvel a bit at the exterior (with some confusion, as we first mistook the bizarrely-grated windows facing onto alleys as signs of a deluded office building).  I was taken, however, with the stretch along the Mile itself, which is faced with different Scottish stone and graven with Scottish verses in English and Gaelic.

From there, we walked up the Golden Mile.  Here we discovered a bit of a tactical mistake.  Remember that ridge of rock between the two promontories that I mentioned?  The city lies along the ridge between the two, but it slopes down from the Castle to the Holyrood Palace, which meant that we were walking the whole mile uphill.  Whups.  Still, it was a fun walk and there were great things to see along the way.  Like street bagpipers…

Street musician in Edinburgh

Our favorite street bagpiper in Edinburgh. Check out the tennis shoes.

(Remember kids: Bagpipes were designed to be heard on battlefields.  These guys were playing a good half mile apart.)

And blue police call boxes…

A true blue police call box. Inoperative, unfortunately. Or maybe that's just what The Doctor wants you to think...

And Adam Smith, trade goods in hand…

Adam Smith, the economist of nations.

And my man, Hume!

Hume's da man!

Along the way, we encountered hordes of tourist shops, ranging from kitsch to high-end.  We popped in to a woolen-goods shop, where Susan picked up a lovely Fair Isle sweater and we grabbed a sun-catcher for our friend Cat (who put up with entirely too much shit from our cats).  Further along, Susan invested in her new hobby of Scotch exploration, snagging an (apparently) lovely bottle of 18-year old Scotch (whose name is not presently at hand — oops).

Finally, we reached the imposing Edinburgh Castle, fortress and last refuge of kings and queens for centuries.  From this site, for over a thousand years, Scottish war chieftans and lords and kings had sallied forth to give battle to everyone from Vikings to English to other Scots.  (And, to hear the brief history blurbs in the Castle tell it, largely to get their asses kicked.)  Here, the infant Mary Queen of Scots holed up from her terrifying uncle, Henry VIII, and here too she herself later gave birth to James VI, future king of Scotland and England.  The Castle was the centerpiece of the Scottish struggles for sovereignty and independence from England for centuries.

(Part of) Edinburgh Castle

The intimidating bulk of the fortress, perched on its promontory of black basalt.

At this point, we were famished, so we made a bee-line for the chic castle cafe.  We were surprised to discover that it was actually good — a big change of pace for tourist monument eateries. (Of which we have sampled our share and then some at this point.)  We had a lovely lunch.  A decadent mushroom bisque to start; then I had haggis, neeps, and tatties (haggis with turnips and potatoes), plated in a surprisingly upscale presentation.  Susan had salmon (Scottish, of course), with lime sauce.  And we split a fantastic slice of Victoria Sponge Cake for dessert.

Contrary to popular opinion, haggis is actually not only edible, but in fact quite tasty.

On to the castle.  We toured the Scottish Crown Jewels.  (Older, by a considerable margin, than the English, but a tad bit less pretentious.  But only a tad.)  The great hall, home, now, of piles and piles of weapons, and, says the audio guide, a fantastically preserved original beam ceiling (and lots of Victorian fanciful interior decor).  Dungeons and walkways and battlements and courtyards.  The Scottish War Memorial.

But we’d done plenty of castle touristing at this point and were a bit burned out, so after only a couple of hours, we called it a day on the vasty pile of stones and headed back down the Mile.

We were a bit at a loss for evening plans, but this turned out to be the week of the Edinburgh film festival, and we hoped to get a piece of that action.  After some tired-tourist dithering, we boldly set off across the wilds of Edinburgh, in search of an art theatre.  After some slight bus mishaps, we pulled in to the theatre we sought just in time to catch the early evening round of animated shorts.

This was a bizarre, but entrancing series of indie animation bits, varying in length from about two to fifteen minutes.  Angst was definitely the theme of the evening.  A blind, old widow, searching for eyes in jars of buttons in her lonely hut in the woods, and the owl-spirit of death who comes to bring her sight and surcease.  The tale of the man who sits at the top of the great cliff to count people in animal costumes who come to cast themselves off the cliff.  The counterpointed stories of three everyday people and their reactions to close encounters with death.  A wordless musical tale of the child who wakes to follow the tooth fairy back to her subterranean home.

Heads abuzz and evening falling, we left the theatre in seach of supper.  Walking back in the direction of our B&B, we ran across “La Bagatelle”, a low-key, but fabulous French restaurant, where we had a stunning and surprising meal.  The appetizers, in particular, were strikingly unusual: Salad with sautéed chicken livers and raspberries, and terrine of pork with apricot jelly.  Then Susan had a fabulous chicken supreme with asparagus velouete, while I enjoyed pork cutlet with truffle sauce.  Altogether, it was one of the best meals we’d had since… Well, France.

Back to the B&B and crashed out, to be ready to take on…

Day 3 (Sun): Edinburgh, reprised

We hopped up to head back to Holyrood Park and Arthur’s Seat.  In spite of the imposingness of the butte, the climb was not bad — the greatest challenge was finding the correct trail up the side.  From the top, we attained an unparalleled view of Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth.  (Linguistic aside: Firth is a Scots word meaning “inlet” or “estuary”.  It’s originally from Norse, and is related to “fjord”, which gives some sense of just how prominently the Vikings figure in the history of Scotland.)  Among other features, we could get a much better view of the entirity of the Scottish Parliament building.  They tell us that the aerial view is important to fully appreciate the architectural design of the building.  We appreciated that it still looked rather like a jumble sale from above.

