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.

“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 :-)

Greenwich is probably best known as the baseline for both the Prime Meridian and the Greenwich Mean Time: 0º longitude and 0:00 hours.

And, of course, the canonical things to do when you’re there are to stand on the zero line…

Susan half in one hemisphere and half in the other.

… and to set your watch by GMT:

The Royal Observatory clock. Note the prime meridian line running vertically through the clock.

Sadly, these days the public clock display is set from GPS time, rather than an on-site master atomic clock.  Oh well.

While it may not be entirely obvious, the fact that 0º and 0 hours are co-located is not at all a coincidence, nor is it just the whims of the British Empire in action.  The two are actually quite fundamentally linked, at the level of physics and math.  The small observatory museum had a fascinating discussion of the science and technology of location and horology.

The short-short story is that knowing your longitude can be reduced to knowing what time it is.  Or, more precisely, knowing what time it is where you are relative to what time it is where you started.  For example, if you can figure out that when it’s exactly noon to you, it’s 11:00 AM at your starting point, then you know that you’ve moved 1/24′th of the Earth’s circumference east.  (More precisely, you’ve moved 15 degrees east, which is 1/24th of the Earth’s circumference, or roughly 1670 km, only at the equator.  Close enough for this discussion, anyway.)  So knowing time gives you distance.  Therefore, it makes perfect sense to put your 0 time base on top of your 0 distance base.

Now, where you choose to put 0 longitude is a matter of convenience or, in practice, the might of the British Empire.  But having done that, your time base is naturally set.

This is a familiar story to anybody who has read a bit of the history of technology or exploration.  What I found really interesting was the museum’s history of horology, focusing on the Harrison chronometers of the Eighteenth Century.  These were the first timepieces with sufficient precision and robustness to be used in practice for navigation.  He built a series of chronometers in response to a contest to devise such a device, and the Royal Observatory Museum holds originals or replicas of the first four models, most in working condition.  (The fourth, “H4″, ultimately won the contest.)  They are fascinatingly intricate machines:

Harrison's first contest chronometer. State of the art for the day, but not quite good enough.

(Sadly, we weren’t allowed pictures in the museum itself, so this is a stock image grabbed from the ‘net.)

What really startled me, though, was the evolution of the chronometers.  The H1, above, is about 3 feet tall, made of delicately machined brass.  I have trouble guessing how heavy it is, but I’m sure that it would take a couple of people to move it around.  H2 and H3 were similarly intricate, delicate, and bulky.  But then, just a few years later, Harrison released the H4:

Harrison's H4, ultimate winner of the contest.

Looks like a pocket watch, doesn’t it?  In fact, it is the great grandfather of all pocket watches — within a few years, it had been duplicated, miniaturized and was being mass produced for individual use.  The H4 itself is too large to be a convenient pocket watch (you probably can’t tell without a scale, but it’s maybe 4 or 5 inches across), but compared to its predecessors it’s a model of compactness and elegance.  It was incredibly startling to see three massive beasts of chronometers lined up, followed by something that looked nearly petite in comparison.  It is both a reminder that recent memory is not the only era in human history when technology has advanced blazingly quickly and a vivid demonstration that getting the core design ideas right makes a huge difference in the final design.

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…

Almost two months ago now, we were working on securing our visas for the UK.  (Wow.  Two months already.  Time flies.  Yike!)  While filling out the absurd pile of paperwork, I ran across the following questions that gave me pause:

In times of either peace or war have you‚ ever been involved in‚ or suspected of involvement in‚ war crimes‚ crimes against humanity or genocide?

Have you ever‚ by any means or medium‚ expressed views that justify or glorify terrorist violence or that may encourage others to terrorist acts or other serious criminal acts?

Have you engaged in any other activities that might indicate that you may not be considered a person of good character?

Ok, so I can sort-of see the first of these.  This seems to me a little like the fact that the US IRS can nail you for failing to report illegal income.  (For those of you who may need this info, I think it should go in box 21 of this year’s 1040.  Though the instructions aren’t as explicit about it this year as they have been in the past.  Note, however, that you cannot list illegal drug use as a medical expense on your itemized deductions.  That seems rather asymmetric…)  But, really, who is going to apply for a visa to the UK and then say, “Oh, gee!  Yes, when I was a general in the Muddonian army, I ate 100,000 Oozeville babies, braised gently in white wine.  I better tell them that on the forms.”

The second is touchier.  In the US, anyway, this verges on free speech issues.  Justifying and glorifying things (no matter how horrid they may be) are generally protected as free speech.  Actually encouraging people to evil acts, though, steps over the line, and is usually not protected.  So, while this one makes me somewhat uncomfortable, I can see where they’re coming from.  The focus on terrorism, though, is somewhat frightening.  If glorifying terrorism is bad, shouldn’t glorifying, say, serial killing or rape be just as bad?  Except that the latter would get a bunch of song writers and movie directors in trouble.

But it’s the last one that really disturbs me.  Talk about a catch-all, “we just want something that allows us to stomp you, regardless of who you are or what you’ve done” kind of clause.  A “person of good character”?  What does that mean?  Is there a legal statute that defines good character?  How do I know if I’m in violation?  Does being an obnoxious boor at a party violate the good character clause?  What about building up a BO that stuns trees by failing to shower for a couple of weeks?  Cheating on science exams in 4th grade?  Picking your nose?  Not volunteering for the church potluck?  Watching porn?  Telling sexually explicit jokes in the workplace?  Being from a different religion?  This clause is so vague as to be terrifying.