Probably the most photographed vista in the Edinburgh area

Susan enjoying the sunshine atop Arthur's Seat

The direction marker atop the Seat

After taking the air on the Seat, we headed back down, leisurely. Took a turn through a ruined chapel at the base of the Seat…

Ancient chapel just above Holyrood Palace. Susan does her part to stave off entropy.

And then headed back to the Mile.  There was a great deal more of Edinburgh to see, of course, but we weren’t going to be able to catch all of it, regardless.  So our goal for the day were the Vault tours.

The Vaults are a series of chambers located beneath the three major bridges of Edinburgh.  Not bridges over water, but bridges over the valley: they span out from the top of the central rock ridge to either side, meeting the hills that rise beyond the glacier-valleys that straddle the ridge.  Over the centuries, buildings arose along the tops of the bridges and up against the bridge arches, leaving vaulted spaces beneath the streets of Edinburgh.  For a time, these vaults were active as store rooms for pubs and restaurants, spare meeting space, homes for the otherwise homeless, and haunts of murderers and thieves.  In the early nineteenth century, they were condemned and closed because of water leakage and lack of sanitation, and it was only in the past decaded that some of them were re-opened to tourists.

The gloom of the Edinburgh Vaults, lit by Susan's sunny disposition.

Seventeenth century wine racks, echoes of long-forgotten pubs, wine shops, and gathering spots for Edinburgh's famed intelligentsia.

Our guide was a local history student, picking up a few quid by guiding curious tourists through the ill-lighted vaults and telling them tales of the people who lived and worked there and even an occasional creepy-crawley story.  Unfortunately for him, he had no other customers than us that afternoon, so we hounded him mercilessly with questions and requests for elaboration.  I could tell that he was torn between his history geek-ness and his canned spiel.  I think he was happy enough to see us off at the end of the tour.

From the Vaults, we went in search of the Museum of Musical Instruments (a branch of the U. of Edinburgh School of Music, as I understand).  While searching, we were amused to rest our feet near the Tron Pub (considerably older than the Tron that geeks usually think of!).  Sadly, no pix of Tron…  We did find the museum, which focused mostly on keyboard instruments, so we didn’t find any notable violas for Susan to drool over.  We were, however, treated to some fabulous harpsichord playing by a fellow who was working his way through the collection.

We still had a great deal of Scotland ahead of us, so we headed back early to the B&B to catch a nap and then an early Italian dinner. (The high point was the tagliatelle with salmon and white wine cream sauce; the calimari was acceptable, but not as good as that in Madrid. Oh well.)

We crashed early again, in preparation to fly off to the Orkneys in the morning.  But that’s another post, for another day…

Leaving Britain is a particularly strange feeling.  In so many ways, it feels close to home — not just the (mostly) shared language and history, but just the feel of the place.  The green and the trees hearken back to my earlier life, growing up in Kentucky and Indiana or living in the Northeast.  The intermittent misty and sunny weather that remains temperate through the summer evokes echos of the Pacific Northwest and the Canadian Rockies, where I came of age.

More than that, it has been a year of personal growth and change.  I have had some excellent research interactions, of course, and have learned a great deal scientifically.  I had some valuable time to think and experiment and hack a bit myself.  I have a stronger sense of some directions to explore.

But much more than that, it has been a year of learning about the greater world and our place in it.  History, art, culture, language, politics, religion.  Food, fashion, fun.  I feel that I have a fuller or richer sense of the tides of culture.  Countries all face the same problems, but different countries resolve them differently, and we both have some better senses of what the spectrum of choices is.

In flight, now, the great steel flying machine boring a hole through the sky above Ireland, heading for the North Atlantic.

Moments and memories flit through me…

Arriving in Spain eleven months ago, now.  Confusion and panic, plunged into a world we didn’t fit into, uncertain if we could even pay for our apartment.

Snow in London, paralyzing the city.  Two days later, a train through the fairy-gilded countryside.  Sunlight gleaming on snow in the trees and on the fields; a Dickensian scene.

Treading the streets of Hardy, Halley, and Hawking; Tolkien, Carroll, and Lewis.

A whirl of castles, fortresses, and palaces: El Escorial, El Palacio Real, El Alcazar de Segovia, Alhambra, Pembrokeshire, Warwick, the Tower of London, Hampton Court, Versailles, Castle Howard, Schloss Marienburg, Earl’s Palace, Edinburgh.  Centuries of might, power, prestige, wealth, fear, and blood.  Some standing still proud and strong, some crumbling and struggling against tides of time and entropy.  All showpieces, now, for adventurers, curiosity seekers, history fanatics, and tourists.

Snippets of history assembling.  Fitting together growing fragments of the great mosaic.

The sense of wonder and excitement as cafés and headlines in Madrid were filled with Obama’s victory.

The awe of touching stones laid down a thousand years ago by the cathedral-builders…

… or laid down two millennia ago by the Romans, as they grasped the world in their palms.

… or five millennia ago by the now-nameless neolithic farmers, circumscribing the heavens with stone.

… or eight millennia ago by the mesolithic hunter-gatherers, laying their treasured dead into barrows for reasons now lost in entropy and age.

Plays in London’s West End and English-language movies at the foreign film theatre in Madrid.

The ocean surging against cliffs in Scotland and Wales; mist above the sea.  The sea, the sea, the sea, stretching out before us, a reminder of how small these islands really are, for all of their deep history and vast influence.

The whirl and bustle of the great mercados of Madrid, a foodie’s heaven, if only you can speak enough Spanish to order the jamon.

The decaying Victorian majesty and grunge of the London Tube, its subterranean labyrinth inviting visions of fairies, just beyond sight in the hidden recesses, driving the trains, or sometimes not, at their whim.

Jamon and pisto manchego.  Fish and chips at the pub.  Chocolate con churros, merluza, cochinillo, cocido, and the best calamari in Madrid.  Steak and kidney pie, cumberland sausages, scones and cream tea, Victoria sponge cake. Ordering Indian and Chinese for delivery.

The gleaming modern efficiency of the Madrid Metro, jewel of Madrid’s recent public works and their charming, self-aggrandizing pride in it. Posters of the Sphinx or the Statue of Liberty peering excitedly down the steps of a Metro station: “El Metro que todos quisieren tener.”

The green, green, green of Britain.  Trees and grass and flowers and rolling farmlands.  Even in the concrete jungle of London, the locals have striven to set aside greenspace.  And the greenery fights for itself: grass springing forth from every crack or crevice in the concrete, moss or ivy spreading over every wall, unless vigilantly fought back.

The grand, tree-lined boulevards of central Madrid, evoking Nineteenth Century splendor and imperial power.  The arid clime, so achingly reminiscent of Albuquerque and the desert Southwest of the US.

The digital map informs us that we are over the coast of Greenland now.  Halfway to Chicago, or thereabout.

But, really, what has mattered most are the people.

The kind and enthusiastic woman across the courtyard from us in Madrid.  Discussions in our halting Spanish about sharing the clothes line and the state of the weather, and her pledge of friendship on the day we left Spain.

The supervisor at the Manor House Tube station in London, who cheerfully sorted us out, from helping us get to our house in the first place, to helping us find our way to the New Year’s celebrations in the city.

The Nicaraguan expat we met in Spain who hated the US for its role in the Contra-Sandanista civil war that destroyed his country and his family.

The Kosovan taxi-driver in London who loved the US for its role in the Kosovo war and stopping the horrors of ethnic cleansing.

Elaborate Christmas lunch at the warm and welcoming house of my postdoc’s family.

The brusque but secretly friendly proprietor of the corner store near our place in London, who just smiled when we returned for the fourth time in a day for something forgotten, saying “It’s ok — this is your store.”

The delightful B&B hosts in Pembrokeshire, who welcomed us into their house and shared their joy in Wales with us.

Gaming with friends back in the US — a touch of familiarity and comfort for expats far from home.

The shopkeeper in Spain who sold us pillow cases when we had no Spanish whatsoever, who cheerfully passed the dictionary back and forth with us to help us through the transaction and who, at the end, complimented our Spanish, “¡Su español es muy bueno!”.

A group of hostellers in Orkney, with whom we stayed up too late dissecting the state of the world and the best travel destinations on five continents.

And all of the beautiful, wonderful, warm friends we found in London: Writers and musicians and gamers and engineers and hackers and teachers.  Who, most of all, made London feel like home, at least for a time.

Over the North Atlantic again, closing in on the coast of Canada.  The flight attendant brings us a snack of fruit and crackers and lovely stinky cheese.  We marvel a bit at the luxury of flying business class.

I titled this post “Leaving the Shire, Mr. Frodo” because I can empathize with some of Sam’s feelings.  For one thing, the echos of Middle Earth are all over Britain — you can see Tolkien’s roots in the thatched roofs and hedge-rows, the towers and spires, the barrows and standing stones.

But it’s a deeper feeling than that.  Sam was leaving home for the first time — first setting foot beyond his native lands, starting out on a grand adventure that would change him deeply.  We are returning from a grand adventure — admittedly not as grand, nor as hazardous, as Sam’s — but I can feel some of the wistfulness and conflicts that he did.  Transitions are potent.  We return to familiar places and people that we love, but we leave behind fascinating places and discoveries and new people to love.

But more opportunities to return, to visit new friends, and to explore further.

The road goes ever on…

Passing over the Great Lakes now.  We are close.  They feed us again.

It has been such a strange year.  There were plenty of stresses, from discovering the failure modes of the international finance system, to wandering lost at Barajas airport in search of our cats, to staying in touch with friends and colleagues five thousand miles away, to planning the next bit of local travel and tourism, to trying to pound a new language into our aged cortices by exposure and sheer force of will.  At times, we were exhausted by the overwhelming intricacy of life maintenance when your home isn’t really your home and every transaction has to be coordinated across two continents and up to five countries.

Landing gear down.  Seats and tray tables up.  Machines off.

But it has also been an incredibly… Fulfilling/enriching/educational/exciting/exploratory/wonderful/creative/social year.  All wrapped up in complex feelings — joy, loss, excitement, fatigue.  The sense of our perspectives stretching, like muscles, sometimes a little bit too far.  Homesickness for two homes.

Landing in Chicago; back in the US.

We are home.

So, clearly there are whole books on a country’s cuisine, but here are some things that British food has been to us:

British food, sort of like American food, seems to be basically family restaurant or pub fare.  The signature dishes are fish’n'chips and bangers’n'mash.  Everyone’s heard of the former.  The latter is sausages and mashed potatoes.