Now, granted, this is just for a visa application.  Stuff that they can use as grounds to deny you entry to the country, rather than grounds to lock you up and throw away the key.  But still, it reflects a disturbing mindset on the part of the government.

Not that the US government has always been a shining beacon of light, freedom, and tolerance itself…

I really want to go around and take some photographs to give you an idea of the legendary London Underground.  But I haven’t done that yet, and here I am posting about it.

London has a lot of trouble with its subway because it had the audacity of being the first (?) city to attempt one.  Being a pioneer is a great way to teach others A) that something is worth doing, and B) how not to do it.  The tunnels are too narrow by modern standards, so the subway cars are crowded and cozy.  And they were all built by different companies and thus are incompatible with each other — each has special needs, and you can’t shift cars from one to the other to relieve congestion.  It’s clearly incredibly costly and time-consuming to maintain, and the city is just barely keeping up: some of the stations are in an amazing state of decay, and on weekends two or three lines are routinely down for maintenance.  Check the transit webpage before you leave home.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think that to use the Tube is to love the Tube.  If you can get your head out of your daily routine, it feels like wandering through magical goblin tunnels.  It has so much character and sense of history that it makes more modern systems like Madrid’s seem antiseptic.  But I’m probably biased.  I really love trains and subways of all kinds, and I haven’t gotten tired of them yet after five months being completely dependent on them.  (And I’ve lost weight.)  I’m giddy that Albuquerque just opened up light rail service to Santa Fe, so when we get back we can go there without driving.  But I digress…..

But there’s also the cost of a really comprehensive public transit system.  I have no idea what it really costs to build and maintain a subway, but just looking at the scale you can see when you use it makes me wonder how such a thing could ever be cost-effective.  I guess there are some things you can’t put a price on — a city of a certain size and density simply can’t handle more than a certain maximum car traffic.  If you don’t want your entire city economy to come to a halt (or move elsewhere) because people can’t get to work, you have to do something.

But, still, that money has to come from someplace, and there’s the question of how much of it you just take straight out of income/sales taxes and how much you push out to usage charges.  Madrid’s subway was incredibly cheap to use in comparison to London: €1 per ride or a 10-ride pass for about €7.50.  Buses, subway, and light rail charged the same fee.  In some places, you could transfer from subway to bus as part of a single ride (thought not light rail — you had to buy a separate pass for that).  Terran’s transit cost for the week, including commuting to work by subway and light rail and sightseeing inside the city for the weekend, came to something like €10.  If he were using just the subway, which he’s doing here, it would have been more like €7.

The London Underground, OTOH, has a complicated usage system based on what time of day it is and how far you are going.  You put down a £3 deposit for an RFID (?) card called an “oyster card,” and you tap a receiver with it when you enter and exit the subway or when you enter a bus.  All bus rides are £1, so you could probably use the system fairly economically if you only used buses and never needed to transfer, but that gets slow fast (no pun intended).  The cheapest trip on the Tube, going a short distance during the lowest-traffic time, is £1.60.  Going a short distance during peak times, like during commute hour, is £2.20.  Fortunately, we’re close enough in that we don’t usually need the larger fares, but they go up to £3.80 per ride.  (Oh, and if you opt NOT to get an oyster card, all rides are £4.  That’s a no-brainer.)  But even where we live, with the Tube and some bus rides thrown in, Terran’s spending about £20 per week JUST commuting, and he’s not going in to the university every day.  If I had the same commute as opposed to working at home, we would have a tidy car payment just in transit fees.  Our weekend warrior tourist trips are taking us out about another £10/week.

And I’m not even going to get into values of the various currencies.  Now that I’ve been through three of them, I’m learning that value is hard to talk about because the exchange rate is more like a stock market thing.  It doesn’t tell you what you can actually buy with the money when you’re using it or what you’d expect to receive in a salary if you were working there.   But this seems pretty dramatic to me even if we assume that $1=€1=£1, and the pound really does buy more than the US dollar, even in London, so it’s more than that.

London makes the Tube economical to commuters by making it even more expensive to drive.  If you drive into the city during business hours, you are charged an £8-£10 congestion charge, which makes a measly £4.40 commute by subway look pretty sweet.

But all of that doesn’t really mean that Madrid’s system is magically cheaper either.  In fact, you can tell that it isn’t because the city is running an aggressive marketing campaign about it.  There are posters up in the gleaming subway stations with anthropomorphized monuments of international cities (the Statue of Liberty, the Sphinx, etc.) looking excitedly at the Madrid subway signs.  I thought these were so cute that I looked all over the internet to find a picture of one, but this out-of-perspective cell phone shot on someone’s blog was the best I could find: http://saritaymadrid.blogspot.com/2008/10/madrid-metro.html.  I think the actual slogan is approximately “The world wants to travel on the Madrid metro.”

They also run television commercials on screens in the stations (and probably on actual television, too, but we didn’t have one) that show people being excited at the amazing Madrid subway.  All of that said to me, “We had to raise taxes to do this, and we want our citizens to think it was a good investment.”

As for taxes vs. fees, I can see a real tradeoff.  I’m sure a large percentage of travelers, especially on the Tube, are visitors like us who don’t pay local income taxes.  OTOH, with usage fees so high, there’s another whole ball of red tape you have to go through to get low-income deferments, since it seems like a bad idea to keep people from working because they can’t afford to get to work.

Whatever the case, I’ve dealt with the sticker shock, and I still love the subway.  Call me crazy, but there you have it.