And oh the sausages!  One of the first things we discovered in the grocery store was Cumberland sausages.  They’re pork sausages with a pleasant mild flavoring, but there is something in the filling that makes them the lightest, fluffiest sausages I’ve ever tasted.  Every sausage with this name we’ve tried, in restaurants or cooked up from our own groceries, has been very good.  There are plenty of other kinds of sausages floating around here, but these are the ones we like best.  And it’s a good thing, since we have found nothing that tastes remotely like an American breakfast sausage here.

Fish and chips really do fill the slot for burgers and fries here.  There are chip shops everywhere.  Batter-dipped fried whitefish is incredibly good, especially if you eat it as fast as you can once you buy it.  It definitely loses something if you let it cool.

But here’s something that really flies in the face of the American stereotype: the Brits are not shy with their spices.  Terran learned from some of his Victorian era research that Britain began a love affair with Indian curry when India became part of the empire.  That has not gone away.  Indian dishes are often listed next to the fish’n'chips in pubs.  And if you see any food here, even packaged potato crisps (called “crisps” here because “chips” was taken) marked as “hot and spicy,” be ready for some real burn.  Even if you order your Chinese food in the US at the top of the heat scale, keep in mind that you’re only qualified for medium in the UK.  Brits like their hot food hot.

Another famous type of British food is the hot savory pie.  We learned at a historic food demonstration at Hampton Court Palace that this type of cooking dates from the Tudor era, where flour/water crusts were often used in place of baking dishes for stews.  Back then, the crust was just a wrapper to be thrown away.  Since then, it’s become an integral part of the dish.  Sometimes a pie has an entire crust, but often the stew is made in a baking crock with just rolled pastry over the top.

Steak and ale pie is everywhere.  However, Terran had a hankerin’ for steak and kidney pie.  This has turned out to be very, very hard to find.  We’ve checked dozens of pubs, and only one of them even advertised such a pie for sale.  When we asked, they were out.  Sigh.  So, a couple of weeks ago, Terran undertook a quest to bake is own.  He used lamb kidneys and did his research.  They turn out to be unintuitive and kind of difficult to prepare.  But the result was very good, and we’re going to make it again.

I, on the other hand, experimented with some Welsh cooking, inspired by our hike in Pembrokeshire.  Welsh cooking seems to be known for leeks, dairy, and bacon.  I tried a more modern recipe for a turkey and leek pie with a milk and whipped egg filling.  That was a lot of fun. It was a nice lighter contrast to the steak and kidney pie, which is nothing if not hearty.  I’ve also tried my hand at cream of leek and potato soup (with bacon).  This came out shockingly yummy.

I haven’t even touched on tea.

Tea the meal, which seems to fit in around 4pm between lunch and dinner, is something I can’t really figure out.  I’m simply not hungry for a pile of mostly carbohydrates at that time of the day, and if I skip lunch and try to go until 3pm, I’m likely to make myself sick.  And to be fair, we’ve read that formal tea is dying off in the UK anyway. That said, we’ve managed to make high tea work a few times, and it is so much fun that I’m sad that I can’t come up with any nutritional purpose for it.

I really like black tea with a bit of milk and sugar, and I liked it before I came here, so I fit right in.  Since coming here, I’ve sampled scones and clotted cream.  Clotted cream is a tasty and different pastry spread — basically cream cooked slowly until it congeals.  It has a flavor like light butter and a texture like cream cheese.  Scones are one of the few things I’ve eaten where I think you really need to go to a high-end pastry shop to get them.  The ones I’ve bought in the supermarket have, in my opinion, tasted awful, while the ones we’ve had at high tea have been wonderful.  I want to try cooking these myself.

Crumpets, on the other hand, seem to be great from the bargain counter in the grocery store. I picked a package up on a whim, and I really like them.  They’re like very holey English muffins, but much eggier.

If you’re hanging out at home, you are supposed to make your tea in an electric kettle.  We have one in the house, and it’s so convenient that I think I will look for one when we return.  We have a whistling kettle for the stove at home, but when you have company, it’s just so nice to bring the kettle into the room and plug it in so that people can serve themselves.

Oh, and off the tea theme, there’s cheese.  A lot of cheeses I think of as ordinary are hard to find here.  You can get emmentaler in the big grocery stores, but I haven’t seen any holey swiss.  On the other hand, cheddar expands from the orange block in the corner of the cheese counter to an entire way of life.  There are literally hundreds of different types of cheddar here, and most of them aren’t even orange.

In summary, this has been a great sabbatical for our food horizons.

I was leaving home in the morning, heading for the bus stop to go in to the university. As I approached the end of our street, and the turn onto the more major cross-street, I was surprised to see a Victorian hearse pass.

Two beautiful grey horses in fancy tack and bridle (complete with the feather head dress) drawing an elaborate, gilded and ornamented, glass sided wagon containing what appeared to be a coffin. The whole affair was driven by two men in formal dress — coat and long tails, top hat, the whole bit. It was a vision out of a Dickens novel, for sure.

This surprising conveyance was followed by just two dark, limousine-style cars. (And then a red London city bus.)

I assume that it was really a funeral arrangement of some sort.  I was just surprised to see it trotting down a city street in what is not precisely an upper-class or elaborate area.  I think of horse and carriage as being something that people hire for weddings and other romantic occasions, not for funerals.  And there wasn’t a long line of mourners following.  (Though the tradition of a huge number of cars following a slow hearse and paralyzing traffic for miles around may be more of a US thing.  I don’t know.)  It just felt…  Out of place, I guess, in the middle of a neighborhood of early 20th century row houses filled with immagrents and making its way through dense traffic.

“And then, when Henry took the throne, he…”

I had to interrupt (being a loud and obnoxious American), “Which Henry?”

He stopped his flow of lecture and blinked.  “The Eighth, of course.  We’ve only had two monarchs, you know: Henry and Elizabeth.  All the rest were just placeholders…”

Henry VIII, as rendered by Ewerth. National Portrait Gallery, London

The funny thing is that he’s not completely kidding.  While all the monarchs of Britain have left their marks, some have done so more than others.  Being ignorant Americans, who barely remember most of our own presidents, much less the leaders of that-other-country-over-there, we didn’t really realize the extent to which Henry VIII left much more of a mark than most others.  When you start looking around the UK, he stands out in the parade of royalty.  My history books in high school sort-of mentioned him, and we all know his famous portrait, but we (Americans) tend to think of him as an overweight, turkey-leg bearing chap, whose major accomplishments were writing Greensleeves, fathering Elizabeth I, and running through wives like Imelda Marcos ran through shoes.

No.

Henry VIII was a ruthless, bloodthirsty bastard, who ruled with might and terror.  He revolutionized the British military and was an advocate of advanced military technology.  He bucked almost a thousand years of tradition and accumulated power to break with the Catholic church in Rome.  Contrary to popular representations, that move was only partially about his desire for a divorce — it was probably much more about power and economics.  In one fell swoop, he broke the power of the monasteries and grabbed their money and lands which, by that point, included over a third of the property in England and Wales.  It was the largest land grab in British history (short of the Norman Conquest itself).  It represented a huge infusion of capital into England’s coffers and funded Henry’s continued warfare.

But just having grabbed their power, lands, and monies wasn’t enough.  It was necessary to break their spirits as well, in some sense.  Or, more properly, to wipe out any popular support for the clergy by utterly humiliating them.  Henry had horses stabled in churches, pulled down monasteries, and issued writs allowing townsfolk to carry of the stones and roof lead of abbeys at will, for whatever purpose they liked.  We visited one small church that had a waist-high gated fence around the altar because Henry had issued a permit allowing cockfighting in the sanctuary.  His soldiers used some churches as outhouses.

Henry didn’t hesitate to use force against those who opposed him, and the Tower of London saw a steady stream of political opponents on their way to the headsman’s block under Henry’s reign.  He once executed a priest’s mother because of the former’s political crusades against Henry on the continent.  By the time of his death, our tour guide estimated, over 50,000 families had lost someone to Henry’s reign.  It makes his daughter’s moniker, “Bloody Mary,” for a measly 300 Protestants burned at the stake, seem like blatant historical hypocrisy.  Another tour guide cited 153,000 writs of execution ordered under Henry.  This man had the “do not fuck with me” meter cranked to 11.

But this is just one example of the fuller portraits of European monarchs that we’re getting here.  (Living in Europe for a while has done way more for my sense of history than all my HS classes did.)  Take Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, for instance.  What do most of us get out of American history lessons about this sweet couple?  What’s that I hear?  Funded Columbus to sail to the Americas?  True enough, but Spain paints a much different picture.

Don Fernando y Doña Ysabel, Reyes de Castille y Aragon

Like Henry VIII, Ferdinand (II, of Aragon) and Isabella (I, of Castille) were way up there on the “scary and powerful” scale.  They united two kingdoms to create the first major modern nation-state in Europe (what we now think of as Spain).  In the process, they annihilated the last of the Islamic state on the peninsula and slaughtered the Moors.  They were also bent on establishing a fully Catholic state, so they didn’t stop with Muslims — they expelled or killed every Jew they could lay their hands on and purged any other non-Catholics they could identify.  To aid in this process, they created that fine institution that we know today as the Spanish Inquisition, which proceeded to repress, terrify, torture, kill, and purge Muslims, Jews, Protestants, and even other Catholics for over 350 years.  Their reign towers over Spanish history — certainly in the South of Spain, you can’t go anywhere without tripping over their actions.

Nice people.

Oh, and did I mention that their youngest daughter was Catalina, better known to history as Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s first wife?  That explains a lot…

Louis XIV

France had Louis XIV.  Best known today by American school children for Versailles, elaborate hairdos, and having dukes vie for the honor of being his personal royal poop-carriers.  All that is true enough, but again, that portrait evolves out of a much more complex, powerful, and dangerous man.  He reigned in France for over 72 years — still the longest run for any European monarch.  (Victoria, the longest-reigning British monarch, only made it a skosh over 63 years.)  During that time, he raised France to being the most powerful nation in Europe, and possibly in the world at that era.  Through his brilliant military leadership, France overturned the balance of military power in Western Europe of the time, emerging on the top of the heap after a series of wars.  He played his enemies as skillfully as he played his friends, keeping both at odds with each other and weak against him.  He defended the borders of France with a scorched-earth policy in Germany and he broke putatively impregnable fortresses.

Louis manipulated his nobles into an elaborate game of courtliness that kept them close at hand, where he could keep his eye on them.  Like F&A before him, he felt that the best way to a solid and united kingdom was religious unity, so he purged Protestants and Jews from France.  (Technically, his revocation of the Edict of Nantes allowed Protestants to remain in France, so long as they did not preach, advocate, or practice Protestantism.  Oh, and their children were to be forcibly baptized Catholic.)

His royal palace at Versailles is now known as one of the most extreme displays of power, decadence, and luxury that has ever been known in the Western world.  (Notwithstanding Bill Gate’s house.)  But it wasn’t just personal aggrandizement.  It was a calculated move as part of Louis’ strategy to centralize all power in France on himself and keep the nobility under his thumb.  By creating such a seat of luxury and wealth, he made it de rigueur to see and be seen there, so everybody who was anybody (anybody who might possibly have been a threat, that is) had to be there in person.  Similarly, by setting up a system of dispensing favors and power by physical proximity to his royal self, he kept the most powerful people the closest to him.  And I’m sure that he found the irony of keeping the second-most-powerful people in the kingdom waiting hand and foot on him utterly delicious.  His reign and designs set the social and political course of France for a century, leading ultimately to the Revolution, with all of its chaos and blood.

It’s interesting and kind-of strange.  Even in the cadres of  most-powerful-people-in-Europe, a few seem to stand out.  I guess that’s not surprising — most Americans know only about a very few presidents of the US either, let alone the other congress-critters and supreme court judges who have critically shaped our country.  Still, none of the US leaders resonate in history with the intensity that people like Henry, Ferdinand and Isabella, or Louis do.  Which is, of course, a lot of the point — by design, none of the US leaders can hold that kind of power.  (A great thing, if you think about some of the psychos we’ve managed to elect over the years.)  But it’s certainly an odd feeling to think about those eras and people.  Educational, but makes me spend a lot of time recompiling world views and going “hmmm…”

Oh, and Henry didn’t write Greensleeves either.

Edit: My Spanish postdoc wrote in with some corrections about Spanish history. (Good to have someone who really knows something giving feedback!) Here’s what she had to say:

The Catholic king and queen never join the two kingdoms. As a matter of fact, when Isabel died, she passed it to her daughter, Juana, who left it to her son Carlos V, who finally inherited everything their grandparents had … as well as the Austro-Hungarian Empire (from his other grandad). Which is kind of funny, because Carlos V shouldn’t have inherit any of his grandparents lands if his uncles/aunts had had a child before dying.

Spain as a unique kingdom is a really modern concept that many current Spaniards are not even happy with :-)

Breakfast (supposedly) came with the room. It was a nice combined continental and American buffet with yogurt, cereals, sliced meats, cheeses, rolls, scrambled eggs, potatoes, and bacon/sausage. When we checked out, we were told that the breakfast was NOT included because we’d booked on a central Internet site, despite the fact that the website had said it was AND the concierge had said it was when we checked in. (I.e. the central booking site had said in generic terms that it wasn’t booking food, but both the specific hotel website and the concierge said it was included without caveats. We were fine either way, but we wouldn’t have eaten there if it wasn’t included.) Apparently, it cost €15 per person, per day. That’s more than we paid for friggin’ lunches in cafes. OUCH. However, apparently they’d kept lousy records, because they only thought we had eaten there one morning rather than four. So we gave up on making a nasty scene, paid an extra €30, and skeddadled.

There was an open-air market by our hotel, so we had gourmet picnic lunches for two days — baguette, cheese, pate/terrine, and pastries. The prepared meats and pate store had some absolutely terrifying prices: €28 for a jar and up. We tried not to look too poor as we roamed around to find something that looked fun that we could justify paying for. I found some duck pate with dates for €7. I’ve never tried a sweet savory pate before, and it was amazingly good — just enough date to hint at sweet. I got another jar to bring home, which was accidentally opened, so I should eat it before it goes bad :-p. Terran found a jar of pork and truffle terrine. That was also good and had no sweet in it (I dig sweet savory a lot more than he does), though we wished the truffle flavor was a little stronger. We also got a stinky triple-cream cheese (brie-like but much stronger flavor) and a small round of a bleu for a total of about €7. That turned out to be so much cheese that we used it for both picnics and a snack on the return train, and there was still a couple of bites left, which we brought home and stank up our fridge with. Whoops. I had forgotten the perils of stinky cheese.

For the remaining lunches, we had cafe fare. One time, I ordered quiche lorraine and Terran ordered hab omelet. (The quiche was actually served with salad, for the veggie-trackers.) At the other, Terran ordered the best beef burgundy either of us had ever tasted. We now want to dig up a really authentic recipe rather than the ones I have periodically pulled off epicurious for red wine I don’t like the taste of. It’s possible that you can get something to taste that good just by picking the right wine, but it seems like it was thickened and seasoned differently too. I had blanquette de veau (veal in white sauce), which I recall having learned about in French class but never tried. Also very good. In fact, for that meal, we both thought the other one had the better dish :).

We had three dinners at Terran’s friend’s recommended restaurants. In all cases, the standard menu was three-course, fixed-price, with the ability to swap out the standard options for fancier options at additional cost. Wine was additional (we always ordered a bottle, which Terran skipped). Aperitifs were offered, which was largely the option to drink more alcohol before the first course — we skipped that. The first course was essentially an appetizer (though it’s called an entree for those who plan to visit France and read French menus), though it’s scaled to one person. One time I had langustine bisque; another time I leaped at a veggie opportunity and had white asparagus.

Main courses were things like lamb, duck, fish, etc. in sauce. Most often, JUST that with a side bowl of some sort of potato brought separately. In that sense, most of the main courses we ate were a lot simpler than I’m used to in a higher-end restaurant. In some sense, you were getting the main course variety I usually expect by combining both the entree and the main. Though, for the record, the mashed potatoes that came with one dish were probably 50% cream and the best I’d ever tasted — I’m not a mashed potato fan, so that’s high praise.

Dessert was, well, dessert. I had mascarpone and orange one night (more bitter than I expect, but good), a sort of polenta creme brulee another, and we skipped out on dessert to go to the creperie across the street for the last, where I ordered a franginpani (sweet paste made with crushed almonds), pear, and chocolate crepe.

So if you were curious, that was our dining in Paris experience.  When we got home, we ate veggies almost exclusively for a week.

George's fish bar, London UK

Unfortunately, the awning doesn’t come out in this nighttime photo, but the full shop signage says:

George’s Fish Bar / Fried Chicken / Barbecued Spare Ribs Our Specialty / We Fry Fresh Fish / Calamari

?!?!

When we first saw this place, we couldn’t stop laughing.  I’m surprised that they don’t advertise hamburgers, pizza, Chinese noodles, and chilled monkey brains while they’re at it.

This is clearly a grease-pit, but we were so amused by the sign that we had to try it at some point.  Eventually, we did and discovered that it’s essentially just “George’s Fish Bar”.  The spare ribs and chicken were dreadful.  Oh well — it’s about what we expected.  Actually, the surprise was that the fish was not too bad.  (Though clearly not what we get at the most excellent local pub!)

But this is really a small reflection of the kind of culture we find in our neighborhood.  We’re living in a neighborhood that’s struggling between ghetto and gentrification, with a healthy sample of immigrants across the spectrum.  Near us, the predominant immigrant groups seem to be Turkish, Greek, and Russian (or the myriad of Russian-speaking former USSR states and satellites that appear Russian to my uncultured eyes, anyway).  We hear a medley of languages on the bus and English is often in the minority.

The local shops and restaurants reflect that melange.  Like “George’s”, many of the store fronts have clearly changed hands many, many times over the years, housing a succession of ethnic groups and their tastes of home.  There’s a Chinese restaurant on the main drag whose plate glass windows still proudly announce fish and chips.  (It’s now defunct; I wonder who the next generation to inherit it will be.)  The local groceries vend everything from kimchee to couscous to salsa, including some vegetables I have never even heard of before.  Within a few minute’s walk of us there are Greek, Turkish, German, and French bakeries and patisseries.  Butcher shops proudly proclaim that they carry halal meat.  There’s a cafe down the street from us that advertises Italian cuisine on its awning, but as far as we can tell it serves essentially British mainstream food.  It’s run by a Turkish woman who spent most of her career as a fashion designer in Egypt.

It’s a fascinating contrast to Madrid, which appeared (at least to our outsider eyes and linguistically impoverished ears) to be much more culturally homogeneous.  In Madrid, you heard essentially one language and most of the shops and overt culture were recognizably Spanish.  (Aside, I suppose, for the massive flux of dubbed Hollywood films.  On which, hopefully, another post another time.)  Granted, there appeared to be a significant number of immigrants from other Spanish-speaking nations, but there did not appear to be such a variety of different origins or ethnicities as we see here in London.  Beyond our neighborhood here in London, we see a high density of Indians, East Asians, Africans, and others.  We run into Nigerians on the subway and hear French on the buses.  The researchers I work with at UCL come from across Europe and beyond.

All of this makes London an exciting, but also a bit dizzying place to spend a few months.  The US is proud of its history as a great cultural melting pot, welcoming immigrants from across the globe.  (Though we’re currently struggling to resolve our own feelings about the current generation of Mexican and Latin American immigrants.)  But there are very few places in the US that approach this density of diversity, I think.  Different regions of the US have different ethnic mixes — Latin American and Native American in the Southwest, East Asians on the West Coast, a mish-mash of Europeans on the East Coast — but by and large, each city will have only a few highly represented cultural groups.  Perhaps New York or Washington DC approach this level of diversity — I haven’t spent enough time in either of them to get a real feel for it, the way I’m just beginning to here.

I suppose this is to be expected of one of the Great Cities of the world.  London is, after all, the capital of what remains one of the most powerful nations on Earth.  It was a capital city roughly 1600 years before Washington DC was a gleam in Madison’s eye.  I suppose it’s not a great surprise that it attracts such a wide variety of people from so many backgrounds and walks of life.  Sometime it leads to serious friction, of course.  Any time cultures (and economies) collide, there are bound to be.

It’s fascinating and fun and overwhelming.  In the short time we’re here, I’m sure we’ll only have the chance to just sample some bits of it all.  But I’m glad to experience what we can of it.

Oh, and the groceries have truly awesome olive oil…

In fact, it’s been snowing all day today (2 Feb — Candelmas!), and apparently most of last night.

I know that for those of you who live in chillier and snowier climes, this would be no big deal.  And I enjoy the snow for the snow’s sake myself.  The problem is that, although London is essentially as far north as Calgary, it has a much more moderate clime.  (The reasons for this are somewhat debated, but the consensus puts it on the Gulf Stream.)  Thus, like many cities far further south, London enjoys fairly warm winters and rarely gets this much snow.  The BBC reports that this is the worst snow storm to hit this end of the UK for 18 years.  And, like warmer clime cities, London doesn’t have the snow-removal infrastructure to handle it all.

Here are some pix of our yard, house, and street in the snow.  It’s lovely, when you don’t have to go anywhere and have a nice warm house to crouch down inside…

The front of our house in the snow. Note the depth of snow on the front wall.

Back yard of our house in the snow. I love the snow on the branches.

The primary school behind our house. Needless to say, school's out today.

View down our street in the snow. Note that at noon, the snow has not yet been plowed.

What does this mean for us?  Snow day!  The city is essentially paralyzed, with even Heathrow experiencing partial closures.  The city busses are out, which means that it would be excruciating for us to go into the city if we wanted to.  And you know the weather’s bad when it shuts down the subway:

Snow paralyzes the London Tube lines

Fortunately, the Turkish grocery on the corner is open today, so we were able to pick up some staples.  The owner seemed happy to have business today…

The euro is a very new currency, and it was clearly designed by currency snobs.  Coins come in 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50 cents, plus €1 and €2.  Bills follow the same 1-2-5 strategy: €5, €10, €20, €50.  1, 2, and 5-cent coins are copper-colored and increase in size proportionally.  The 1-cent euro coin is so tiny and cute that we have to keep some as souvenirs.  10, 20, and 50 cents are gold.  1 euro is a small circle of silver ringed by a larger circle of gold.  2 euros is a small circle of gold ringed by a larger circle of silver, plus it’s larger.  The edges are also textured such that a blind person can easily distinguish coins by size and texture.  The paper bills are also scaled in size proportionally to value, which starts to get annoying once you hit €50 notes.

Now you hit the British pound, a currency which evolved more than was designed.  Coins also come in 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50 pence, £1 and £2.  The 1p coin looks about like our penny.  The 2p coin is also copper-colored and ENORMOUS (ie about the size of a quarter).  5p is silver-colored and about the size of a dime.  20p is silver, smaller than a quarter, and has seven sides.  £1 is also smaller than a quarter, gold-colored, and REALLY thick.  £2 looks sort of like the €2 coin.  (Oh, and the £20 note is larger than the €50 note and peeks a good half-inch over the top of my wallet.)

The point to all of this is that without a lot of drilling to recognize coins on sight, you’re going to fumble around for minutes with your change, squinting at the little numbers and annoying cashiers, when you try to pay for things.  Getting into the swing of the money was so easy in Spain and so difficult in the UK that you can see that currency design really does matter.

Accepting that I can’t possibly be objective, I’d say that the US currency is somewhere between pounds and euros in the bizarro unpredictability factor.  A lot of that is just that we don’t do so many coins.  We don’t really do silver dollars or 50-cent pieces anymore.  Pennies are copper, nickels are way bigger and thicker than the tiny dimes, and quarters are a nice respectable size for their value.  And once you get to paper money, it’s just a matter of looking at the numbers for anyone.  We don’t do the brightly colored, variable-size paper bills that seem to be all the rage over here, but I admit that I don’t think it makes that much difference for usability except perhaps for the blind.

I was suddenly struck by a clue-by-four in December and went looking for an English-language Christian church.  I have no idea why that didn’t occur to me sooner.  One Google search of “English language Christian church” turned up Community Church of Madrid, which turned out to be a fantastically welcoming congregation formed from a core of English-speaking expats and a lot short-timers like me.  I went to a bilingual candlelit Christmas Eve service that was co-hosted by them and a Spanish-speaking sister church.  It really put the mood back in the season for me.

In the theme of family and home, Terran made rabbit stew the way his father used to make.  Rabbit meat is more easy to buy here than in the States.  I’d never had rabbit stew before.  It was very good.  (Kind of tastes like chicken! :) )

On Christmas Day, we had an invitation from Terrans’s madrileña postdoc, who is home for the holidays, to have Christmas lunch with her family. We had a lovely time and were able to use some of our baby Spanish. The parents spoke no English, but Terran’s student’s siblings did, so we bounced back and forth between languages. At the end, they put on a children’s video for the 3-year-old, and Terran and I laughed that the Spanish was just about right for us. The food, of course, was amazing and unending, but this time I was braced for it: ham and bread and cheese for an appetizer, followed by gambinas (~prawns) cooked in butter and garlic, followed by a main course of suckling pig in the style of Segovilla, followed by a traditional dessert of turron (almond sweets) and marzipan. We’re glad we got a chance to taste suckling pig before we left, since we missed it when we actually visited Segovilla. It was amazing.

We got home in the late afternoon, which was still morning, back in the States, and called our families.  It wasn’t the same as being nearby, but it was a good time.

Now, we’re in the last day of our time here in Spain.  It’s hard to believe the time has gone so fast.  We want to find a way to hold on to the Spanish we have learned, and we hope to be able to visit Madrid again someday.  We think it is one of the undersung cities of Europe.

We still plan to post the story of our Pisa trip and hopefully a couple of other bits about Madrid, but all of that will have to come after we’re settled in London.  We fly on New Year’s Eve (tomorrow!).  The last few days have been crazy and stressful, and I’ll feel better venting about it after everything has turned out all right.  Wish us luck!